Mcmadness said:
You play as Bowser's minions in the beanbean kingdom, koopa cruiser brings them to the beanbean kingdom. It's just a basic mark of consistency. Especially since unlike their hatted counterparts, these ones will actually be doing some fighting.
Consistency is a fair point, yet they still didn't need to remove the flight suits. Bowser's Minions is an extension to the original story, if we're seeing the story of the surviving crew of the Koopa Cruiser, they should look like the original crew. Not replacements with generic Koopas. if consistency between the two gametypes was a priority, they should have just kept the flight suit designs on the Koopas in both Superstar Saga Deluxe and Bowser's Minions. It was an unnecessary sacrifice, still unbeneficial. What was there to gain from making them generic Koopas in the first place?
Mcmadness said:
And in Paper Mario koopas wore shades and spiked collars, swoopers were purple instead of blue or green, and a whole bunch of other nonsense. Did they change their names? No because thats stupid. It's just a koopa troopa, wearing a hat, they don't act differently, they don't sound differently, they are just wearing hats.
Also the term "generic washing" is on top of that another stupid term. They aren't "washing" anything, just using their updated designs, like everything else in this goddang franchise.
The issue is, it's hard to see it as harmlessly updating their designs after Miyamoto told Paper Mario devs to only use generic characters saying
"As much as possible, complete it with only characters from the Super Mario world." regarding Sticker Star. Those words alone seem harmless, but actions speak louder than words. Evident of Sticker Star we saw seas of generic Toads, Koopas, and Goombas no new/old original characters in sight and everyone hated it. It's a trend that has stuck as evident of Tanabe, a Paper Mario dev, recently saying
"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. So 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." regarding Color Splash. All this trend does is hurt fans, as many fans love the original characters, original designs and would love to see old and brand new ones in the games. This trend benefits no one except for Miyamoto's own personal preference. So why defend it? It is implied that this recent lack of original characters and overabundance of generic Toads, Koopas, and Goombas in the Mario & Luigi series is also result of this, if even to a lesser extent. It's a trend with Paper Mario at this point, so it's hard to see it as an innocent coincidence with Mario & Luigi.
In 2001, Paper Mario used the up to date Mario enemy designs. In it's own way it was bringing things up to date. But it still had all those unique original characters, and classic toad/koopa/goombas but given personalities with clothing, facial hair, etc.
Bringing a character design up to date doesn't mean it has to be made generic. We could have instead had a modern Koopa design with green boots, but with a more detailed flight hat and jacket, that would still be an update of design.
There's no reason why bringing designs up to date means it has to be generic.
