Blog: Thoughts on Paper Mario: Color Splash

It's colour and it's splashy. (Yeah, still haven't fixed the internet problem on my Wii U)

I picked up Paper Mario: Color Splash because I wanted something new, different, and not that hard to play. I’m trying not to buy too much while finish my PhD, and I thought Color Splash might be the right thing to tide me over until I can get caught up again. There will be some spoilers for Color Splash - I hate to tell you but Bowser might kidnap Princess Peach again, but wait til you see why he did it!

Toad is very firm in his beliefs.

While I've watched most of the Paper Mario games being Let's Played. I’ve never actually played one before. I’ve generally thought that they had a lot of heart and the localization team has had a lot of fun producing them. I really enjoyed Thousand Year Door and I’ve thought most of the others were pretty good. Color Splash fits in that model, and while I didn't love it, I certainly like it a lot.

Things I Liked

Paper Mario: Color Splash is very charming. From the visual style, to the characters, to the writing it was a delight to play. It definitely has some issues, as I’ll discuss in the Things I Didn’t Like, but overall it’s fun.

The first thing I really liked is the colour. I am a fan of bright colour and rainbow things and this game certainly provides. Beyond that, the Woolly World / physical paper style is fantastic. Mario is a piece of paper. The enemies are pieces of paper. If you hit the enemies with your hammer they crumple.

Don't worry that's just a country side cafe, with extra large decorative knives, getting rolled up above you.

At the same time the paper craft is used to build a really “realistic” and fun world. As you go through the world you see a shiney rock and suddenly realize it’s aluminum foil. Or you a log and realize that it’s rolled corrugated cardboard. Or you walk along a nice ridge and then some jerks roll it up and trap you in it.

I also liked the world of Prisma Island. You travel around on a Super Mario Bros. 3 / Mario World style map. At first I was a little worried that it would be too highly “levelized,” with no reason to go back to a level once you finished it. But there were interesting characters in different locations and just about every level had at least two reasons to go back, and was a little different every time you went through. Each level felt unique, and there were "biomes" across the game that felt like you were travelling between different areas, where there were common stylistic elements shared between the levels.  The world felt dynamic, alive, and interesting at every point of the game.

I'd visit.

Part of the world feeling alive is that, despite the fact that it might be really hard to tell the Toads apart, every single character is has well written, unique dialog. Everyone in every town has a personality and it’s easy to remember them. Like the bridge repair expert, and the bridge repair expert expert who helps you find the bridge repair expert (they’re especially memorable because they both get really happy whenever you use the bridge they repaired in town).

So happy!

The Rescue Squad Toads were also phenomenal, there were at least a hundred of them, in various colour squads. Each squad helps Mario do a thing usually by becoming a patch in the world (and they don’t mind if you step on them, or drive a train over them). Each Toad in a rescue squad has a personality, and has a different thing to say. At one point you and the 50 Red Rescue Squad Toads need to get in a circus. While you’re waiting all 50 toads have something different to say and they’re all witty, or interesting, or both. The attention to detail that the localizers put into this game is phenomenal.

They may be construction material, but they are glorious.

The writing overall is really good. The game is very self aware, and comedic, and it’s really enjoyable to read the plot, the side plots, and the NPCs just standing around. The story is not a heartbreaking work of literary genius, but for a Mario game, it’s unique, fun and a little different.

Things I didn’t Like

I played about 50 hours of Color Splash, and I probably enjoyed 40 of those. Unfortunately, this game is kinda cavalier with your time, and that can make it very frustrating. The first example of this is simply the game over mechanic. This game is old school, if you lose a fight, you go back to your last save. Also, did I mention that there are hazards in the world that can kill you? There are, so if you’re not careful - and sometimes if you are careful but the game designers are feeling like it would be fun for you to do that last bit over again - you’ll suddenly get blown back to your last save.

The game, and the colour, is over.

I will say that the game is generally good about saving every time you leave a level and there are save blocks positioned in fairly useful places. However even then on several occasions I found myself dead by surprise and suddenly way back with a lot to repeat again.

The game is also aware of its game over mechanic. Several times, early in the game I’d die to a boss only to have Huey pop up and tell me that I hadn’t done the fight correctly. Later in the game this didn’t happen as much but I still felt a that the game over penalty wasn’t required and there must have been a different way to handle the fact that the game is *fairly* easy.

I actually found regular fights pretty fun, instead of picking your commands from a menu you pick cards out of a hand, and then it’s back to the old fashioned action commands to thump enemies. As with all Paper Mario games, you need to take care that you choose the right type of attack for the right enemies (don’t jump on the spikey things).

Stomp, hammer, fire your way to victory.

Where I found things broke down in combat was in the boss fights. I mentioned Huey telling me I was fighting wrong, well the bosses in Color Splash all have a CORRECT WAY (™) to fight them. In general you have to find a card out in the world (a “thing”) and use that think to break whatever is keeping you from actually fighting them. On the one hand this makes the boss fights interesting and different than your regular encounters. On the other this means that almost inevitably you’ll go into a fight having not found, not gone back for, or having used the thing you need to actually win the fight. And then you die.

Better yet are the times when you have the thing but you don’t use it the right way. Did you use the balloons? Well, too bad, because right now Ludwig isn’t vulnerable to that. He’ll be vulnerable to that later. So you die.The game isn’t bad about explaining when you get to the right point that you should use the thing, but it’s still kinda easy to jump ahead and get yourself in trouble.

Morton might be be the brightest candle in the box, but he sure tried hard.

All of the main bosses work this way, but the worst example was probably the steak. Yes, there’s a boss about 2/3s of the way through the game where you have to cook a steak. So you have to tenderize it appropriately (which, i mean Paper mario does love clobbering things with hammers so - great), apply salt and pepper, apply lemon juice and grill it to medium rare. That requires three “things” you find out in the world. That are all found in different levels (although there is at least a shop in town where you can retrieve any “thing” you’ve found once in the world). Then you have to apply them in the correct amounts in the correct order. I think I fought the steak 5 times before I got it right. You don’t die if you don’t cook the steak right but you do have to buy the steak to fight again each time.

Overall, I do think the boss fights add a lot to the game, they are at least different and interesting. I’m not sure they’re fun, but I wouldn’t say they're bad. What I would say is that they feel a lot like the developers included the mechanics to slow the game down for you. I get needing patience to play, I suck at dark souls, but I recognize that I need to put the time in to “git good”. In Paper Mario: Color Splash I feel like I am good and the game’s just hitting on my ignorance. While I loved it, I was definitely frustrated at times.

This carries over to some of the puzzles in the game, they’re very long and you have to start over when you do something wrong (or sometimes when you do everything right). There’s one level late in the game where you fight your way through the forest, have to avoid the surprisingly accurate hammer brothers circus act and then you discover three “paint stars” next to each other, which means that not only was it a slow and relatively difficult level, you have to play it three times in a row for no reason.

I think my frustration also comes back to the use of save points. The game only saves when you leave a level or hit a save blocks, so when you’re infiltrating the Yellow Sniffit’s base to get the a Cafe Owner back (cafe owners are very plot important), you have to play the whole level in one sitting or start again and do the 30 minute trip to the base and then the hour long base.

I sniffed the need for a quick save feature.

(I’m wondering now if there were save points that I missed / forgot about, but still it would have been nice to just suspend and come back later. Additionally the mechanic of saving in a level and coming back is a little confusing.)

I think I was most frustrated by the part where you have to guide a ship through a spooky violet passage. That level had an “on the ground” portion, and then you had to sail the ship through a number of fairly challenging challenges, navigating rocks and shooting stuff. It probably wasn’t that bad but I was tired, I wanted to stop, but I didn’t want to give up all the work I’d done to get that far.

The game has banners in the main town square where it celebrates how many coins you’ve picked up, how many times you’ve whacked things with your hammer really well, how many times you’ve used your scissors to cut up the back ground, how much paint you’ve smashed onto things, and - how many times you’ve won a game of rock paper scissors. While 100%ing the game is not really rewarded, it is nice to see those banners unfurled, so I tackled those parts of the completion quest. Over all they’re fun enough, especially with a friend shouting everytime they see something you missed. The Roshambo however is a bit of a different beast.

Achievement Unlocked - wait, that feels wrong here...

For - reasons - Roshambo is the religion(?) on Prisma Isle. There are Roshambo Temples at least where you compete against your enemies in - the ultimate rock-paper-scissors showdown. I actually like about half of how this was put together, Toads outside the temple give you hints about what your opponents are likely to play and you can use that to help figure out a pretty good strategy to play.

The part I don’t like however is that if the Toads don’t know then you’re just playing random rock-paper-scissors. The final “boss” of each temple works that way, and the whole of the final temple. For the first 7 temples this means you need to take a couple of runs at them, for the 8th temple this means you have to win 3 rock-paper-scissors matches in a row, which works out (if I did the math right) to a 4% chance of winning on any run. While I know I didn’t have to do it, it did take me an hour to get done. I’m happy I got all the banners displayed in town, but I think there’s a better way to implement that.

You are truly the king of randomly picking things over and over and over.

The last thing I didn’t like about this game is a design decision. If you’re going to write a funny game, maybe put the jokes on the screen the player is looking at rather than the one they can’t look at? I was lucky to play with my partner because she would read me the enemy dialog that they should while I picked cards on the WiiU Tablet. Given how well the game is written I was pretty disappointed in that decision.

Generally, the use of the WiiU tablet was unusually weak in this game. When you’re moving around the over world, the tablet screen only displays a button to press to get into the menu. And you have to touch the touch screen to get into the pause menu rather than using any of the controller buttons (like, +, which would make sense). It wouldn’t have cost them anything to put the status screen you can get in the menu up all the time while you play, let alone just make the tablet screen usable like it is in other games (Wind Waker HD, for example). It’s also really slow, which suggests to me that there was some sort of information or optimization problem going on in the background.

This is neither interesting, nor useful.

The structure of the card mechanic is also weird. Your job in the game is to take cards out of your (eventually) 99 card sized hand, put them into your “palette”, “paint” them and then throw them at the enemy where they turn into your moves for a standard Paper Mario battle. First, picking through your hand is hard, especially as it gets large, secondly as you move between the different phases of organizing your cards you have to press buttons on the interface and the number of times I tried to go on to the next phase or looked back at the screen is high. I think some careful UI / UX work on the tablet would have gone a huge way to making this a more satisfying game to play.

Things I Noticed

This game has too many mechanics. It starts off well with the standard Paper Mario, go around the world and hit things with your hammer (or maybe jump on them). In the paper would this is really engaging as there are a ton of interesting paper-craft things in the world for you to hit with your hammer. This is especially when you get the temporary unfolding power which lets you make really cool things, by hitting them with your hammer. That brings us to one and a half mechanics before really starting.

Peach calls it like she sees it, when necessary.

Next we have the paint. Paint is effectively your mana in Color Splash. You and your paint can buddy Huey, are trying to recover the paint stars and in order to do that you have to recover all of the paint that’s spread around the world. Some paint is just sitting out whereas other paint has to smashed out of things with your hammer. Your primary enemies are shy guys with straws and they suck the paint out of things and steal it, so you get an extra ability to hit things with your hammer to smash colour back into them. (This is very funny - to me - when you’re resuscitating toads by smashing them with the hammer. I’ve been calling it first aid by cranial trauma, but it’s okay since they’re made out of paper and can just iron themselves out.) Again this seems like a mechanic and a half so let’s call it three mechanics, so far.

Paint, available everywhere you hit things with hammers.

Next, you have cut outs. These depend on you positioning the camera in such a way that something in your view of the game world makes a shape and then pressing a button so that you can get out your “MAGIC SCISSORS” and cut your view of the world and then sometimes put things into the cut outs, sometimes get things out of the cut outs and sometimes jump into the cut outs so you can get somewhere in the world that you can’t do normally. Firstly, these are asinine, and my least favourite thing to do in the game. I regularly forgot I could, and they didn’t make sense with the rest of the world. Either way the game expects you to do this frequently to progress and that brings us to four mechanics just for getting around the world.

I did not feel very challenged by this part.

Next they introduce the “things”. Things are - things - which are rendered in a “realistic” fashion as opposed to the paper-craft style of the world, so they stand out. These include lemons, desk fans, statues of cats, washing machines, teapots, plungers and many, many more. As I already said they play a critical role in boss fights, but are also used generally for combat and they also manipulate the world in a lot of situations. I liked the things and I thought they added to the light hearted fun of the game, but again they were a different mechanic that had to be monitored. You could go out in the world and find the things or (if you’d already found them once) you could go to “the squeezer” in the main town and just buy one (and squeeze it to get a card). There was also a toad that would give you hints about which “thing” you were going to need next. Given their uses we could probably call them three different mechanics, but let’s give them game and keep them as one whole mechanic, which brings us to five different mechanics.

Oh no, it's a giant fan! We're made from paper!

Within combat there are two main twin mechanics, one is standard Paper Mario combat, with hammer hits and jumps, which you have to act on with “timed hits” pressing buttons at just the right moment to block an attack or to hit your attack properly. In the “good” Paper Mario games you decide which attack your going to do out of a menu. In more recent games they’ve made battle commands expendable items. In Color Splash, to jump on an enemy you have to have jump card.

To use a card you have to pick it out of your hand and throw it at the enemy. As the game goes on you can throw more cards, but every card you throw is gone, so you don’t want to throw to many cards if you don’t have to. The cards are also basically useless unless you paint them, so you have to use some of your paint to colour in the shapes on the cards so they’re powerful. Thankfully the game only requires you to tap and hold on them while does the actual painting.

On the surface that’s two and a half more mechanics, bringing us to seven, but then you have to deal with the number of different cards and the different ways they work. So you have the standard cards, hit with a hammer, jump, which then have a half different dozen flavours each (which change up the effectiveness and timing of the timed hits). You also have fire flowers to throw fireballs, and ice flowers, and mushrooms to refill your paint and mushrooms to refill your health - plus some other cards too. Then you have enemy cards where in you can call in a temporary ally, which might or might not actually help you fight, but yay, now you have a goomba buddy for the next 30 seconds. Then you have the thing cards which mostly will wipe out all the enemies, except when they don’t. All of these you might find pre-painted or have to paint yourself, and you have to make sure you have enough cards, but not too many cards or you can’t pick up the new cards (which might be the thing cards you need to fight the boss). And then you have the emergency card system where you can pay money to the game to give you an emergency card (that’s helpful but not too helpful) to help you in case you run out of cards. And that’s still excluding the boss fights where you might or might not need to use a thing to do something other than what it usually does to do something to the boss so you can fight them. Oh and then there are the times where Kamek decides to flip all your cards around, or just steal all your cards, or whatever.

It's enough to make a guy droop.

So, yeah. That’s a lot of mechanics. That’s also only the regular mechanics, there’s many, many more one-off examples, such as the 2D/3D Super Mario Bros. 3 game you jump into, or the Dragadon which you can jump on and have it carry you around a volcano, but only if you have an item that you have to get in the level that is literally the farthest away you can be from the volcano.

Over all, I feel like the game could have used a little bit of editing. None of the mechanics are awful - although I really didn’t care for the cut-outs, but there’s just a lot and figuring out how what mechanic you’re supposed to use for this particular situation. As far as I can tell the game is also not very generous with allowing you to find different solutions to a problem using different mechanics.

Interestingly after all that. There’s one, one-time mechanic I wish I’d seen more in the game. In the final fight with Bowers, you have to get black paint off of him and jam it back into your paint can friend Huey. This was hard, especially because it required really skilled blocking, but I thought it really fit well into the theme of the game and was honestly a lot more interesting than the thing mechanics they used for all the other bosses - Bowser does still have a thing mechanic, but the paint capture is more prominent. I think they could have use a mechanic like that to much more effect throughout the game.

Bowser's covered in ink. Your only option is to smack him with a hammer until he's clean.

Things I’d Include in a Game

First and foremost I would love to make a game which is as charming, funny, fun and entertaining as this. While I definitely have my gripes, I loved playing this game and I think it’s a thing people should look at frequently to ensure that we have a real diversity of genre, theme and style in video games.

Friendship, a sidequest.

The other thing I think I’d like to include in a game is the combat system, at least somewhat revised. The card system they use works, and it does promote using several different play styles as you run low on one type of card or another. I think the weapon breaking mechanism from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild does this better, but it does get at keeping players on their toes and preventing people from having one solution to everything.

I think I’d rather see the game structured as more of a deck builder - similar to Legendary or Star Realms. In this way rather than collecting disposable cards, you collect a card you can put in your deck and then use that same deck regularly to take out enemies. That would allow a lot of diversity in different decks for different worlds and then different decks for different bosses. I’m not sure how well it would work but I think it would make the combat a little bit more consistent and enjoyable - at least for me.

Final Things

This is a good game. It’s fun, it’s bright, it’s rainbow coloured, it’s funny. It’s worth you time. I also got really frustrated playing it. Thinking back I think that’s more of a comment on me than it is on the game. Obviously there’s things that could have had a more streamlined design or a more thoughtful implementation, but over all the game is a lot of fun. I think I needed to slow myself down and just relax and enjoy it. I think I got a level of difficulty and a style of play in my head and when the game didn’t do that I was annoyed.

I wanted a game that would distract and entertain me. This game does that. I should have let it do that more and I hope if you’re looking for a game to entertain it will do that for you as well.

Paper Mario, best credit sequences, no question!