Review by Gianluca “DottorKillex” Arena
Among the most colorful, carefree and witty titles of this fall, a place of honor goes without a shadow of a doubt, to Paper Mario Color Splash, the latest incarnation in chronological order of the adventure / RPG saga born at the turn of the century following the great success that Super Mario RPG was able to collect at the end of the Super Nintendo life cycle.
In the face of a particularly bare release calendar for mother Nintendo's flagship (still briefly ...), and despite the flaws there are, we anticipate that it would be a shame to miss this curious hybrid between an RPG, a platform and an adventure game of the most classic.
If you are looking for a fun title to play on your two screen console, you may have found it.
Monochord white
The new adventure of Mario, Peach and company takes them to Prisma Island, once a crowded tourist destination and today a ghostly town without colors, drained by an unknown (!) Overgrown lizard.
Someone lured our hero in dungarees to Porto Prisma after sending him an anonymous letter, which was none other than an unfortunate crumpled and bleached Toad: who will ever be behind this spiral of events?
Arrived on site, Mario soon makes the acquaintance of Tinto, a talking pot of paint (ehm ...) that will accompany him throughout his adventure, in search of the missing Vernistelle, capable of restoring the colors to a world that is too pale and monotonous.
The simplicity of the plot immediately betrays the intentions of the development team to focus more on the dynamics of the game and on the playful experience itself, leaving the narrative on the sidelines, as a consolidated tradition for the titles with Mario and associates as protagonists.
The fun, more than in the plot, lies in the jokes of the protagonists, in the stupidity of many antagonists, in the carelessness of those who should be evil geniuses: supported by an excellent work of localization española, Paper Mario Color Splash manages to involve the most young people and to snatch some smirk from the more experienced, who will find there topoi, situations and twists known but no less nice.
As written above, the gameplay is tripartite, in the sense that it throws stylistic elements from different genres into the blender and centrifuges them, giving life to a result that, while resembling Paper Mario Sticker Star, ends up finding its own identity in the Wii library. U.
If, like the writer, you were expecting an RPG set in the kingdom of Mushrooms, you might be disappointed, because the role-playing elements in Paper Mario Color Splash are subtle and impact only minimally on the gameplay, but, after the first hour of play, you will discover that the Intelligent Systems product still has a lot to offer.
Explore, color and fight
Right from the start, the player is offered tools that will prove to be fundamental for his adventure: a hammer, which serves both as a weapon and as a recolorant, and the ability to choose between more than one card in combat.
But first things first.
Paper Mario Color Splash is structured on single stages, with an entry point and an exit point, which contain within them multiple roads, shortcuts, secrets and areas hidden from view: it will be necessary to revisit almost all of them several times, not only because many of them contain more than one Vernistella, but also because certain passages will be unlocked only at a certain point of the adventure, obtained a particular power such as that of cutting out (literally) the scenario or that of activating special blocks that influence the morphology of the stages themselves , just to give two examples.
Not everyone will like the conspicuous dose of backtracking, but the goodness of the level design, the limited respawn of the enemies and the presence of a thousand little secrets scattered around the stages will alleviate the tedium, making the practice almost natural.
The enemies are visible on the screen, they can be hit to get an advantage at the beginning of the fight and, generally, they offer a very mild resistance to the player, who on several occasions will find himself wanting a more stimulating level of challenge.
Once an opponent has been engaged, the combat system rests heavily on the GamePad screen, where the player is asked to select which cards to use for the battle and whether to fill them with color, making them much more effective; once ready, it is sufficient to throw the cards upwards, effectively opening the dances.
The action then moves to the television screen, with the ballet of turns and attacks in real time already appreciated in Paper Mario Sticker Star, released in 2012 on 3DS: compared to that title, however, the player will never lack the necessary resources to continue, since the cards will always be very abundant and with them also the color necessary to enhance them.
The result is very good, and fighting turns out to be a pleasure, albeit quite an end in itself, as there is no growth model for Mario, which only increases the size of his Rainbow Hammer and his life total, without advancing by level or gain powerful, new skills.
The gradual loss of the role-playing vein that had characterized the beginnings of the franchise is also reconfirmed in this new episode, unfortunately, but the classic adventure game dynamics that replaced it make the product even easier to approach and suitable for a lot of audiences. large.
Rain of color
In spite of new generation graphic engines, polygonal models that tend to photorealism and disputes over resolution and framerate, Paper Mario Color Splash offers a wonderful aesthetic, in which two and three dimensions meet to give life to a vibrant world, full of very dense colors, of masterfully animated characters, of glimpses that seem straight out of an animated film of the best.
As it had already been for the platforms dedicated to Kirby and Yoshi, Wii U proves to be at ease with specially developed graphics engines, with that care in the conceptual phases that has been lacking too many times during the life cycle of this unfortunate console, especially for with regard to third parties.
Thanks to the fact that there is never too much crowd on the screen, there are no slowdowns whatsoever, everything moves smoothly and naturally and the individual stages, probably helped by their closed and non-open world nature, are overflowing with details, often interactive: crush a paper bush means seeing it curl up, hitting a tree, benefiting from the fruits that will fall and so on.
The chromatic show and the fluidity of the on-screen action make the title one of the most beautiful to see not only limited to the Nintendo home console, but also expanding the discourse to more performing consoles such as PS4 and Xbox One: to brute computing power, Wii U responds with inventiveness and an art direction to applause, ideal for both old foxes and new recruits, who will seem, on several occasions, to be watching a blu-ray instead of a video game.
Even the most hasty player, who in any case would lose a lot of what the game world has to offer, will hardly take less than twenty-five hours to complete the adventure, a more than respectable duration and in line with what is offered by the other episodes of the game. franchise.
Final comment
The veterans of the saga will probably regret the progressive thinning of the RPG dynamics and the inconsistency of the difficulty level, yet Paper Mario Color Splash has entertained us a lot throughout its duration, offering a very successful mix of various genres and a varied and hilarious combat system, capable of using the GamePad intelligently.
If you add to this a very high level cosmetics and a really full-bodied longevity, here is that the overall judgment can only be positive.
Suitable for young and old.
