Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-31549837-20200115185054/@comment-31549837-20200626145741

Trust me 71, as a big fan of the Mario RPGs, I’ve heard what your saying plenty of times by now. And what your saying primarily applies to Paper Mario.

It’s true Miyamoto got his hands involved starting with Sticker Star, got rid of all the original stuff, and they continued to follow his word with Color Splash. Will his word continue to be followed for Origami King? Probably. At least it’s looking to have both an original side hero AND main villain.

I’ve even heard how apparently they did a poll on Super Paper Mario that would effect Sticker Star, and not 1% of those people said they liked the story. The problem... they took Club Nintendo survey results for it. And if you remember most people would just put in random stuff for most games to get points from them as quickly as possible.

While Miyamoto‘s philosophy on this stuff definitely effected Paper Mario, Mario & Luigi is a bit of a different story. Dream Team obviously has plenty of original stuff and was released after Sticker Star. And with the last new game Paper Jam, the reason given for its lack of original characters is because the story ended up getting too complex, so they got rid of a lot of that to simplify it to give focus to the crossover element of the game.

Then with the M&L remakes, obviously original stuff was kept for the main stories, but while the Superstar Saga remake didn’t give us anyone truly new besides the enemy captains, the Bowser’s Inside Story remake gave us three completely original characters in the form of the Best Fitness Friends. On top of the story for Bowser Jr.’s Journey being very original and surprisingly a little dark with strong character development for Bowser Jr.

And while your quote for the Color Splash interview 100% applies to what your saying, the Super Mario RPG quote... not so much. It’s not referring to a lack of original stuff, it’s about what types of weapons should have been used to keep with the Mario Universe. Square thought about a sword and horse, while Miyamoto wanted stuff like a hammer which better fit the world. They actually decided by telling the crowd at the games reveal to cheer for what they wanted, and there was way more cheer for traditional Mario stuff like hammers. Watch this video if you want to see this stuff visualized.

But... this whole topic about the Mario RPGs losing original stuff overtime... that wasn’t what I was talking about to begin with. It was simply about why don’t characters from the Mario RPGs appear in other Mario spin-offs like Mario Tennis, Mario Party, Mario Golf, and Mario Kart.

The most annoying part is that we have seen a few RPG characters get this special treatment. Specifically the Goomba King and the Star Spirits. There’s even been a few smaller cases like Whacka getting a cameo in Mario Party 6 (funny enough all the characters lucky enough to reappear come from the first Paper Mario game).

I guess in the case of Dr. Mario World, the game that started this whole discussion. Come on, Dr. Toadley would be perfect for that game, you can’t deny that.

Even if you want to argue that these cases were before Sticker Star came out, well Smash Bros has had no problem referencing the original characters as trophies or spirits.

I’ve heard plenty of conspiracy theories as to why this is over the years, like maybe Intelligent Systems and AlphaDream have some part ownership over the characters they made (which doesn’t make a whole lotta sense). But I guess your idea of Miyamoto‘s control makes the most sense. Either the studios behind these other spin-offs don’t really care, or Miyamoto is going up to them and saying “No, you can’t put Fawful in my Mario Tennis. He’s tOo orIginaLLLL!... But Fire Piranha Plant heck yeah go right ahead.”

I’ve spent too long discussing this again, but to end it off, it’s funny how Geno, a character Nintendo doesn’t even have full ownership of, is more likely to get playable in Smash at the moment, then anyone from Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi is at getting into another Mario spin-off.