Unpopular opinions about the Mario series

MiracleDinner said:
Do I not sufficiently explain it under my comment for Luvbi on my list? The story of that family is so powerful that I could not bear to dislike any of them. And yes I do remember Jojora having played Superstar Saga for over last summer (Northern Hemisphere) and I didn't find her at all memorable for better or worse.
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To each their own. My mind was literally going "yeeeeeeeeees" during Luvbi's sacrifice and was extremely furious when she inexplicably returned.
 
Well you asked me to explain why I liked Luvbi and I'm saying that I already did under my comment.

I suppose you could argue there is the objective side to think about as well but I feel that with characters it's a lot more personal than games overall so I'm not sure I'd like to try to make that comparison.
 
MiracleDinner said:
Count Bleck is my favourite video game character easily because true forbidden love stories have been used in many media prior to SPM but never before in a Mario game, at least not on this scale. And it was truly his presentation and atmosphere that made him so special for me.

E.g. how he is presented at first as a stereotypical heartless villain but then he says "Just as no-one can ease the tempest that rages in my suffering heart" and you start to wonder why and then as the game progresses you realise how hurt he is on the inside and you finally draw the dots with the pictureless stories between chapters and it just comes together so elegantly.
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It's the exact reason I dislike it. What the writers just did was lift a cliche story and surgically tie it into a Mario game, with nothing interesting or particularly unique going for it. Anyone with a pencil or a typewriter can write something like this. It's a reason fanfiction has a notorious reputation of being slipshoddy. I also find Bleck's dialogue moaning how much his heart aches to be incredibly sappy, something you'd find in a gooey cliche romance novel. Bleck outright tells you he's suffering internally (he has no reason to let this phrase out as he's committing this atrocity), rather than let the audience implicate how he feels through his actions and body language alone. Dialogue that outright tells the audience how they should feel for him is really, really bad. No one talks like this in real life.

It's fine to like this sort of plot. That's why it's a cliche, because it's commonly relatable, has an interesting conflict, and it's an easy story to tell, and it has roots as far back in the Sumerian times with Pyramus and Thisbe. But to call it "deep" or something remarkable? That's where I strongly disagree. The plot isn't deep. It doesn't go deeper than themes lifted from countless other stories who did this thing better and for ages. There are no subtle, underlying themes that can be unraveled and analyzed from this plot. It's literally just "dad doesn't like this girl, guy suffers and betrays and does evil thing". That's pretty much it. You can summarize Bleck's character with just a simple phrase: heart-broken destroyer.
 
Mario can't even talk though. He's pretty passive when it comes to development. When I read in Luvbi's article, there's hardly any mention of the Mario characters, no interaction. I don't know if the Wiki has incomplete information, so I can't verify myself (don't feel like sitting through potential hours of footage). Heck, it's stated in the article that she constantly put others down, so she doesn't come off as a pleasant character. Additionally, Luvbi appears to arrive too late in the story, in Chapter 7, to actually have any development with Mario. I have a feeling her relationship with Mario is overstated.

Her character arc revolves around hyping up for her sacrifice only for her to reincarnated inexplicably which, if you take the story seriously, should be a moment of inexcusably poor writing. Even if you care for the character, that should elicit a sense of betrayal by the story-tellers that manipulated your emotions for the result of status quo.

Either way I think any relationship Mario and Luvbi could've salvaged could've been done way better with Luigi or Tippi, one who is directly related to Mario while the other comes much earlier in the game.

And I would argue it would prove my point. Bowser's marrying Peach is all a subversion for the main plot. It's set up literally by one of the villains and revealed almost immediately. They want to set you up thinking it's a Mario story where something surprising happens, a wedding ceremony, but that's not a big part of the story at all. It disintegrates into another kind of love plot that doesn't involve these two all that much. I don't find it all that remarkable myself but I can't blame you since I'm spoiled myself and I also don't prioritize the plot all that well. I might have been impressed when I was 14 and was writing fanfic, but I'm 24 now and my idea of what's a good story has changed.
 
It's still deep. I went to the theatre a few months back to see R&J and sure it was decent but the gooeyness and clicheness of it all and the fact that its a formal play written by a notorious literaturist (that's hardly a word lol) stops the power of the plot from reaching me. But to see this in Super Paper Mario completely blasted away those inhibitions and allowed me to truly appreciate the power of this plot even if it has been used before.

Baby Luigi Rescuing Mario said:
It's literally just "dad doesn't like this girl, guy suffers and betrays and does evil thing"
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I already stated that I disagree with this as Bleck has a lot more depth to him than that and the way that Tippi develops separately and their ultimate reunion was much more unique. But even if it is cliche, it's a lot more fleshed out and dramatic than how you just put it, as I say, the fact that this is a Mario game entirely renders clicheness from ruining the story for me.

To be honest, I don't care if saying your emotions out loud is poor script writing - the thing which sticks with me is that this fellow has deep emotional pain and this is a Mario game and the combination of those two things is so positively unbelieveable not to be my favourite video game.

I suppose there is a difference between subjective and objective though. No matter what I'm too emotionally invested in SPM to ever turn my love away from its story. Objectively, I can see why some would argue that the devs were lazy and just rebrandished R&J and stuck Mario in it and in a way yes they did but that's not the whole picture - the whole picture is that they in many ways took that and made something much more unique and artistic and powerful for many young people such as myself who aren't really into more adult games, films, or books have been moved by. So, it wasn't perfect for sure but it's still outstanding for a Mario game.

I'll go back to defending Luvbi when I find time.
 
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MiracleDinner said:
It's still deep.
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I would like you to please elaborate on why you think Super Paper Mario's plot is "deep". Having an exposition, climax, and characters with basic motivations isn't what makes a plot "deep", it's what makes a plot....a plot.

MiracleDinner said:
To be honest, I don't care if saying your emotions out loud is poor script writing - the thing which sticks with me is that this fellow has deep emotional pain and this is a Mario game and the combination of those two things is so positively unbelieveable not to be my favourite video game.
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If it's deep emotional pain, then it would be far more powerful if he displayed it in realistic subtle ways like in body language or reading notes from tippi or whatever, not just throwing out there "DIE! DIE! GO ON MY MINIONS. oh btw i got cucked by the dark tribe i'm sad :(".
 
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as someone who still considers super paper mario one of his favorite games my apparently-unpopular-among-that-crowd opinion is that the plot isn't the draw for me; i liked it well enough but it's not the reason i rank the game so high on my personal list

i mainly enjoyed gameplay, music, aesthetics, and sidequest collectathons
 
I do think Super Paper Mario has a lot of good ideas. The flipping mechanic could have been more interesting, and the action RPG 2D sidescroller is a pretty ingenious idea for a Mario game (combining the strengths of what Mario is good at-platforming-with Paper Mario's genre is a no-brainer really). I just think its execution was really, really bad. They got rid of a lot of stuff that made Paper Mario fun for me, such as badges, partners, a stronger focus on Mario environments, etc. and filled it in with stuff that are inferior, nothing, or characters I didn't particularly care for. If there was a 2D Paper Mario platformer hybrid thing again, they better have fun badges and Mario-inspired partners following you about.

The story? I can't ignore it. I love harping on it. Maybe not as much as Sonic plots but I love to hate it. I guess that's an aspect that makes it fun to talk about Super Paper Mario for me. You can't exactly shit on Sticker Star the same way (but at least the game gives you SO MUCH MORE to shit on).
 
Until I see a Mario plot talking about hegelian dialectics I'm not going to call any of it's plots "deep"

Deep to me is something you gotta stop and think about to understand or at least get a basic comprehension of. SPM is just "oh gee, should I stop the sad hat man from destroying the multiverse or should I not stop the sad hat man from destroying the multiverse?"