Icemario
Star Spirit
Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam
Overall, I really liked the game. Hard to say where I'd rank it, for now.
I actually have very few problems with this game, besides maybe how enemy drops work. It's both impressive and surprising how quickly you're whisked into battle with all your options available (literally the first battle has hammers AND Bros. Attacks). Despite slightly wanting it, I can't see a Hard mode version of this game being very nice considering how the bosses seem consistently tougher and actually pose a realistic threat, unlike other Mario RPGs.
The music is maybe the best in the series imo (this game's final boss music is the best in the series by a galactic landslide) and the gameplay is extremely solid (the decision to remove all gyro controls was a well-made one) but the story and character cast feels a bit lonely, although to their credit they've gotten in some pretty cool SM64 references. The areas, per the words of others, tend to be really generic don't have enough spice to them, and the paper aspects of it were a mediocre way of addressing this. The Expert Challenges were handled a lot better in this game as opposed to Dream Team and felt more lively in its variety: being able to spend the points was an interesting concept.
Field movement was very pleasant thanks to dashing (which may have made opposed to performing field actions because most of them are fairly slow), but switching between actions was incredibly frustrating due to the R button going through them all backwards, which normally cycled through them from the start to end in previous instalments. I liked the Battle Cards, although they seemed to be in excess, particularly those that damaged specific enemy types and collecting them all has been a pain (currently at 145/159) because the normal ones are pricy but count towards the total whereas the shiny, better ones are time-consuming to farm from shiny paper enemies, more so if they're actually dropped by normal enemies because you can't do anything to raise the likelihood of the card drop.
I never did get tired of rescuing Toads, but there were a few missions that were downright irritations to deal with. Sidequests felt lacking and many rewards for completing them sucked, to be harshly blunt. Gear also felt drier in this game; the range was less diverse, but for Paper Mario it generally felt like better stats in the newer stores and little else.**
The music is maybe the best in the series imo (this game's final boss music is the best in the series by a galactic landslide) and the gameplay is extremely solid (the decision to remove all gyro controls was a well-made one) but the story and character cast feels a bit lonely, although to their credit they've gotten in some pretty cool SM64 references. The areas, per the words of others, tend to be really generic don't have enough spice to them, and the paper aspects of it were a mediocre way of addressing this. The Expert Challenges were handled a lot better in this game as opposed to Dream Team and felt more lively in its variety: being able to spend the points was an interesting concept.
Field movement was very pleasant thanks to dashing (which may have made opposed to performing field actions because most of them are fairly slow), but switching between actions was incredibly frustrating due to the R button going through them all backwards, which normally cycled through them from the start to end in previous instalments. I liked the Battle Cards, although they seemed to be in excess, particularly those that damaged specific enemy types and collecting them all has been a pain (currently at 145/159) because the normal ones are pricy but count towards the total whereas the shiny, better ones are time-consuming to farm from shiny paper enemies, more so if they're actually dropped by normal enemies because you can't do anything to raise the likelihood of the card drop.
I never did get tired of rescuing Toads, but there were a few missions that were downright irritations to deal with. Sidequests felt lacking and many rewards for completing them sucked, to be harshly blunt. Gear also felt drier in this game; the range was less diverse, but for Paper Mario it generally felt like better stats in the newer stores and little else.**
Overall, I really liked the game. Hard to say where I'd rank it, for now.
