Paper Mario: Color Splash

[Mcmadness]

so from what ive heard color splash was a pretty big success and from what ive seen looks decent to boot.

Finally a paper mario i can look forward to playing eventually outside of pm64 and ttyd.

How much of a success?

 

[Zae]

so from what ive heard color splash was a pretty big success and from what ive seen looks decent to boot.

Finally a paper mario i can look forward to playing eventually outside of pm64 and ttyd.

How much of a success?

well not top notch for sales, but it seems reception wise its done far better then that of sticker star and i know i would enjoy it far more then super paper mario for damn certain.

 

[Mister Wu]

Ok, Ludwig in the italian version is... interesting:

Spoiler

first of all he explicitly says he's a composer (the Italian text says:"May the fight begin! Take a comfortable seat to admire the concert with cannon solo that I myself composed!", compare this with the English text:"The first movement begins! I hope you enjoy my Cannon in Sea Major!"), of course his Paratroopas call him "His Malevolence" and, at the end, when he's defeated, he doesn't call Bowser "Lord Bowser", "Master Bowser" et al., just "Bowser" - like in the German version -, but most importantly, he says goodbye with an "Auf Wiedersehen!" confirming that he's German!
The funniest thing is that everything I mentioned is not in the Japanese script (well, Bowser is mentioned, but as "Master Bowser", of course); actually, one detail present in the Japanese version (that he designed the Super Ludship) is completely missing from the Italian version!
It almost seems that the translators took the depiction of Ludwig from the early '90s and reinterpreted the actual Japanese script according to it!

 

[Glowsquid]

so from what ive heard color splash was a pretty big success and from what ive seen looks decent to boot.

Finally a paper mario i can look forward to playing eventually outside of pm64 and ttyd.

How much of a success?

"Selling worse than Game & Wario in Japan" kind of success.

 

[Zae]

so from what ive heard color splash was a pretty big success and from what ive seen looks decent to boot.

Finally a paper mario i can look forward to playing eventually outside of pm64 and ttyd.

How much of a success?

"Selling worse than Game & Wario in Japan" kind of success.

well not really but i was mainly thinking of reception i suppose, not a success, good job zae.

 

[memoryman3]

Wait, why is this game sticked whilst the new Mario and Sonic game isn't?

 

[Crackin355]

I still need to get back to this, I think I reached that first level in the huge forest, it has a giant coin wall. It's been enjoyable enough but it feels like a lot of slightly frustrating things have added up and I have a pretty negative opinion of it as of now.

Spoiler: shitting my thoughts out

Battles aren't actually pointless but the way the menu works makes them tedious and I actively don't want to do them despite the reward, and this is someone who actively fought enemies in sticker star without a good reward because the reward was the battle itself. I feel like I'm being punished just because I want to increase the paint amount so I don't have to smack random things as much later on when I inevitably have to use higher cost cards later in the game.

Scrolling through the cards and then painting them and then hitting ready but having to flick them anyway because ???. Honestly they could just fix this by moving the 'readied' cards to the tv and doubling the amount of cards shown on the gamepad (stacking duplicate cards would also be a good solution) so I don't have to scroll all the way to the left every fucking time because the game sorts mushrooms to the front even though they're a rarely used card. But I guess that would ruin the perfect view of mario, an enemy, background, and literally nothing of worth. Painting cards is an unecessary 'feature', it's just there to shoehorn the paint aspect of the game into the battle system and it's done poorly. Overall the entire paint aspect of the game is poor, I was worried it seemed rather pointless when I watched the first trailer but I figured they could do something cool with it; they haven't so far.

The enemy losing colour with damage is cute but I don't like it, it makes it difficult to gauge what I should use to kill an enemy without going overboard, which often leads to enemies having a sliver of colour left and then I have to go through the whole process again just to get rid of what I can only assume is 1 hit point. and that's not difficulty, it's just a minor inconvenience.

The colorization % thing was nice at first but then you miss a single tiny ass spot on a surface that is almost white and then you end up scanning through a level just to find that 2% by accident, I am now less than pleased with the idea of doing this for every level.

Those random ass kamek battles are also not interesting, just annoying. the coins mean nothing when you can win 5 billion coins from rigged rock paper scissors. Speaking of, I've only done one of them and unless the later ones have some sort of new gimmick, it's literally just two rigged fights and one bit of rng, and if you get unlucky then you have to waste another 3 minutes getting back to that point, only to rely on rng once more.

Honestly this makes me seem like I hate the game but I only think it's below average. It's probably the worst paper mario game I've played at least, on par with mario & luigi games.

The dialogue is funny I guess but it's lost on me because I don't really care what they have to say. I did like the key toads though. Aesthetically the game has been kinda poor. None of the levels have blown me away and most of their designs are rather ugly.

 

[winstein]

I'm convinced that every Roller Guy battle in Mossrock Theatre contains a Red Roller Guy just to make it a lot difficult to get the Green Roller Guy and Pink Roller Guy cards, since Red shows up in the Green and Pink ones, and when fighting Red, there's only one enemy. In fact, it took me a long time to get the Pink Roller Guy card, and I am yet to get the Green Roller Guy card because when I got a card out of it, I got the Red Roller Guy card.

Last time I played, I got the Dino Rhino and Pink Roller Guy, so that leaves me with 15 more enemy cards to get. Hoping for a Shy Bandit card to easily get a few of them.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Mister Wu]

A recent interview with the producer of Paper Mario: Color Splash has been made by Game Informer, and two interesting points have been picked up:

• it seems that even with Color Splash they wanted to respect Miyamoto's guidelines on the characters involved
• the next Paper Mario game won't be like Color Splash or Sticker Star, they will adopt a different system

http://nintendoeverything.com/paper-mario-color-splash-producer-on-lack-of-returning-npcs-new-game-would-feature-a-different-system/

 

[freakworld]

• the next Paper Mario game won't be like Color Splash or Sticker Star, they will adopt a different system

 

[Xiahou Ba]

All Miyamoto said was use Mario characters only. So in an essence of building an interesting world around a better diversity of Mario characters, they still failed.

 

[Tyrell Badd]

• it seems that even with Color Splash they wanted to respect Miyamoto's guidelines on the characters involved
• the next Paper Mario game won't be like Color Splash or Sticker Star, they will adopt a different system

I'll believe it when I see it. Hopefully they abandon Miyamoto's ideologies in the next game too, because it already failed two times and there's absolutely no reason to try it a third time unless they just like seeing the series get poorer sales and eventually die.

 

[Xiahou Ba]

there's absolutely no reason to try it a third time unless they just like seeing the series get poorer sales and eventually die.

Paper Mario series sales is almost entirely correlated with a system's sales.

Sticker Star and Super Paper Mario sold the best and that's because their systems were successful. On the other hand, Color Splash and Thousand-Year stuttered compared to them because their systems aren't successful, especially Color Splash's.

 

[Magikrazy]

Miyamoto's guidelines isn't the reason the game's character diversity isn't good. How many characters and species have Mario games shown throughout its history? They were free to use any of those.

No, the character diversity was bad because they played it safe, safer than safe. And honestly I don't blame them after the less than glowing reception Super's story received. Who knows? Maybe the original Paper Mario 3DS build was starting to head in that direction of too much story and not enough Mario, maybe to the point of it just being a big mess.

I still probably would have liked that better than Sticker Star, but I definitely see where they wanted to go with the final game. The only problem was not going far enough (only problem with character diversity I mean, there's still a few other problems besides that).

I haven't played Color Splash, but from what I've seen it looks fun. The new Toad characters look great and so does Huey. The premise seemed quite a bit darker than Sticker Star's while not taking itself too seriously, and the setting is beautiful. Really the only thing that looks bad about it is an apparent overabundance of Toads and lack of other notable species or characters new to the series. Except the Koopalings, whom I've wanted in Paper Mario for so long.

 

[Mcmadness]

I feel like the thing here is that a lot of developers don't actually play a lot of games due to being too busy making them and having their own hobbies and interests.


Considering how bloody huge the Mario franchise is it's actually pretty unreasonable to expect every person who develops a Mario game to be intimately acquainted with it's history and "lore"

 

[Magikrazy]

I mean there's still a few obvious ones that they didn't use, like Piantas or Yoshis. There are also still main characters getting no love in Paper Mario on a regular basis, like Donkey Kong, Wario, Waluigi, Daisy, Rosalina, etc. Granted, they shouldn't be expected to fit all of them in if they don't fit, but aside from Rosalina, none of the characters I mentioned are in the Super Mario series either (unless you want to be Mr. Technically about it with the Mario Land and 64 DS games, but even then it's just one or two games). There's quite a bit that could be done with them.

Considering how bloody huge the Mario franchise is it's actually pretty unreasonable to expect every person who develops a Mario game to be intimately acquainted with it's history and "lore"

Of course it would, but wouldn't you think they would do some research on characters while developing the game to not make it so bland? In fact, considering they have Ninji of all enemies in Sticker Star, it's at least possible they did some.

 

[Tyrell Badd]

I wouldn't be surprised if Ninjis appeared in the new 3d Mario game since they've made quite a comeback.

I feel like the thing here is that a lot of developers don't actually play a lot of games due to being too busy making them and having their own hobbies and interests.


Considering how bloody huge the Mario franchise is it's actually pretty unreasonable to expect every person who develops a Mario game to be intimately acquainted with it's history and "lore"

I don't think asking for more than Toads as the primary NPCs is an unreasonable request. It's not like we're asking them to include enemies from Super Mario Land into the game. From what I've seen, there are at least several Shy Guy NPCs so that's a step in the right direction. It's not like they're incapable of doing so considering the first three games, questionable design aside in the case of SPM. They've also strayed away from the "NSMB-ification" of the level design from Sticker Star, so they likely have listened to backlash as well.

there's absolutely no reason to try it a third time unless they just like seeing the series get poorer sales and eventually die.

Paper Mario series sales is almost entirely correlated with a system's sales.

Sticker Star and Super Paper Mario sold the best and that's because their systems were successful. On the other hand, Color Splash and Thousand-Year stuttered compared to them because their systems aren't successful, especially Color Splash's.

That is absolutely true and I'm not denying the fact as there's enough evidence to prove it, but I'm pretty sure that can be said about many franchises from different companies. Also, amount of sales =/= quality. Each sale also isn't discerning if the game was bought at bargain bin price, which Sticker Star hit relatively quick for a Nintendo game. Attach rate would be a good indicator for this nist likely, but I don't know the numbers of that. I'm sure many here will argue that Sticker Star is a terrible game, and even though I like Super Paper Mario, others can argue about the quality of that game. Then again I'm not a business analyst so *shrug*, maybe this is working out for Nintendo/Intelligent Systems?

I wouldn't be shocked if there's a semi-large drop-off in sales for the game compared to the others due to the backlash of Sticker Star and this game being essentially Sticker Star 2 for all intents and purposes (similar battle system, reliance on Thing items, scarce NPC variety, etc). This is ignoring the fact that the game is on the Wii U, but the Wii U has been a handicap for almost every game not named Mario Kart 8, Splatoon, or Smash Bros.

 

[Mcmadness]

Of course it would, but wouldn't you think they would do some research on characters while developing the game to not make it so bland? In fact, considering they have Ninji of all enemies in Sticker Star, it's at least possible they did some.

Ninjis were in SMB2, one of the more well known Mario titles. It's actually not that improbable that they were in the game.

And yeah they did do some research obviously. They looked at SMB1 2 3 World, Captain Toad, Mario Kart and the NSMB series. Basically the franchise's earliest days, or something really recent.

To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if they've never even heard of things that appeared in sunshine that hasn't continuously stuck around so stuff like petey piranha or gooper blooper they could have easily seen in more recent Marios due to their continued reappearances.

I mean it's not like that game has ever been available in any significant capacity since it's release over a decade ago.

 

[Mister Wu]

Regarding sales, the last data we have is from Media create, and they were 37k copies in Japan the 9th of November:

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2016/11/3ds_hardware_sales_grow_in_japan_despite_lack_of_new_releases

as far as I can tell it since then disappeared from the top 20. It also wasn't in the November NPD charts. Essentially, despite not having real competition on the Wii U, the game didn't sell well.

While I can understand that the fans of the first three games weren't all interested in this, I'm still surprised by the indifference this game met, it almost seems as the core demographic that bought the Wii U is made of said fans.

Of course it would, but wouldn't you think they would do some research on characters while developing the game to not make it so bland? In fact, considering they have Ninji of all enemies in Sticker Star, it's at least possible they did some.

Ninjis were in SMB2, one of the more well known Mario titles. It's actually not that improbable that they were in the game.

And yeah they did do some research obviously. They looked at SMB1 2 3 World, Captain Toad, Mario Kart and the NSMB series. Basically the franchise's earliest days, or something really recent.

To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if they've never even heard of things that appeared in sunshine that hasn't continuously stuck around so stuff like petey piranha or gooper blooper they could have easily seen in more recent Marios due to their continued reappearances.

I mean it's not like that game has ever been available in any significant capacity since it's release over a decade ago.

From what I understand of the interview to Risa Tabata and of the Iwata Asks on Sticker Star, the team chose as little species variety as possible on purpose to challenge themselves.
Piantas and Lokis were in Mario Kart 8, penguins and Bumpties are regulars of the Mario games as well, yet they didn't appear as NPCs. Toadette too didn't appear, despite being a Toad, being featured in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker from which Draggadon was taken and now being a popular character within Nintendo, even featured already once in the Paper Mario series.

 

[Mcmadness]

Then fuck it, they could have done better.

Still, I don't think the Miyamoto hate is warranted in this case.

 

[Glowsquid]

there's absolutely no reason to try it a third time unless they just like seeing the series get poorer sales and eventually die.

Paper Mario series sales is almost entirely correlated with a system's sales.

Sticker Star and Super Paper Mario sold the best and that's because their systems were successful. On the other hand, Color Splash and Thousand-Year stuttered compared to them because their systems aren't successful, especially Color Splash's.

Install base matters, but it can only go so far. The original Paper Mario was released at the arse end of the Nintendo 64's life (there was a whooping 13 games released for the N64 in 2001, most of it shovelware) and it achieved nearly 1.5 million copies worldwide. Mister Wu beat me to posting the sales number, but less than 40k in Japan is very poor, even when taking in account the wii u's perfornance and the bad console market there.

Since console game sales are very front-loaded, it's usually the next game in a series that suffers from a dissapointign sequel or overhyped first installment. It's obvious to me that's what happened with color splash.

It also wasn't in the November NPD charts.

According to an executive of the NPD group who'd post numbers on twitter before deleting her account, the game did 100k in November.

 

[Mister Wu]

Still, I don't think the Miyamoto hate is warranted in this case.

Yeah, sorry if that's the message that is passing, the producer himself didn't state that Miyamoto forced them this time:
[quote author=Kensuke Tanabe]
“Mario is not an IP that I created. From the position of someone borrowing the IP, I think it’s only natural to show respect to the person who created it, and let that feeling of respect guide us. When Miyamoto-san, the father of Mario, asks us, ‘Could you make a game with only characters from the Mario family?’ I think it’s only natural for us to give it our best shot. In other words, we are not currently thinking about returning to old NPCs.

Incidentally, I do think Color Splash may have proven that we can still make a game entertaining, even if our original characters don’t appear as NPCs. And with that belief, we will keep on continuing to do our best.”
[/quote]
That Miyamoto quote came from Sticker Star development, so I don't think we can say that even this time he forced them on the use of original characters. Even if he did, we already cited numerous non-new species and characters outside of the Mario RPGs that could have been added, so I agree that hating Miyamoto because of the lack of characters' variety in Color Splash is excessive.

 

[Xiahou Dun]

From what I understand of the interview to Risa Tabata and of the Iwata Asks on Sticker Star, the team chose as little species variety as possible on purpose to challenge themselves.

Did they specify exactly what they want to challenge themselves on? I know about self-imposed limitations in order to generate creativity, but from what I've seen, they could've done a lot better.

 

[Mister Wu]

From what I understand of the interview to Risa Tabata and of the Iwata Asks on Sticker Star, the team chose as little species variety as possible on purpose to challenge themselves.

Did they specify exactly what they want to challenge themselves on? I know about self-imposed limitations in order to generate creativity, but from what I've seen, they could've done a lot better.

Well, pretty much what you said, the challenge was being creative enough to keep characters recognizable even if the design is generic. From the Iwata Asks on Sticker Star:
[quote author=Kudo]
But personally, the more restrictions there were, the more excited I got. They may look the same, but we put in some elements in which their personalities are slightly different, so you can tell the difference and you think, "Hey! Are you that Toad from back then?" Toward the end of development, I could feel that I became one with Toad! (laughs)
[/quote]
From an interview with Risa Tabata on Color Splash:
[quote author=Risa Tabata]
Since this is taking place within the greater Mario world, we wanted to focus as much as possible on the familiar Mario characters. As you mentioned before, when you're limited, that tends to bring out greater creativity.
[/quote]
[quote author=Risa Tabata]
We had to think a lot about, 'Alright, if it's all Toads, how do we make them distinctive? How do we give them personality?'
[/quote]
[quote author=Risa Tabata]
One we thing we decided was that the basic Toad is red, and then if they have something different about them, we'll change the color. And a lot of the personality comes out in the text. You can also use the fact that they all look alike as the basis for jokes. We're really trying to focus on using all these Toads, and other familiar characters, and still creating great variety and keeping things interesting.
[/quote]

 

[Xiahou Dun]

Well, people thought Super Paper Mario was the odd one out, and from pre-release footage of Sticker Star, its original direction was intended to be similar to its base, if I read that correctly. Miyamoto's decision came in later in development, but not extremely far in. I'm not sure why he didn't want them to create original characters, but anyhow, the stream of original characters was halted at Mario Party games as well, so I guess it's not only Paper Mario that has been affected.

I don't think Miyamoto hate is entirely founded either, as he gets way too much blame for it. It's just a group decision, not like Miyamoto exercised dictatorial control over development as some detractors seem to put it.