A couple of nights ago I was taking bedtime dabs (gubby says I can take my medicine) and got nostalgic for Paper Mario 64. I really liked that game as a kid - all of my friends missed it because it was on the tail end of the n64's life cycle, but I got so into it that I had the *good* strategy guide. My 11-year-old ass had gamefaqs printouts. In notepad, I made my own little cheat sheets for the recipes, little maps... things like that. So when I got back inside, I got it set up.
And here I am, still playing it a couple of days later. It's nowhere near as big or deep as Super Mario RPG for SNES (underappreciated,) but man is it charming with lots of unique characters and places. The RPG systems are somewhat simple, but rewarding. The action system was pretty revolutionary for its time. As far as turn-based action goes, it's actually really fun and satisfying. There are all kinds of different moves with different button sequences to get extra phases, damage, and effects. Some come from equipment, while countless others come from badges. The badge system adds a lot of versatility to your combat, kind of like spells but instead Mario gets different attacks with different actions to time. So many to collect as you go, creatively pair them up and you find there's an actual meta to it. I didn't get it as a kid. The badges are where the real RPG guts are. You can basically make Mario run a range of different builds based on his badge rollout. You can have glass canons and tanks - you can go really deep into a low hp buff and move set. You can emphasize damage with different types of attacks, add multi-target capability, so on. That's a cool element for this kind of RPG. It is a little simpler than Japanese SNES RPGs a little before it, but in those, your builds are more grindy and rigid. In Paper Mario, your base level just determines the overall limits of how strong and capable mario can be. You can choose to add HP, FP(for special moves,) and badge points. Personally, I prioritize the latter two, but the point is that leveling is just about base stats. You spec in and out of builds dynamically with the badges. Once you get a lot of of BP and FP, it gets surprisingly deep.
You also have out of combat moves that can be used not only for traversal, but to initiate combat as well. Each party member has their own move. The party system is yet another element that spices it up. You have party members that you acquire along the way, of which you can have one at a time walk/fight with you, switching on the fly. They don't really have hp like you do, and the rare times they do take damage, it takes them out of the fight for x amount of turns. But they all have different moves with different strategic advantages and drawbacks. There are also the star powers. Along the way you rescue 7 star spirits, each of which give you either an excellent support move or a pinch-hitter attack of some sort, each one taking it's share of a bar that grows with each spirit you rescue and charges either passively, or by using a turn to boost it up more. There is a badge that adds to the passive charging, and another for the active.
It's all very fun and intuitive to just pick up and get into. You gotta love that art style too. This one and The Thousand Year Door are my favorites in the series. From there, it gets pretty mixed on the execution for me. These just have so much character, and they're fun games to just kick back and play. Laid back old school JRPG adventure in a different package. A a nice tight package, mind you. TTYOD took everything good about it and expanded it. They made good use of the gamecube's abilities to make a much bigger, meatier Paper Mario and that too would be a tough one to emulate for years. That and Windwaker were the dream.
I will also say... emulating this game is a breeze nowadays. Project64 is basically good to go out of the packed exe.
Back around 2010, Paper Mario was notoriously hard to emulate. I tried but it often ran and looked terrible, with lots of rendering problems. It took me weeks of digging around for different versions of different video plugins, addons to those plugins, the right version of the right emulator that would behave how that game liked, and the right esoteric settings to enable/disable. I did eventually get it running decently well. But now the version of GLideN64 that it comes with gets the video more or less perfect, with a lot of decent texture enhancement like brz and hq4x. You can upscale the rendering resolution to get much better outlines at increased resolutions. I've got it at like 10x to do 960x720 with hq4x on top and I'd say it looks pretty decent. Obvious inaccuracy but everything generally looks clean. It runs flawlessly to begin with, but has a lot of useful settings and general power over rendering methods. It already has HLE support for more performance and capability range. I grabbed Azimer Audio to have HLE audio as well. Force interpreter. The RSP PJ64 comes with isn't really configurable, but in the app settings, you can influence it and it is a good stable RSP. With that, HLE plugins just make sense. The input plugin it came with has excellent controller support and I had my 360 controller set up in under a minute. It lets you map sticks/pads to the c-buttons, d-pad, and analog stick wholesale. It's all just so easy now, man.
On the hardest ofc.
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