Mario and Luigi Paper Jam Review

Mario and Luigi Paper Jam is the latest entry in the Mario and Luigi series. This is also the second time they’ve mixed Marios, the first time being in Mario and Luigi Partners in Time.

Paper Jam features a new character, Paper Mario. Paper Mario has some features that the other characters don’t have, such as being paper thin.

Pros:

The graphics are nice. I’ve always enjoyed when a game can pull off the 3D but actually 2D look, and this game pulls it off. I’m pretty sure the characters are actually two-dimensional, but that just shows how impressive the effect is, I can’t tell.

The gameplay is enjoyable. What would a Mario and Luigi game be without the gameplay? Something closer to Earthbound, but that’s not the point. The gameplay of Mario and Luigi Paper Jam is just as enjoyable as the previous games in the Mario and Luigi series. Attacks are fun to use, and satisfying to use well.

The music is pretty good. Most of the songs are really good for the areas they appear in. The music of Mount Brr is my personal favorite.

Cons:

The story is the most bland out of all the Mario and Luigi series. As of writing this review, I beat the game less than a week ago, and I can’t even remember my motivation for beating Bowser, you know, aside from being done with the game.

The story starts with Luigi knocking a book off a shelf, which contains the paper mushroom kingdom. This releases a lot of Paper Mario characters into the world of the Mario and Luigi series, though mostly just Toads.

And that’s where the story stops being unique. Bowser takes Peach and Paper Peach, and the Marios and Luigi must save them.

The “jokes” get old fast. There is one joke that keeps getting used for the first two thirds of the game. This joke being that the paper characters are flat. The first couple times it’s somewhat funny. Then it gets old. But just because it’s old doesn’t mean they’ll stop using it.

There’s virtually no comedy later on. There’s a point in the forest where they actually do something different, they try to be funny. It felt so strange to actually smile at a joke in the later half of the game. In the earlier part of the game, there’s actually a bit of comedy! But they seem to take the story so seriously that they forgot it was a Mario game.

There are no original boss battles. Every Mario and Luigi game has had unique bosses, or bosses we’ve never seen in any Mario game before. This game has NOTHING. In fact, two bosses are actually the same boss, just one is paper and the other isn’t.

There’s almost nothing from the world of Paper Mario. You have Paper Mario, Paper Peach, Paper Bowser Jr, and Paper Bowser, and a whole bunch of smaller enemies. But what if you had to fight Doopliss or Wracktail. Or what about a mention of Vivian or Goombella. Or you, reference anything but Sticker Star? Maybe I should have clarified, there are some small references to Sticker Star, but that’s the only Paper Mario game with any references.

Paper Toads.  Throughout the game, you’ll encounter missions where you need to rescue various Paper Toads. Some Paper Toads are in actual danger, and some aren’t. Some missions are timed and some aren’t.

From a story standpoint, you’re saving them and giving them to Toadette so she can make you more papercraft objects to fight with. But think of how much cooler it could have been to have it work in a similar way to Pikmin, where getting more is optional, but it makes things go faster. Instead we get cheap padding to make the game longer.

Enemy attacks are horribly unfair. In most Mario and Luigi games most enemies are fairly easy to predict. This is not the case here. You will need to fight an enemy several times before you can have any confidence in your ability to dodge or counter their attacks.

On top of being able to predict enemy attacks, the game also completely fails in terms of a difficulty ramp. The game gets extremely hard randomly in the middle of the game. It’s so bad I had to turn on easy mode.

Paper Mario is overpowered. Paper Mario gets the ability to clone himself, at first six times, but you can increase it later. When you have six clones, you won’t take actual damage, you’ll just lose a few clones. When your turn comes back around, you can just fill back up on clones. This makes boss fights incredibly easy.

Some songs get downright repetitive. I mentioned earlier that many of the songs are really good. But then you have songs like the battle music, which gets old. On top of that, almost all of the songs are happy sounding, which means that there’s essentially zero contrast between music. Partners in Time is an example of a game that has good contrasting music. An example of this can be found here.

Overall Opinion:

I can’t recommend this game to anyone. It starts out kinda fun, but becomes tedious pretty fast. In terms of if the game is worth it, I think not. I got about twenty five hours of playtime, but I only enjoyed around five hours of that playtime.