#god this ui style goes so fuckin hard

[baconpal]

so heres the long super paper mario post

strap in for why super paper mario is fucking bizarre and why that’s pretty much awesome

gonna be a good amounts of spoilers, so if you’re on desktop then hit that read more, and if your on mobile, then here’s your punishment for using this god awful app

super paper mario is a game that is incredibly difficult to put into words, but it leaves such a powerful, lasting impression on me and i can’t come to say anything first other than I love it so much, and if you havent played the game, please just go do it now, even if you have to pirate or emulate or something, just let yourself play this game. It’s one of those games that I really feel I can just recommend to anybody

it’s difficult to think of where to start with dissecting this thing so i’ll just start with the art since lookin at things is pretty easy

ART/WORLD DESIGN

every world in SPM is completely unique, not just in what type of environment, but it’s art style, and this is premised with the fact that none of these worlds are capable of existing together and are completely separate, and NOT part of a cohesive universe (LOOKIN AT YOU ODYSSEY I STILL THINK YOU LOOK STUPID)

The hub and the first 2 worlds are mostly just slight variants on the same general style of simplistic shapes and colors, with world 1 delving into more linework type aesthetics, and 2 focusing more on impressions and silhouettes, 

world 3 changes this completely with what is obviously an 8 bit kind of style, but instead of jarring over sized pixels, the world is composed of detailed tiles arranged to look like pixel art that imply a more real world, and not a gamey one, 

world 4 focuses on patterns and big patches of color to give the impression of the vast emptiness of both space and the surface of a barren planet, before giving you the “Whoa Zone”, with a striking mix of wire frame and futuristic UI style to it

world 5 takes the idea of nature being crude and simplistic and humanity being sharp, angular, and extreme and flips that on its head, with humanity and the space they occupy being these absolute memes with no sense of depth, and the plant life existing in a system of clean cut caves with futuristic technology and elegant historic values

world 6 simplifies a kind of colored Japanese painting aesthetic, down to the funny cylindrical cloud clusters and brushstroke trees

world 7 depicts what is essentially hell (yes there’s hell in this game keep your pants on) as a squarish blur of bright greens and warm reds and purples, and depicts heaven as fluffy land of clouds and Greek temples

and lastly, world 8 is inverted greyscale, where light is black and darkness is white, its simplistic and striking and i couldn’t think of a better style for the final area of a game so focused on the concept of light and dark

MUSIC

I’ll just try and keep it simple, the musics fucking cash money

The game makes great use of motifs when it needs to, where specific themes and instruments are used in other songs to suggest relationships and put battles and travels into perspective

And when it ISNT doing that, it’s just fucking funky stuff, with a weird trend of BOING and PLOP and SPLISH noises in the percussion because fuck you i guess

There’s a lot of good songs that do lots of interesting things, any of the like 5 final battle songs are great things to point to, but i’ll just go ahead and say the main theme of world 8 “Castle Bleck” is one of my favorites that isn’t super highly rated. It brings in the types of instruments that have been associated with the villain the entire game, but also throws in 2 very important things; a sudden triumphant burst of almost JRPG styled chiptune that pushes away the constantly building tension, which is then followed by the sound of a clock ticking, which is a musical motif only present in the songs “Memory” and “Promise” which is played whenever the memories of the player’s little guide thing and the main villain’s past lives together are alluded to. This one song holds a lot of weight, as well as simply being a fucking cool song.

GAMEPLAY

This is, sadly, the one place I’ll not mince any words and say the gameplay is not amazing by any standard, it’s pretty much a classic mario game if it had RPG stats, items, and random abilities granted through the character and partner systems. The 3D flipping mechanic is nothing astounding, though it is very interesting to see how worlds are constructed

One of the biggest flaws people will mark the game for in its gameplay is that it’s tedious, and while I have to agree, that’s because I’ve already played the game before, and the tedium only comes from not being completely invested in the experience anymore. I’ll get some specific examples in a bit, but there’s a few cases of “tedium” that i believe are 100% intentional and drive the story in an interesting way

STORY/WRITING/GAME DESIGN

Thats a fuckin broad section, but its pretty much everything else i have to say on the game, and where the most spoilers and random praise is gonna be

I’m not actually gonna talk about the whole story, more just the strong parts of it, under the assumption you’ve already played it or understand a story as simple as “villain wants to destroy world, hero wants that to not happen”

The writing and characters are just flawless, everyone is fun to be around, especially the bad guys, who you see more antics of than your own party. There’s goofy running plotlines about O’chunks and mimi essentially getting grounded and being forced to write essays about why they fucked up at beating mario, and big stinky brother dimentio teasting and bullying them and sneaking them out to do his bidding when The big Count Bleck is away

The game is full of referential humor to not just mario itself but all kinds of games, there’s skeletons in hell who are clearly just Marios from the mainline games who died in stupid ways, there’s an actual dragon quest turn based boss battle in hell too, and chapter 3 has an otaku villain who tried to get with peach in a simulated visual novel

but the humor exists not just in references, but in simple good scenarios, with things like “Having a game show in a bathroom when everyone's life is at stake” and “locating an ancient manuscript to use as toilet paper” or “flying through black holes to find a convenience store” and things of that nature

It also interacts with the players emotions in many interesting ways, one of the more lauded being chapter 2-3, where mario is forced into working off a massive debt of fictional money, and is required to do hard, boring labor. There isn’t anyway to avoid doing both the hitting a block 100 times and the running on a treadmill for a few minutes thing, but the constant feeling of “there has to be a faster way to do this” drives the player to prod around, find the secrets, and slowly discover how to break the system wide open and get to the end, and i love it for that

This entire game is some sort of bait and switch, to put it simply, while it’s already a bit of a departure from both mario itself and the paper series, the first 5 worlds are pretty fucking tame stuff, other than the void, which is a giant black and purple spot that sits in the sky, always, every single world has the void growing in its sky, and it does grow, every chapter it gets bigger and bigger and takes up the sky, but where this truly culminates into the “switch” part is chapter 6, which starts itself by presenting you with the most TEDIUS sounding chapter possible, fight 100 enemies in a row, and nothing else, and for 25 straight fights, that is all it is, so you’ve locked yourself into it at this point, you know whats up, but the void in the background begins to grow to the point of being the entire fucking background, and every enemy you face speaks as if they know they’re all going to die, and by the 30th fight, one of the villains comes to stall for time as the void completely swallows the world, and the party is sent back to the hub. When they decide to go back in to world 6, its empty, the entire world is a white void with a single black line making up the ground, and colorless destroyed structures occasionally peaking out of the ground.

and you walk on this white void for so long and you just feel nothing but regret and fear and no matter how fast you make yourself go you feel like you’ll never find anything, but you do eventually get your plot item and escape

then, Dimentio, one of the villains you’ve seen the least of, appears in the hub world, the safest place in the universe, and kills mario

he just fucking kills him

he puts mario in a box and fills the box with explosions and mario fucking dies and goes to hell because fuck you mario

then you go through all of chapter 7 just to escape hell (called the Underwhere cus how could we possibly be allowed to take hell seriously) and join up with your full party before confronting the final world, which i’ve already stated i just love the design off

the game just takes the comfortable ride you’re on and throws it into the fucking sun and burns you alive and i love it so much, even the very end of the game doesnt let up, where the main villain is overtaken by that absolute madman Dimentio (Whose name is a play on both Dimension and dementia), who clearly was powerful enough to have done the whole “ending of the world” himself, but did it this way for the theatrics of it

there’s a lot i could still say about the game, but this post is absolute rambling and its 2 in the morning but as usual, i just wanted to shit my thoughts onto the internet to people could maybe learn somethin about either the game or me and how i think and look at and respond to stuff, and as always, anybody who read this whole thing is cool and i love you a whole heck of a lot

[italicwatches]

GAMERS! Episode 02

Well yesterday ended bad and I’m still not doing great, but I can only put this off for so long. It’s GAMERS!, episode 02! Here we GO!

-We begin exactly where we left off, with Karen trying to be tsuntsun as Keita is being too kind for it to really work, and Tasuku just stares. And then, banana. Not a great day for her.

-Opening! And this opening has tons of game references, which we’re going to count down! Our very first one, right at the start after the title screen, looks like generic zombie action…But I disagree! That specific style of first-person viewpoint with minimal UI, to me, can only come from one place: The lightgun action genre! And if we’re talking lightguns and zombies, well, that can only mean The House of the Dead, Sega’s classic zombie-shooting franchise! Its very first release in 1996 was part of the wave of early arcade 3D games as we would understand them today, not counting the various 80s-era experimentations using hyper-minimalistic graphics and all that. The series is actually still going strong in Japan, with a new title announced earlier this year! Only time will tell if they’ll bring it to a home console and into the US market. As an aside, you can get HotD 2 and 3 on a compilation disc for the Wii that’s pretty cheap, pretty easy to find, and of course Wiis practically fall out of thrift shops when you open the doors, so you can totally get your lighten action with minimal effort and cost!

-DAY 02: Uehara Tasuku and New Game+

-So everyone is soon talking and gossiping about what they just saw, as Keita tries to just play his damn games, and Tasuku soon calms down his little entourage. Whatever’s going on with that loser isn’t their problem. But soon they’re deciding that Keita is getting too high and mighty for being such a loser…Until Tasuku shuts that down. Even as he’s starting to not have such good vibes about his friends anymore…

-And as class goes on, he can’t figure out what the hell is going on in that guy’s head…

-Lunchtime! Pink-haired girl comes to join Tasuku and his friends for lunch, tasty tasty lunch! And she brought some for him too! It…was a cute kitty when she put it in the box. Now it’s more of a murder face. And that’s why you’ve got to either overstuff the box when you do a design, or be damn careful with it. Reasonable portions and genki exuberance do not mix.

-So apparently even her class has heard about what happened between Keita and Karen, as Tasuku is about the only one to not be surprised by it. He can’t tell the reasons why, but they clearly existed…As he flashes back to when his pink-haired girlfriend confessed to him. And had a pile of snow fall off the roof and pile down onto her. Which both messed up her confession, and his original plan to let her down gently, and then things just kinda…happened.

-And now here they are.  She’s super in love with him, and he’s a confused mess at the best of times…Later that day, they’re all down at the arcade, to of course use the photo booth. But packing that whole group in there is difficult at best, so Tasuku chooses to excuse himself, claiming he’s going to the bathroom…Of course, instead he gets sidetracked around a claw game with old PS1 games in it, titles like Darker Blue, THE BLOCK, MOTORGAMES, and METEMPSYCOSE. Also what is clearly a shogi game but I can’t read Japanese so I’m just gonna assume that it’s called Shogi 2: The Sequel To Shogi. Only took them quite a few hundred years but they finally followed up on the much beloved classic!

-So he ends up throwing some coins in, putting his claw game skills to use to hook something something PHANTASIA…When he suddenly has a flashback. And he doesn’t see his current, stylish self in the glass reflection, but his old self, the middle school dork who loved games…Quit it, quit staring at him…Quit laughing at him, all of you…FOCUS, Tasuku!

-Deep breath. He hooks PARADIGM OF PHANTASIA this time, bringing it up…As he tries to get these flashbacks of middle school hell to quit happening…Wait that’s not a reflection of him. It’s Keita, watching him play! What the hell are you doing here?! Well…He…Thought you might like games, since you were playing this over any of the other claw games…

-And Tasuku retrieves what he got, as Keita is all up on it wanting to see! And oh man this is a CLASSIC, you should play it for sure! It got mixed reviews at the time since it claimed to be a revolution but then was kind of more of the same, but it’s a really good example of its era and looked back on way more fondly now! It’s top notch!

-Tasuku don’t care.

-…Right. Sorry. Um, well, goodbye! Keita promptly gets himself gone, going to the video game area of the arcade…Where Tasuku inevitably ends up. And he sees that Keita is…Woo boy. Keita is being very nervous, trying to get a single-player round on one of the fighting games, but of course everyone wants to versus on Arc System Works’s many storied and top-quality fighting games! So finally, Keita just up and goes to leave…When Tasuku decides to just grab the dork by the shoulder. Come on.

-Keita tries to insist he’s not into guys. Okay don’t even start with that ridiculous cliche they both know that’s not what this is. You want to play a game? Then they’re gonna play a fuckin’ game.

-So it’s to the Persona 4 Arena etc. etc. etc. cabs, where Keita admits that he wanted to play it, but felt all nervous having to learn it slowly when other folks were, you know, all…intense. Jeez, this nervous, awkward, passive kid is the one who just shot Karen down hard? …Fuck it, all in. What’s your relationship with Karen?

-Pardon? Oh, right, this morning…Look, you don’t have to say if you don’t want to, but Tasuku was curious.

-Cut over to pink-haired girl waiting, bored, for Tasuku to get back. Also her phone has a kitty case on it. I see a theme. Which is when she spots a blonde over by the crane games…?

-So Tasuku’s heard the whole story upstairs, and the only thing he doesn’t get is, why the club didn’t work for him. You like games. They like games. You want friends who like games. Tasuku’s not really seeing the problem. But before Keita can figure out how to put it into words, one of the sets opens up! And Keita’s so eager to get his chance that he wants to just play! (Fighting games in Japan are typically locked together as a twofer, where you literally play head to head against the person on the opposite side. This is in contrast to the side-by-side play of American fighting game cabinets, particularly back in the day. Depending on the game, it’s not uncommon for them to be able to go into local lobbies with all the other cabinets in the facility, or even play properly online.)

-Of course, the trouble is that Keita is so eager and enthusiastic and wants to Just Have Fun that it’s throwing off Tasuku’s more competitive side…As ROUND 1 starts! And Keita just goes at it, as Tasuku can see that the guy’s definitely better than his girlfriend Aguri. She just kinda mashes buttons with wild abandon, while Keita clearly understands what he’s more or less supposed to be doing…

-But he’s also incredibly easy to read. Guy like him tries all the buttons at the start of the match, does tons of jump-in approaches, relies strongly on heavy attacks and doesn’t use, or defend against, throws properly…Tries to just rely on projectiles when things start going wrong, and finally spams his super when his health is near the end. And that’s how he loses to Tasuku, who barely lost any health.

-But ROUND 2! Which starts to go totally sideways…As despite things, Keita is actually having fun…And Tasuku almost starts to feel some of the old joy that drove him back in middle school. …The only trouble is, Keita is so bad at this that he’s only able to feel a tiny smidge of it. Seriously, he’d go up against elementary kids who did better!

-So, match done, other people want on. And Tasuku finds himself wanting to play something else with this dork, something that’ll be a more even match. So Keita races over towards a lightgun game for co-op play, and pretty soon they’re just goofing off, spending the afternoon working through the arcade’s multiplayer selection, as Keita is just enjoying this chance to get to play games with someone else for a change…And Tasuku can’t help but enjoy it too. Even as it starts to remind him of something that happened back in middle school…

-When Tasuku notices a certain blonde crouched down by a rhythm game , watching. …PAY NO ATTENTION TO HER OH GOD TIME TO FLEE! When Keita sees…The rest of Tasuku’s entourage, and he promptly flees himself. Karen spots him and tries to talk to Keita as he runs by, but Keita is in total panic-flee mode as he doesn’t even recognize that she’s there.

-And Aguri is rather upset with Tasuku for just totally ignoring her! She called tons and tons of times! …Well shit that explains why his pocket kept buzzing. Sorry, he didn’t even notice. How cold! But something’s bugging Tasuku…As he tosses Aguri his bag, and before he even puts together what he’s doing, he’s is sprinting off after Keita!

-Commercial break! Showing off the original PZP’s neon-infused ad campaign.

-And we’re back, with the PZ4’s own stark red ad series in the same aesthetic!

-The sun is low in the sky as Tasuku tries to find that jackass, where could he have run off to…THERE! Up on the foot bridge! Keita! Why, did, you, run? H-He wasn’t running away—CUT THE BULLSHIT.

-He…He wasn’t trying to run, he just…Why would you want a dork like him around? You have a life. Friends, and a girlfriend, and…

-And Tasuku snatches Keita up, and FUCK THAT SHIT. Do you have any idea how much he busted his ass to get here?! How hard he had to work to get superficial friends that don’t even know who he really is, how many things he enjoyed he had to dump to shed his geeky persona from middle school?! Don’t act like he just fucking ‘has a life’ like it’s that EASY! You’re just fucking being salty, trying to justify the rut you can’t climb yourself out of! You think you want to play games by yourself, without having to try so hard? Then why’d you spend the whole day playing every damn multiplayer game you could the instant someone was willing to join you?!

-Nut up, chill the fuck out, and go tell that damn girl you’ll join her fucking ridiculous club! Or at the very least SAY SOMETHING!

-…Take it back. Take it back! He finds himself snatching Tasuku right back up, but his grab ends up with Tasuku halfway over the rail of the footbridge and oh god those are really fast cars really far below this just got Too Real! Even as Keita doesn’t even notice because he’s too busy in his own mess as finally it comes to the end where he’s a lot more mad about the insult to Karen than to him. Him being insulted, he can take. Himself, he dislikes almost as much as you do. But her…She’s driven. She’s kind. She tried to bring him into her circle twice. She, doesn’t deserve this from you!

-Yes yes okay okay DON’T THROW HIM MOTHER OF GOD! And Keita finally realizes what the situation he’s in is, as he yanks Tasuku back onto solid ground in a panic. And Tasuku, Tasuku flashes back again…To that fateful day at the end of middle school, when he packed up all his PZ3 games. Games like BASE COMBAT, and CALL OVER STRIKE: DESTRUCTION WARFARE, sealed up in cardboard. Abandoned his old glasses for contacts, and he realizes how much he was comparing Keita, to his old self…

-So, okay, deep breath. But jeez, to think you’d turn that girl down outright, and then defend her club that hard…You’ve got stones, Keita. …He’s going back to the arcade. You want to come?

-He’s going to head home…There’s a game he really does want to play on his own. And…Sorry for all this. Just forget about it, man. See you tomorrow.

-And Tasuku heads off, deciding that Keita’s got a real earnest heart in him…When he happens to pass by Karen, who saw the whole thing and is all blushy and squirmy and giddy over seeing Keita defend her honor like that.  …Oh dear, this is gonna be a mess. You okay, girl?

-Yes yes the great Tendou Karen is fine! Yahuh sure thing enjoy your romance. WHAT WAS THAT?! You and Keita up there. You’re into him. Karen’s brain goes poof, as Tasuku decides he’s gonna have to see how this goes…And keep poking Keita a little. The guy’s got some real fire, he just needs to let it out.

-Oh and then he gets back to the arcade, where Aguri is really mad. Oh. Oh dear. And that’s how Tasuku ends up having to spend even more money on plush toys out of crane games to try and calm her down. Even as he’s realizing how…kind of thin the premise for their relationship is. It’s been six months, and they more hang out than date. Hell, what even made her want to go out with him?

-So he just finally asks her that question…Expecting it’s because she thinks he’s cute, or tough, or stylish, or something else like tha—

-Because you were so cool when you first got her a plushy back in middle school! …Wait. Middle school? He never got a plush for anyone in…middle…He was a total geek! He…Oh god.

-And he remembers. That face. A nervous, ordinary, kind of sweet girl. Who he gave a plush he just happened to win, just so he didn’t have to carry it home. She fell for him hard, and when they ended up in the same school, she saw her chance…Only to learn he’d turned into this super stylish guy! She had to totally reinvent herself, in turn, to be the kind of girl who could stand next to the new him…

-And Tasuku just locks up, as he puts it together, and remembers the old her, and his brain just locks up, and finds himself feeling more…Something, something he can’t identify at all, as it sends him into a panicked flight as he tries to grasp his own heart!

-Next morning, class. Tasuku gets in, and spots Keita already in his seat. …Hey, you were right. That game you saw him won yesterday really was pretty fun. He’ll let you know when he’s done, maybe you can recommend something else to him. And Tasuku’s friends see how much of a good mood he’s in, as Tasuku admits he’s been having a good time with games these last few days…

-Credits! Which looks really cool, but doesn’t have any other particular game references.

-Aftercredits! It’s a few days later, and Karen is in her own class, in a complete daze…Because her brain is lost thinking about Keita kicking ass like that…When she hears someone mention Keita’s name! Oh god is he here?! He is. But he’s here for…Mono-san, in the corner playing her PZ Vivio. Karen’s brain goes poof.

Well, we have certainly had a shift. The games are now a bit by the wayside for the complicated love shapes. We’ll have to see what happens next time, in episode THREE of GAMERS! Wait for it!