SUPER MARIO RPG 3DS HOW TO
SUPER MARIO RPG 3DS SERIES

These battles play out kind of like sumo matches, and remind me a lot of the great segments from Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story which saw a massive King Koopa fighting castles, towers, and trains. Some battles have the three protagonists riding a giant papercraft into battle, where they do battle with a similarly huge enemy made of folded paper. One of the more interesting bosses in the game uses this ability to shuffle himself into a pile of clones, so you can't inflict damage until you work your way down to the randomly placed real McCoy.Īlong with the standard solving of Zelda-style environmental puzzles using the Bros.' odd abilities, Paper Jam also includes mini-games that don't have a whole lot to do with the RPG genre. Paper enemies can use this ability too, which adds yet another angle to battles: At times, you'll have to battle a stack of foes whose attacks change as they shrink in number.

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Paper Mario's main ability involves making copies of himself, which gives him a buffer against enemy attacks and allows extra attacks during his turn-a clever way to make the smaller numbers of his series play nice with the larger numbers of Mario & Luigi. Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time made things a little too complicated by involving four party members, but for this installment, three seems to be the magic number.

The 'Paper Mario' angle is more than just a fun gimmick, though: Both he and paper variants of enemies move and act differently from their fleshier counterparts, which adds a little more to think about in every battle. It's an approach that could result in tedium from overly long encounters, but Paper Jam has a way of introducing new enemies just as soon as you've mastered fighting the current crop.

SUPER MARIO RPG 3DS HOW TO

Since each of these enemy moves begins with some sort of visual cue, battles mostly entail figuring out how to respond within a limited window of time. And battles essentially boil down to wrapping your head around the latter: While the timing never changes on your party's jumping and hammer attacks, each enemy comes equipped with a collection of abilities that require a keen eye to fully understand. If you've never played the series before, its enemy encounters resemble Nintendo's Punch-Out more than anything: Combat involves using timed button presses to make the most of your attacks, and watching enemies closely so you can either dodge or parry their own offensive abilities. Ultimately, this change is for the best, because Mario & Luigi's battle system has never been better. That's the reason why I steered clear of 2013's Mario & Luigi: Dream Team: Based on what I read in Jeremy's review, it's a game that just doesn't know when to shut up. Granted, it's well-written and smirk-worthy dialogue, but it soon became the main course rather than a surprisingly good side dish. It's something I sincerely used to love, but somewhere along the line, developer AlphaDream fell in love with the smell of their own farts and starting cramming their games with too much dialogue. (Oh yeah, and rescuing two princesses.)Īdmittedly, this lax approach to storytelling may irk Mario & Luigi fans fond of the series' chattier qualities. Even for a Mario & Luigi game, it's an extremely straightforward story: Mario, Paper Mario, and Luigi are tasked with journeying to Bowser's Castle to defeat him and his paper-thin counterpart. Its story begins with the flimsiest of premises, if only to immediately drop players into the main attraction: Luigi accidentally knocks over a magical book, which sends a nearly endless stream of Paper Mario characters-and enemies-into the world. And Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam fully understands this fact. Two decades and roughly 10 games later, Mario's RPG adventures have become almost as much of an institution as his runny, jumpy ones.

Adapting Nintendo's simple, side-scrolling gameplay to the world of stats, equipment, and battle strategies? Like a lot of people, I picked up Squaresoft's strange experiment if only to see how the hell they could possibly pull it off. 20 years ago, Super Mario RPG stood as an outlandish proposition.

Super mario rpg 3ds