Paper Mario

5 / 5 stars
By Nintendo for the Nintendo 64

This was an incredibly fun game for me. You play as Mario, that lovable Italian plumber, and you have to rescue Princess Peach, whom Bowser has kidnapped away to his castle in the sky. In order to do so, you have to recover the stolen Star Spirits, which are scattered throughout the land, protected by Bowser’s minions. The fighting style is turn-based, which proved to have a very small learning curve. I’m not at all used to console games, having done all PC games in the past since my childhood with the Atari 2600. However, Paper Mario was easy for me to pick up because the fights rely on your strategical skills only: knowing which partner to use, which attacks to use, when you should use an item or star power, etc. You don’t have to be good at jumping to win battles, though improving at performing Action commands during a battle greatly helps you.

The game is very cute and it just made me grin while playing it. The graphics are pretty, the characters are adorable, and you feel bad for whacking the Whacka, despite how it helps you. “WhackOWWWWW! Don’t hit me!” Any game that makes me say, “Aww, I’m sorry buddy, but I need that egg!” before I pummel some critter with a hammer is a good game in my book.

I would really recommend enabling the Quick Change badge, because being able to adapt your partner’s fighting abilities to whichever battle you’re in is a life-saver. I found myself using Bow a lot during battles whenever I stood to lose a lot of health (e.g. boss fights, or when an enemy increased his attack power) to go Outta Sight, which is incredibly helpful. If you get good at Bow’s Fan Smack, I found that to be a very useful attack, too. Kooper was excellent for deploying decent damage to a whole row of ground enemies. I think I used Bombette a lot earlier on but gradually tapered off my usage of her. I rarely used Parakarry, but I did use Watt a lot once I upgraded him, because his attack became pretty powerful.

The Paper Mario series is definitely my favorite console game series. The attractive and cute graphics, the RPG style, the lovable characters, and the energy you feel to hurry up and save the princess/save the world/save all worlds just really makes you love the game.