Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam (3DS)

The Mario series has two major role-playing game series building off its established elements and world, the Paper Mario series coming first with its distinct aesthetic and sometimes deep storylines and the Mario & Luigi set of games focusing on sillier romps where the brothers often teamed up with unlikely allies. Both of them took inspiration from the first Mario RPG, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, in how their combat focused on timing your inputs to deal additional damage or take less from an enemy attack, so when developer AlphaDream was looking for another unusual partner for Mario and Luigi to join up with in their next game, a crossover between the two series seemed like a plausible but still incredibly unique direction. With so many memorable characters, varied mechanics, and interesting locations they could draw from, such a crossover seemed like the perfect opportunity for what made both series so beloved collide in an even more exciting title… but for some reason, almost every distinguishing characteristic of the two RPG series ended up stripped away to make it more like the regular Super Mario Bros. series was just crossing over with itself.

In Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, Mario’s bumbling younger brother Luigi manages to uncover a strange book while helping out in the library of Princess Peach’s castle. This particular tome is more than just words written on pages though, as opening it up unleashes a world of paper characters upon the Mushroom Kingdom, many residents soon confused as they meet much flatter versions of themselves. With the regular and paper versions of everyone intermingling though, the evil turtle king Bowser is able to meet with his paper counterpart and combine both their armies to try and capture the pair of Princess Peaches this dimension fusing event provided. Mario and Luigi are quick to step forward as potential heroes to take down the Bowsers and save the princesses, but they are joined by one more character on their quest, the paper version of Mario also entering the 3D world and eager to lend a hand.

Despite both game series that are crossing over here, this is the full extent of the plot, the heroes sometimes encountering stronger minions of the two Bowsers along the way but experiencing no major twists or changes to their story path along the way. On occasion you might be fed a small bit of humor to make it less sterile, but the game adheres to the generic Mario style codified in games like New Super Mario Bros. Wii and suffers since it can’t create many memorable moments or locations. Your travels across the Mushroom Kingdom will take you to a fairly generic desert, a typical ice mountain, and a tropical island that contains the basics of what you need to make a tropical island. It might briefly touch on a potentially interesting idea like an underground mine and dungeon being beneath that tropical location, but this seems more as part of transitioning from one area to another than informing the design of either area.

While the Paper Mario series had recently been stripped of its identity for Paper Mario: Sticker Star’s painfully generic set of Mario assets around this time as well, it’s baffling that a crossover would be attempted if so little from either franchise made a showing. Instead, the focus for characters from the paper universe seems to be jokes about the fact they’re made of paper. This can lead to a few sight gags and Paper Mario actually uses his lighter weight to his advantage in battle to be able to flutter in the air to avoid attacks, but there’s almost no personality to be found in the cast besides the very basics of good guys being friendly and bad guys being rude. The Mario & Luigi side of things on the other hand just presents its characters as if they were the regular platforming game characters rather than the heroes who explored a kingdom based on beans, fought mushroom aliens, and jumped inside their main enemy’s body to help fight a common foe.

The underwhelming lack of anything truly unique to either series aside, you still aren’t given anything too exceptional to latch onto in the storytelling. The game does provide a fast forward button to get through the often unexciting dialogue faster, and that option will allow you to get to the game’s successes more quickly. The areas in Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam may be incredibly “by the numbers” in concept, but the three main characters can all work together to traverse it in different ways. Working together they’ll eventually gain abilities that help with navigating the world, Mario and Luigi able to fold up Paper Mario to use as an airplane to cross gaps, stack on top of each other to form a drill for moving underground, and deliver a powerful hammer strike by slamming their weapons into each other. Small navigational puzzles are built into the overworld to both provide little challenges along the adventure and provide moments where the player can find special treasures by overcoming small obstacles with these abilities. Instead of just running around to talk to helpful characters or running into enemies to battle them, the player is able to remain engaged somewhat by having these movement challenges that at least ensure the world is interesting to travel through even if the visual aesthetics aren’t trying anything creative.

While you travel though, you will occasionally need to engage in minigames to make progress instead. Many of these are designed for a particular situation like needing to navigate a forest maze filled with invisible ghosts or outrace the friendly dinosaur Yoshi to get a special item, but a lot of these are cut from the similar cloth of being all about catching Paper Toads. The mushroom-headed servants of Princess Peach were scattered all across the kingdom when the book opened, and beside the inherent desire to help people in need, the Mario brothers and Paper Mario also need the help of Paper Toads at certain key points in the story, thus requiring you to complete enough rescue missions to hit the Paper Toad quotas. Many of these draw on the fairly plain concept of running around an area and trying to grab them before they scamper off. Some might be hiding by folding their bodies up to blend in or an enemy might need to be defeated to free them, but once you’ve done a few of these you’ll soon find their style rather shallow for something you’ll need to repeatedly engage with during the adventure. Some do at least cook up unique complications like needing to destroy the rock structures the toads are sitting on properly so they’re in reach but aren’t squished, and those few shifts into a different style of gameplay than just running around do mean it doesn’t grow so repetitive it grates on you, but this feature does still wear out its welcome when you sometimes find yourself doing three or four nearly identical missions in a row so you have enough Paper Toad assistants when the time comes.

Luckily, the battle system has no real qualifying statements when it comes to its quality. If there’s one thing to come to Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam for, it will be its enjoyable and constantly interactive battle system. When the turn-based battles kick off, you’re never truly just sitting back and waiting to choose your attack options. When it is the enemy’s turn, you can potentially avoid or outright counter each attack that comes your way, the player needing to first identify the speed and movement pattern of an enemy’s attack and then pressing the right button to make Mario, Luigi, or Paper Mario react in the right time frame. There are some more involved dodging sessions where the characters all run towards the screen and you need to avoid repeated attacks for a chance to deal hefty damage to a boss character, but in most fights the enemy turn is all about building up the knowledge of an enemy’s behavior and acting within the right rhythm to gain an edge over them. With even the simplest enemies having attacks that ask for this level of constant involved interactivity, it doesn’t matter that the game is throwing rather simple foes like the Koopa Troopa turtles or masked Shy Guys at you rather late in the game as they can still be difficult to dodge until you learn their battle style.

Your own attacks can be enhanced as well if you do some timed button presses correctly when executing them. The trio usually relies on jumps or hammer swings to deal damage, the player able to bounce off an enemy’s head repeatedly if they nail a button press correctly or deal greater damage with the hammer if they release it after it glows. The cues for your own attacks are incredibly easy to read whereas some enemies are deliberately made a little hard to anticipate until you know their gimmicks, so while assuring extra damage is easy, you can still find yourself in a difficult battle if you aren’t picking up on a foe’s patterns. You do have some more powerful moves in your arsenal though, the trio of heroes unlocking powers that involve specific button presses to pull off successfully but dealing greater damage as a reward for needing to be more precise. These can be simple ideas like the brothers kicking a shell into the enemy over and over or involve wild concepts like Paper Mario turning all the enemies into a paper stickers on a wall before you smack them with a racquetball. Their effectiveness and ease of execution vary depending on how much it costs to use the move, so the player might pick an option because it suits the situation, has easier button inputs, or deals the most damage, ensuring you at least have reasons to experiment with all these team maneuvers.

Paper Mario comes with a unique gimmick though, the hero from the book able to copy himself and stack those clones so he can take hits without losing any health. Not only that, but each extra Paper Mario in the stack lets him do an additional jump or swing another hammer, and while he uses similar attacks to the two normal brothers, he still feels unique because this Copy concept lets him split up his damage or deal repeated hits far easier. An equipment system can increase the stats of the trio and even give them simple perks like Paper Mario getting a speed boost when he makes copies, and when you level up you’ll eventually hit milestones where you can pick permanents perks like increasing the power of specific moves or buffing your abilities. The customization isn’t too advanced but it still allows you to sometimes pick a more useful bit of equipment over the stronger set, and the level up perks can be hard to pick from because so many of them would be potentially useful to have along for the adventure.

However, this is one more aspect to the battle system worth mentioning, that being cards. On the bottom screen of the 3DS you’ll eventually have a deck of ten cards, the player drawing one card per turn and able to have three face up at one time. The face up cards can be used any time during battle so long as you have the star power necessary to use them, and this gradually builds up during a battle but not at a rate you can get too many insane card usages in one fight. Some of these are just a simple way to get around using an item such as a revival or healing card, others give a quick boost to your own power or can weaken an enemy, and others might increase your post battle rewards like coins or experience points. However, the more advanced and useful cards come with higher costs, and deck-building actually becomes more interesting because of it. Do you want to put the card that can weaken the seven Koopaling bosses in your deck so you have that incredibly useful tool on hand should you run into one? Do you want to gain some brief invulnerability in a battle that isn’t too important but might be proving difficult? A small layer of strategy enters the picture because of the potential these cards have for turning the tide of a fight, and with the game achieving a pretty decent difficulty level throughout, you might actually find yourself using these valuable tools in a regular fight. Thankfully, none are lost forever as you only need to move through the small deck of ten to be able to draw them again, so it ends up being a surprisingly solid addition to the action even if it’s not always relevant to the fight at hand.

One thing Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam does well are its boss fights, Bowser’s generals coming up with some interesting tricks that go beyond just dodging and countering. One fight is on a timer so you need to pick your attacks quickly to avoid an instant loss, another involves two of the Koopaling generals using their own deck of cards to turn that nifty system against you, and one will even kidnap Paper Mario and make him unusable at parts so you need to rely on Mario and Luigi’s skills alone. Both bosses and regular enemies do often fall into the trap of having both a regular and paper variant that lessens the overall variety of the enemy forces, but paper bosses are often fought alongside their regular versions, and the variants always change up how they attack compared to their 3D versions regardless of whether they’re normal enemies or important bosses.

There is a special type of boss character you fight from time to time though, one that doesn’t even involve the turn-based battle system that at least borrowed the basics from the two franchises crossing over. This all new method of fighting involves giant Papercraft figures built out of cardboard battling it out in real time, but these fights are surprisingly simplistic for how much attention they’re given when they crop up. The three heroes will hop aboard a Papercraft creation made by Toadette and her workforce of Paper Toads you saved, each battle involving a new character turned into a cardboard titan. On a basic level each of these giant figures controls pretty similarly, the player moving them around a 3D space and able to ram them into enemies or the specific boss character of that battle. If you can knock an enemy over you can then hurl your Papercraft creation up into the air to squish the enemy for heavy damage, and then you repeat this until the battle is won. Some of your Papercraft rides have unique abilities like the one based on Princess Peach able to drift in the air before slamming and having a parasol to reflect projectiles, and the Yoshi one is able to use his long tongue to disorient the Papercraft enemies or grab far off objects. However, the fights still feel stiff and while they do introduce more danger and slightly more intelligent enemies, the battle style is so straightforward it never feels like it’s asking the player to be strategic. Walking about and ramming your foe when they’re open remains just as effective at the start as it is near the end of the game, the little hazards or complications not nearly enough to breathe life in this paper thin mode.

THE VERDICT: While the crossover aspect is almost negligible since Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam mostly relies on generic Mario series assets, this RPG title does still at least have plenty of enjoyable turn-based battles that call on strategy and skillful timing to overcome gimmicks that can be interesting even from the most basic of enemies. Paper Mario’s copy system and the cards add a bit more to the affair than dodging and timing button presses as well, but between the well-designed battles the game can often feel lifeless or by the numbers. The locations are incredibly plain even if some navigation puzzles make getting around them somewhat fun, but the bog standard “save the princess” plot is a bore and the Paper Toad rescue missions and Papercraft battles feel similarly threadbare despite their repeated presence. The battle system is unfortunately surrounded by far too little of interest to completely salvage what could have been a stellar crossover RPG.

And so, I give Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam for 3DS…

An OKAY rating. Even when it’s forced to use the same basic enemies Mario has been fighting for decades, the battle system in Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam does a lot to elevate this otherwise bland adventure through the Mushroom Kingdom. The constant interaction involved in the battle system keeps you engaged and rewards you for active participation with less lost health and more damage dealt to the opposition. Couple that with the special moves, mild customization, card deck strategies, and Paper Mario’s little gimmick and you have a battle system that isn’t overly complex but can feel incredibly varied as you progress through the adventure. Overworld navigation and its little puzzles form a good connective tissue between the moments of combat, but between these there is far too much of the game’s worse aspects. The story that is rarely worth reading, the Paper Toad chases that feel far too similar most of the time, and the Papercraft battles that feel rudimentary all fill up too much of your time with the game to let you sit back and enjoy its successes. It certainly doesn’t help that the world and characters feel so plain that it’s hard to be interested in where you’re going or who you’re meeting, but the boss fights and their special change-ups do at least stand out as moments where the game can suddenly excite the player with something new and interesting.

Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam could have been an amazing game if it was made just a few years sooner. By 2015 though Nintendo was seemingly in the process of stripping the Paper Mario series of its identity, and the Mario & Luigi RPGs also seem to have everyone but the helpful Star Spirit Starlow trimmed out to make room for the generic characters the main games always relied on. The basic enemies and simple characters are fine for platforming and action games, but the story heavy worlds of RPGs need more depth and personality to keep you invested in their long and sometimes slow adventures. Trying to squeeze more life out of the game with minigames and Papercraft battles might have been an attempt to distract from the story failings even though they often come up short themselves, but despite its plethora of missed opportunities, Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam can at least boast about an enjoyable and diverse battle system despite so many of its other ideas falling flat.