So for the sake of having something completely different and not retreading old ground, Miyamoto rejected a potential Paper Mario RPG for the 3DS. He also said that when he played the prototype which featured partners, he was disappointed that it “felt like a port of Thousand Year Door.”
Posted by Asad_Farooqui
9 Comments
Miyamoto is just too old and out of touch. Bless him for creating the series we love but he needs to step down
I’m firmly of the belief that all the issues fans have with modern Paper Mario is the fault of Miyamoto. Love his work, but things like this or the genericization of all the characters are directly tied to him.
The games have gotten better since sticker star. The writing is still great. It’s just the gameplay loop that isn’t there. Miyamoto seems to be stubborn as a mule.
Rare miss from Miyamoto. A port of Thousand Year Door is close to what I wanted Sticker Star to be. Instead, what we got is, in my opinion, the single worst first party Nintendo game ever released.
I thought that’s was a very well known fact. Everybody knows that Miyamoto pushed for some Mario games to be more simplistic.
No he didn’t. Miyamoto never said “get rid of partners” or “don’t make it an RPG” he simply believed Paper mario 3DS didn’t do enough to seperate itself from TTYD. Tanabe was the one who decided to abandon the entire concept of an RPG and partners, Miyamoto straight up told Tanabe Sticker Star was boring.
From the same interview:
Aoyama: After E3, Miyamoto-san played the prototype and said it was just a port of the GC version.
Tanabe: **I had heard that at first Miyamoto-san said that something like an RPG would be fine, so for a while I thought that something like the previous one would be fine.**
Iwata: **That must have meant that you hadn’t done much that was new.**
Tanabe: Right. So we wondered what to do. Then the idea of using stickers came up. Originally, the plan was to use stickers here and there for solving puzzles on the overall map and so forth, but then we thought, “If we’re gonna do that, then we might as well use stickers for the whole thing, including battles,” and we decided to begin rethinking the game mechanics.
Tanabe: Just about that time, I wanted someone who could write good text, and I couldn’t always be on site, so I was looking for someone who could be present to make calls on detailed matters. Kudo-san was perfect for that, and we had a past connection through IS, so I asked him if he could take a spot in development. I thought it was going too far to ask another company’s president to come in as a staff member on a project I was in charge of, but Kudo-san consented. Then about spring of 2011, we had Miyamoto-san look at a prototype.
Iwata: Uh-huh. How was it?
Tanabe: Personally, I thought it was better than before, but it turned out to be no good.
Aoyama: **He** (Miyamoto) said it was boring. I remember that clearly.
Tanabe: That’s right. At first, we were making a lot of individual allies as in a regular RPG, but when we decided to focus on stickers, in order to make a clear change with previous games in the series, it was like we started all over again by throwing out the system—including those characters—that we had made up to that point.
Iwata: You purposefully threw out the basic RPG structure.
Tanabe: Yes. We decided to make it so that players would face stronger opponents by throwing out the whole concept of experience points and levels in favor of gradually gathering stronger stickers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170105044040/https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/papermario/0/1
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There’s definitely some flaws with the Partner system that most people overlook.
For starters, the episodic nature of the games means that despite the fact that the majority of partners are omnipresent after the chapter that focuses on them, there is nothing for them to do after their introductory chapter, outside of solving a few puzzles or maybe a small bit of dialogue for someone like Vivian.
Madam Flurry? Koops? Yoshi? Too bad. They get sidelined for the vast majority of the game. They have no further arc. They are done. They just exist and that’s it. Their only dialogue is cookie cutter to fit into a scene in case they happen to be your active partner at a given time.
This unfortunately affects the rest of the game, IMO. What’s the point of having these partners if they don’t really grow with the character and are just…there?
It definitely causes a damper story wise too. Everyone hammers on about how great the story is (despite the episodic nature removing much of the arc-aspect, and it’s really just a series of unrelated episodes with addendums that add SOME level of overall context.) So, players want this amazing story, but also don’t realize that wanting the partner system as is doesn’t really help the writers with writing characters if they can’t have arcs that span the whole game.
The rest of the games have an omnipresent character like Olivia that are always there and have an arc that lives through the game. That’s how the writers are able to tell the stories they want, and not be burdened down by a gameplay mechanic.
Like, fans want their cake, and to eat it to. They won’t acknowledge the flaws of some games because they simply “aren’t there” or something.
Look, there’s other problems with the series. But, the partner system has flaws that are paradoxically linked to the story.
Here we go again with the misinformation. Paper Mario fans continue to be the worst even when they get what they want.
I always thought that Miyamoto was the one changing Paper Mario concept after TTYD. Tanabe is the guilty one.