But these are for players TRYING to break the game. Now, sure, there are badges in TTYD that, if used as cheats, can give you massive attack power, allowing you to power through the final fights. You feel like you are Mario, tired, wanting to stop, but you can’t… because Peach and the fate of the world depends on it. She has 150 HP, attacks multiple times, and can restore her health easily. In TTYD, Shadow Queen is legitimately time-consuming and difficult. The Paper Mario series often gets flack for a somewhat minimal difficulty curve, but at least some of the later chapters in the earlier games take strategy and time. So… basically… the cutscene that reveals the villain is longer than the final fight against the villain. And you can literally defeat him using Bowser in less than two minutes without breaking a sweat. Dimentio, at this point, has been built up as a master villain, and has just spent a 2-3 minute cutscene revealing his plan gloriously and setting you up for a grand climax ( with one of the greatest Mario villain songs put to reality). This is most grating during the final boss fight. Most importantly with this game, however, Count Bleck’s backstory is teased out emergently in text interludes between chapters, and you eventually learn that he was a member of an ancient race, the Tribe of Darkness, who fell in love with a girl, Timpani, and when his father refused their union and erased her from their world, Count Bleck turned to hate, destroyed his race, and eventually used the hate to precipitate the universe’s destruction.īut especially, it becomes increasingly frustrating when a boss fight gets built up for hours and then, with a couple of nifty bounces (or using Bowser, who does 2x damage, as your main attacker), said boss is defeated in less than a minute. Like Grodus, you begin to genuinely fear him, but are also mesmerized by his presence. But behind his words, you can feel his manipulation and the joy he feels in tricking everyone around him. Every time he is on screen, he oozes charisma and the feeling that he is having fun with everything he is doing. In the final chapter, it is teased that members of your party (starting with Bowser, Peach, then Luigi) sacrifice themselves for Mario to continue (though they eventually survive and return in the tick of time to fight Count Bleck).įinally, just as you defeat Count Bleck, the de facto main villain, the TRUE Villain, Dimentio, reveals himself having manipulated everyone to take control of the Void and remake the world in his image.ĭimentio himself is a fascinating character. At one point we actually see a world destroyed by the Void and reduced to nothingness, which might be the darkest moment of the entire Mario canon. The story is about a LITERAL VOID (called the Void) that is opened up by the game’s main villain, Count Bleck, that threatens to destroy all universes and you have to collect all of the Pure Hearts in order to counter the Chaos Heart, which is powering the Void, and thus save all worlds. Because, on a pure story and plot basis, the main narrative is arguably more powerful than TTYD’s. This is the most obvious counter-example. It is the greatest interconnected, complex, thematic Mario narrative.īasically, TTYD takes Mario characters + Mario structure + RPG Mario mechanics and builds on it.īut what about other Mario games? I just recently played the most recent Mario title, Super Mario Odyssey, for the first time, and its narrative is not nearly as strong as TTYD’s, but other Mario games and other Mario RPGs over the years have come close. dark, and reinforces all of it through its mechanics and characters. The bottom line is that, for me, TTYD is the greatest Mario story ever told, which builds off of its IP’s rich history, combines it with iconic archetypes of light vs. For more details about my thoughts on TTYD, please read this original post. This is an expanded section that was a part of my original post on Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (TTYD).
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