Paper Mario: Color Splash

Paper Mario: Color Splash is deeply influenced by the reception of the previous title, Paper Mario: Sticker Star, which was released for the 3DS. Since Sticker Star was heavily criticized for its barebones story and strange combat system, Color Splash tries to present a more developed narrative and some additions to its core design to shake things up.

Color Splash‘s story begins with Mario traveling to Prism Island, where he discovers that the place and all its inhabitants had their color drained by Bowser’s minions. The goal, then, is simple: with the help of a can of paint called Huey, Mario needs to rescue six special stars to return life to the region.

The first change that stands out in Color Splash, comparing it to its predecessor, is the focus given to the story, which has an episodic structure. Such episodes are all very distinct in nature, and while some repeat common scenarios in the franchise, others prove to be more creative.

In a certain episode, for example, Mario needs to solve the mystery behind a haunted hotel. He has to socialize with the staff and the guests, solving their problems in order to deliver peace to the spirits that haunt the place. It’s not a very original set-up – even Sticker Star had a similar level – but it works. Fortunately, there are more imaginative sequences: there’s one, for instance, in which Mario needs to chase a Shy Guy that stole a star but, when he finally manages to catch him, the Shy Guy actually gives up fighting, claiming to regret his life choices, and accompanies the protagonist to the star. The ambush that follows is brilliant in the way it uses the paper setting against the protagonist while, at the same time, playing with a specific warning present in the symbols of a nearby restaurant.

The humor in the Paper Mario games usually comes from the subversion of expectations, and here it’s no different. This is achieved sometimes by breaking the fourth wall, with the game making reference to its own narrative problems – a certain Toad is surprised that Mario wants to start a conversation with him, since he believes he has no distinctive features –, sometimes by the surprising tone of the dialogues – another Toad, who is waiting in a line, comments, “I don’t really mind waiting in long lines. Gives me time to contemplate my own mortality” –, and sometimes by the inadequacy of the message regarding its context – there’s a poster on a secret base that says, “Your mom doesn’t work in this dungeon. Clean up after yourself.“)

Despite its creativity, however, the story in Color Splash is quite repetitive. It doesn’t matter that the locales visited and the events that occur in them are different if the characters that inhabit and experience them are all the same. First, there is the issue of Prism Island being populated solely by Toads. Hundreds of them. And, apart from the change in color (there are blue Toads, yellow Toads, red Toads), and the thematic clothing (on a pirate ship, they wear a pirate hat, in a restaurant, they wear a chef’s apron), as one of them points out, they don’t really have a distinct visual identity.

The second and much more serious problem is the fact that the Toads also lack a distinct personality. There’s a Toad, for example, that threatens Mario at a certain moment by saying, “I’m gonna follow you passive-aggressively until you are mildly annoyed.” However, even though this Toad is a mythical character in the story, this dialogue could have come out of any other Toad’s mouth. In other words, taking his dialogues in isolation, they are indeed funny, but together with the others they don’t work quite so well, because similar lines are uttered by dozens of other similar characters with the same personality all the time. This generates fatigue: meeting the first ten Toads may be fun, but after talking to the eighty-sixth Toad there is left only concern over the developers’ lack of imagination. And it’s worth pointing out that in Color Splash, Mario meets more than a hundred Toads during his adventure, with no risk of hyperbole.

As for the gameplay, Color Splash sticks with the combat system of Sticker Star, making some modifications that don’t necessarily improve it. As its name implies, the focus in Color Splash is on color, which here works as ammunition. In Sticker Star, Mario’s attacks were tied to stickers, which were spent with each action: to perform an attack you had to spend the corresponding sticker. The idea is the same in Color Splash (you just need to change the term “sticker” for “card”), but an additional layer has been added to the system: now Mario needs to paint the cards before using them, and if the necessary color reserve is empty, the attack comes out weaker than normal.

This makes the combat system a bit more complex, as it forces the player to manage their color reserve and change their strategy accordingly. However, the whole thing is a tiresome affair, since three actions are required in the gamepad for each attack to happen: choosing the card, painting it, and then “throwing” the colored card toward the television. The last action, being merely aesthetic, just amounts to a huge waste of time by the end of the thirty-hour campaign.

Outside of battles, color is used to paint the landscape and bring the characters and the environment back to life: when drained of color, the Toads don’t move or speak, for example. However, hitting the first wall with your hammer to paint it is the exact same action as hitting the eighty-sixth: this is a static mechanic, without ever evolving or changing throughout the game. Not to mention that the player interested in 100% the game will have a problem hunting for pixels in each level in search of what is left to paint.

Another problem comes from the fact that Color Splash makes exactly the same mistake of which Sticker Star was unjustly often accused of: the arbitrariness of boss battles. Each one of these fights needs a specific card, which, representing three-dimensional objects, works as a special attack with unique and absurd animations: the drums card, for example, takes the enemies to a mountain in Greece and strikes them with lightning in the rhythm of a god’s screams. However, unlike Sticker Star, which categorized the objects to give more options during battles, and usually put the one necessary to defeat a boss in a stage close to it, here each object is unique and the confrontations may require a card acquired several hours before.

To get around this, there’s a Toad in the main city that warns the player which objects they’ll need, but there are two problems in this design: forcing the player to talk to this Toad every time before leaving for a level is tiresome (a word that seems to define the game), and if the level requires the use of objects to solve puzzles, the Toad will only show the solution for these, ignoring the battle against the boss that will follow. This leads to the player being forced to lose the battle and then return to the main city to talk to the Toad again and acquire the necessary card.

Moreover, there are times when the game seems to rejoice in making the player simply waste their time. Mossrock Theater, for example, is a level that contains three stars, but two of them are at the end of the same course, in the same room, making us go through the level twice without offering anything new. In the same vein, a battle against a piece of steak requires the special cards to be used in a specific order, but only warns us about this after we lost the battle. Finally, the unwary who venture to 100% the game will still have to win twenty-four games of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” – a design choice as absurd and random as it is… tiresome.

With Paper Mario: Color Splash, Intelligent Systems believed it was enough just to put a funny story and some new mechanics on the base of Sticker Star. However, both the development of the story and of these mechanics leave something to be desired, making the game more complex, but also more problematic than its predecessor.

April 13, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on December 16, 2016.