Few games have received such prerelease backlash as Paper Mario: Color Splash. Upon witnessing its reveal trailer earlier this year, it became obvious that the game would continue the controversial reduction of RPG elements to help differentiate the series from the Mario and Luigi handheld games. As Nintendo made clear in interviews earlier this year, they view the M&L franchise as the RPG branch of the Mario series—the closest successor to the highly-acclaimed Super Mario RPG from the 1990s era—and Paper Mario more as a puzzle-oriented game with lots of humor.
While there’s plenty of grounds for such disappointment among the fanbase—why not just allow two separate Mario RPG series to exist?—this cacophony of criticism has distracted from the ultimate question: is Paper Mario: Color Splash still a good game in spite of this?
Color Splash starts off quite unlike any other game in the series. There’s a dramatic, cinematic opening featuring a mysterious mailing of a folded-up Toad (remember, everyone’s made of paper) to Mario—and so Mario and Peach set off on a treacherous journey across the sea to Port Prisma, a bustling city known for its colorful six-color paint fountain (the most colorful in the world!). When they arrive, however, they encounter a dried out, gray fountain surrounded by a town with splotches of color missing and its people immobilized, also drained of their color (and thus their life). Mario encounters a floating paint can character named Huey who advises him on how to use his paint hammer to restore color to these unfortunate individuals and missing spots across the landscapes—and so the adventure begins.
As you explore, you’ll be doing just that: stopping frequently to hit things with your hammer—using the X button—to restore color to the when needed. Since using your paint hammer requires various amounts of paint, this action is separate from the regular hammer hit, which can still be performed by pressing B. Your paint reserves are comprised of the three primary colors—Red, Blue, and Yellow—and if any one of them gets low, you can always replenish it by hammering correspondingly-colored inanimate objects around the world (flowers, window shutters, rocks, sand dunes, and so on). It’s really pretty effortless to repaint these items in this fashion, and it’s not often that you’ll run out of paint as a result (occasionally battles can place you in that predicament, but we’ll get to those in a bit). In fact, it’s even a bit satisfying to do so, as each time you fill in a spot, coins, paint, and items spew out of it for the taking.
Although the concept is simple, this missing paint mechanic is used to great effect throughout the course of the adventure. You see, objects won’t function unless they’re fully painted. Doors won’t open, machines won’t function, and pipes won’t allow Mario to pass. There’s even a portion of the game where a ship is trapped in place because some of the surrounding water has been drained of its color.
All of this chaos was introduced by none other than—take a guess—Bowser (“this is completely unexpected!” proclaims one Toad), who has been experimenting with the paints and has found that draping himself in black paint makes him terribly powerful and super evil. He unleashes his Koopa Kids on the unsuspecting Prisma residents, and Mario will have to take each one of them down in his quest for the six Big Paint Stars. Bowser’s minions—Shy Guys wielding straws—roam the lands, sucking up the color out of both people (mostly Toads naturally) and walls, floors, and so on. (As one traumatized Toad, who can no longer stand the sight of a drinking straw in his café, puts it: “I can’t outlaw straws, because then only outlaws will have straws.”)
And the game is truly filled with that sort of humor. Of course, this has long been a hallmark of Paper Mario games—and Super Paper Mario, for all its deficiencies, was probably the funniest one to date—but Color Splash does a terrific job with its humor. Dialogue is laden with colloquialisms, pop culture references, stupid puns, (harmless) political jokes, and all sorts of other ridiculous fare which rarely makes its way into an all-ages game—much less a mainstream one. I found myself laughing audibly more frequently than I can recall with most any other game to date. There’s also an extremely heavy dose of nostalgia laced throughout the various facets of the adventure, including at least a couple of full-blown tributes to beloved games of the past.
But aside from all this, let’s get back to the gameplay. The biggest concern surrounding Color Splash, again, has been its departure from the role-playing mechanics which fans loved about the original Super Mario RPG (to which the Paper Mario series was originally intended to stand as a sequel). Color Splash improves slightly in this area over its frequently maligned 3DS predecessor Sticker Star—but it’s still lacking any sort of traditional RPG level-gaining and character progression. The only benefit granted to you for participating in a battle is a small coin reward, paint hammer items which slowly increase the total capacity of paint you can store (which is somewhat like gaining a level I suppose), and finally, occasionally a battle card specific to the enemy you defeated.
Regarding that last item, the introduction of battle cards does vastly improve upon the battle experience, however. Unlike in previous games, where players simply selected an attack, Color Splash actually supplies the player with a deck of up to 99 cards, each of which represents a particular action. Hammers of all sizes exist, along with KO Hammers, Eek Hammers, Hurlhammers, Fire Hammers, and more. The same goes for boots (for jumping), Fire/Ice Flowers, Pow Blocks, Raccoon Tails, Frog Suits—there are a lot of attack cards. Some of these arrive fully-painted, whereas others are in black-and-white and must first be painted to realize their full potential. You have the option of painting the cards as little or as much as you like before using them in battle. The use of each attack also is augmented by well-timed action commands—again, a staple of the Paper Mario series—so there’s more skill required in battles than simply selecting commands from a menu and sitting back to watch the action.
Collection of enemy cards for use in battle or for donation to the museum is a fun distraction, though ultimately, they’re sadly not all that useful in most cases, so the incentive is fairly dull. This means that, in the end, the only real incentive to fight a battle is to make a slight bit of progress toward the next paint reserves expansion bump, which is a nice bonus, but which hardly feels sufficient in terms of progression. With many of the late-game enemies becoming increasingly annoying, this means that more often than not you’ll be taking great pains to avoid enemies entirely, and even when you encounter them, you’re likely to attempt to Flee the battle (which is successful roughly half the time). I found myself fleeing a lot as I got deeper into the adventure, something which I felt was rather disappointing. Ultimately, in spite of Nintendo’s concerns regarding franchise differentiation, Color Splash would have been better with more traditional RPG elements intact—even if they still chose to omit the beloved Badges system and partners of the previous games. It’s really just a matter of incentive, and there simply isn’t enough incentive for the player to willfully participate in some of the more irritating battles along the way.
Regardless, however—and this is key—it’s still fun. That’s primarily a factor of its presentation, humor, and lack of predictability. The adventure is huge. Progression is a bit different, but by some accounts, it’s better. Rather than trekking through endless interwoven environments to reach your destination, the various environments are tied together via a simple world map, similar to that of Super Mario World. Each level has between one and three Paint Stars to collect, and each one opens a new path (often to a new area). Don’t be fooled—there is little to no nonlinearity in play; everything takes place in sequence and as a part of the story, as is always the case in these games (and most RPGs for that matter). But the implementation of a World Map of sorts does provide a helpful visual diagram to keep things in perspective, and it makes revisiting areas you’ve previously seen (something which you will do quite often to explore new regions within) painless and quick.
I mentioned presentation above also, so it must also be said: Color Splash features a frequently excellent soundtrack. There are some tunes which are overused and/or a bit grating, but for the most part, the composition is well-done and just about everything is recorded with live instrumentation. The styles range from classical, to folk music, to blues guitar, to bluegrass, to jazz. It’s totally hummable and sometimes dangerously infectious. Probably my personal favorites from my time with the game were the Port Prisma theme (which evolves as you visit different stores and locations), the World Map theme (which builds as you progress through the game with different lead instruments), and the main Ruddy Road theme (which is more or less a variation on the classic Mario theme music, heavily embellished upon).
Getting stuck is never fun, either, and Sticker Star was heavily criticized for its illogical and frustrating use of Things—items collected from the environment with very specific uses—something which made determining where to go next and what items to take with you quite annoying. Color Splash once again incorporates Things into the game, but this time, it provides plenty of hints to help the player determine what they’ll need. A particular toad in the town, for instance, straight up tells you what you will need next and roughly where to find it (something I never had problems with personally), and during boss battles, if you happen to die, you’ll receive heavy hints from your companion Huey during your second attempt—since, again, Things can also be used during battle against enemies. Huey can also be summoned at any point, and he’ll usually tell you whether or not you even need to bother looking around in the area you’re in. He’ll often say something to the effect of “There’s really nothing more we can do here at the moment,” which is incredibly useful when you don’t want to waste your time roaming around in search of the next place you need to be.
Color Splash also once again leverages environmental manipulation themes with the introduction of cutouts, which are essentially geometrically obvious areas in the environment that can be “cut out” to either provide Mario access to otherwise impossible to reach areas or to provide the opportunity to use a Thing to interact with them. When I say that they’re “geometrically obvious”, what I mean is that generally it’s possible to insinuate their presence thanks to the fact that elements of the background tend to conveniently line up where they exist—and usually the game camera conspicuously changes to accommodate that. It’s a unique idea which is sometimes intelligently exploited and other times can feel a little cheap. Fortunately, for those latter situations, Huey can provide fairly no-nonsense hints about where to look.
Ultimately, what we’ve covered here today in this review is a solid overview of what you can expect from Color Splash—but in truth, the game’s greatest asset is perhaps its willingness and conscious efforts to continually surprise the player. It saves some of its best moments for late game, and honestly, absent the aforementioned RPG elements which so many fans claim to miss, the best incentive to progress is to see what transpires next. Not necessarily in the story (or half-plot, if you will), but rather, in terms of ideas, environments, musical score, and humor. In this respect, Color Splash is a wholly lighthearted experience, even if it occasionally toys with the player (as all previous Paper Mario games have enjoyed doing) and the trials it sets forth for them.
For all its prerelease criticism—some of which is certainly substantial and should be acknowledged—it actually may have emerged the most accessible and least irritating game of the series to date as a result of its trimmings. Most substantial in this respect is its removal of long-winded hub areas which must be constantly retraversed, now exchanged for a simple and easy-to-navigate map linking all of the game’s disparate areas. And although some of the game’s areas and scenarios provide chore-like challenges, there is usually enough humor and balance to offset any truly negative effects of this approach. And while I’m likely to sustain some criticism of my own for suggesting this next point, the lack of managing equipment and grinding to improve stats is in this way perhaps appreciated, as it removes yet one more barrier to simply enjoying the experience in front of you. There’s no slogging through menus or wondering whether you’ve fought enough battles to tackle the next task at hand: instead, it’s solve puzzles, progress, enjoy. Yes, it’s a different game from Thousand-Year Door and Super Mario RPG, but that doesn’t make it any less of an experience.
