Paper Mario: Color Splash

True to Paper Mario's great sense of humor, art, and constant series revision, it should be no surprise to longtime fans that they're in for a treat one way or another. Maybe they'd like a return to form, but for now, to anyone who skipped Sticker Star, Color Splash is worth the price of admission just to luxuriate in what has clearly been a labor of love for the Paper Mario series.

What begins as a Sticker Star 2.0 grows more confident and slowly becomes a great Paper Mario on its own. There still are some issues, but it's great that Intelligent Systems has found its right direction.

Hardcore fans of action games or tactical RPGs will probably grow bored with Color Splash pretty soon, since it’s mostly about running around and enjoying jokes. But what it lacks in terms of engaging combat, Mario more than makes up in level of detail. [Issue#214, p.62]

Color Splash sure smells like fresh paint, but such a large fresco takes some time to spread as a whole. The high definition lets Paper Mario unfold spectacular artistic and narrative fantasies, while concealing the rather flat, artificial framework. And beyond the exhilarating practice of "hammer brushing", the extensive support of cards add a layer of strategy to the gameplay, slightly heavier though. Intelligent Systems still displays a masterful use of the design palette, picking just a few drops of action, platform and RPG to create its own tone for this stupendously magnificent story.

Excellent writing, impressive visuals, and great presentation save the game from the somewhat lackluster battle system and make it a solid game that will provide fun for fans of Mario games and the Paper Mario series.

It’s a shame that despite all these positives, in the end I found the game to be a chore; my pleasure often undercut by frustration and annoyance. Where I was once delighted by its humor, I’d later find myself annoyed by it.

A dreadful combat system brings down an otherwise beautiful and funny Mario adventure.

Unlike what others say, this might be my favourite game of all time. The story is good, the gameplay is good, the game has a good difficulty, not too hard and not too easy and, geez, THE SOUNDTRACK, it's literally EVERYWHERE since it's TOO GOOD. I love this game so much.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Definitely a big step up from sticker stars but still not nearly as good as the first 3 paper mario games

While the game is funny, looks nice, and has ideas, that does NOT make up for recycling just most of Sticker Star with a fresh coat of paint. It debatably making the awful Sticker Star gameplay systems worse, how is that even possible?

the game is okay, its ruined by the battle system, a worse version of an already bad battle system from sticker star makes me actively not want to fight anything go play the old ones, this one made me pissed off playing it