Super Paper Mario

Super Paper Mario is a 2007 platformer role-playing game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo for the Wii, the first game starring Mario on that console.¹⁴ It is the third installment in the Paper Mario series, following Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (2004).¹⁴ Rather than the turn-based combat characteristic of the earlier games, it centers on level-based platforming while repurposing side-scroller mechanics into role-playing elements, most notably by using the player’s score as a disguised experience-point meter that yields level-ups.¹⁴³ Life is measured in Heart Points rather than a single hit killing the player, so being struck by a Goomba drains a portion of the meter instead, and different enemies subtract different amounts much like an attack power in a role-playing game.² As Mario progresses his skill level and HP meter increase, allowing him to survive larger hits, and classic items take on new roles: Mushrooms replenish ten HP, Flowers activate a coin shower, and Stars turn him into a giant pixelated Mario able to smash through everything in his path.²

The game’s defining mechanic is the ability to “flip” a flat two-dimensional level into three-dimensional space.⁵ When Mario flips, the camera rotates ninety degrees, transforming the flat world into a 3-D environment for a limited period; what appeared to be an insurmountable wall in the 2-D view becomes a pillar that can be sidestepped, a single coin reveals itself to be many, and dead ends conceal invisible doorways.³⁶ Characters and some objects retain their two-dimensional existence, appearing edge-on and effectively vanishing when viewed from the opposite perspective.³ In the flipped view, up and down become forward and backward along one axis and left and right shift onto another, so that rooms may be joined through passages entirely invisible in the default perspective.³ Mario is the only character able to flip, and his time in 3-D is limited by a meter that, once emptied, costs him a hit point before recharging in the 2-D plane.⁶⁷

The idea originated with chief director Ryota Kawade, who wanted to surprise players with a new feature within the Paper Mario concept and, while drawing up plans, arrived at the notion of switching between 2-D and 3-D.¹ Kawade found that more traditional Mario-style battles worked better for effectively exploiting the dimension-swapping idea, which is why the developers opted for that style over turn-based fighting.¹ Producer Kensuke Tanabe recalled deciding promptly to make the game after receiving Kawade’s presentation on the dimension-switching system, agreeing that it fit action-adventure gameplay better than traditional RPG-style battles, though he asked the staff to retain an RPG-like storyline.¹ Kawade also observed that creating both a 2-D and a 3-D version of each level effectively required the effort of building two levels at once, and that many of the side-scrolling worlds of Super Mario Bros. could not simply be transformed into 3-D.¹ The project had originally been a GameCube title using nearly all the buttons of that controller, and was reworked so its controls could be realized with a single Wii Remote, held sideways like an old NES controller.¹⁶

Story and structure

The plot concerns two rival prophecies: the Dark Prognosticus, a forbidden book that foretells the end of all worlds, and the Light Prognosticus, written to counteract it.³⁵ The villain Count Bleck, the Dark Prognosticus’s executor, hypnotizes Princess Peach into marrying Bowser, an unnatural union that creates a “chaos heart” and opens a void in reality threatening to swallow the universe.⁴⁷ As the hero of the Light Prognosticus, Mario must travel through eight dimensions to gather the Pure Hearts — scattered across the worlds for some fifteen hundred years — needed to stop Bleck.³⁵⁷

The adventure is played from Flipside, an interdimensional hub town from which dimensional doors, each opened by a Pure Heart, lead to the eight chapters.³⁷ Each chapter is divided into four parts, with the fourth typically ending in a boss fight that yields a heart.⁷ Flipside itself contains shops where the player can buy items, have a fortune told, or learn to cook, along with side quests and its own puzzles that make advancing to the next chapter harder than it first appears.⁷² Over the course of the quest Mario is joined by three other playable characters — Peach, who can float across chasms with her parasol; Bowser, who has double the attack power and can breathe fire; and Luigi, who has a high jump — whom the player switches between on the fly.⁶⁷ He is also accompanied by Pixls, sprite-like creatures created by the Ancients, each granting a distinct ability: Tippi, a butterfly Pixl, serves as a constant guide, while others such as Thoreau (which picks up and throws objects), Boomer (bombs), Carrie (a rideable floating platform), Dottie (which shrinks Mario), and Fleep (which flips background objects into reach) are used to solve puzzles and reach hidden areas.⁷⁶ Reviewers estimated a playthrough at roughly fifteen to twenty hours depending on the player’s facility with the puzzles.²

Reviewers repeatedly stressed the game’s resistance to genre classification. Eurogamer described plotting it on a “genre triangle” of RPG, platform game, and adventure, only for the mark to land “somewhere on the wall behind you”.⁵ Nintendo World Report characterized it as “Paper Mario without turn-based battles,” and IGN summarized it as “2D and 3D come together as platformer and RPG join hands”.³⁶ Critics singled out the writing — a script full of pop-culture references, self-aware jokes about gaming culture, and unexpectedly touching villains such as Count Bleck — while noting that the sheer volume of on-screen text could interrupt the pacing.³⁴⁵ The localization was noted for its humor: recurring figures include the bumbling, vaguely Scottish henchman O’Chunks and the managerial second-in-command Nastasia, and one chapter pits Mario against Francis, a game-obsessed gecko whose lair mocks message-board culture.³⁵ At one point the player is required to type out “please” five times to gain a character’s assistance.³

Development lineage and reception

Super Paper Mario grew directly out of Paper Mario, which debuted for the Nintendo 64 in 2001 and introduced the cut-out paper style and RPG-light mechanics carried over to the 2004 GameCube sequel Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.⁶ Both predecessors used a flat 2-D perspective and turn-based battle systems, occasionally contrasting the flat look against purely aesthetic 3-D changes, such as a house folding inward into 3-D space as Mario entered.⁶ Super Paper Mario is visibly inspired by these games in its flimsy-thin characters and simple backdrops, but discards their turn-based combat in favor of real-time platforming while retaining RPG conventions such as hit points, leveling, and purchasable items.⁶⁴ Reviewers likened the Pixl-gated exploration — passing a cracked wall useless until Mario can lay bombs, or a warp pipe until he can shrink — to the item-driven progression of Zelda and Metroid games.⁶ Tippi’s role as a constant guide was compared to Navi in the Zelda games and to Goombella from The Thousand-Year Door.⁷

The game was released in North America on April 9, 2007, in Japan on April 19, 2007, and in Europe on September 14, 2007.¹⁴ It was later reissued in the Nintendo Selects line, with a U.S. release on August 28, 2011, and made available as a digital download on the Wii U, with the U.S. release on June 16, 2016.¹⁴ It carries an ESRB rating of E for Everyone.¹⁴

Contemporary reviews were broadly positive. Nintendo Life scored it 9 out of 10, praising the puzzle and level design and calling the blend of platformer and RPG a success, though it criticized the excess of text.² Nintendo World Report and IGN awarded scores of 9, with Nintendo World Report calling it Nintendo’s “most emotional game yet” while faulting the reliance on backtracking and password puzzles.³⁶ GameSpot judged it “a great game that stands among the Wii’s best” while stopping short of classic status.⁷ Both critics of the era and later retrospectives noted a divide within the fanbase: some regarded the departure from the deeper RPG systems of The Thousand-Year Door as a “failure of imagination,” while others held that the story, humor, and imaginative worldbuilding compensated for simplistic combat.¹⁹¹⁶²⁰ Retrospective writers have frequently singled out the soundtrack, which takes a more electronic approach than earlier entries, and the story of loss and doomsday centered on Count Bleck as the game’s standout qualities.¹³

Super Paper Mario Nintendo Wii Trailer - From 2D to 3DIGN