Mario mashup celebrates two decades of RPG action with Nintendo’s main character

TORONTO – It’s been almost 20 years since Super Mario, the mustachioed star of some of the most beloved side-scrolling platformers of all time, made his role-playing game debut.

Nintendo teamed with all-star RPG developer Square to created “Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars,” a game that combined elements of Square’s highly successful “Final Fantasy” role-playing series with the characters, setting and even some of the action-oriented gameplay of Nintendo’s “Super Mario” games.

The game was, predictably, a hit. While Nintendo and Square (now Square Enix) never collaborated on a sequel, “Super Mario RPG” spawned two role-playing series that served as spiritual successors to Mario’s first foray into turn-based action: the “Paper Mario” games and the “Mario & Luigi” series.

Two decades later, those series come together for the first time in the Nintendo 3DS handheld title “Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam.”

For the most part, the mashup works.

“Paper Jam” is very much a “Mario & Luigi” game, where the player controls multiple players, and fights are a combination of turn-based and action combat. Paper Mario is a guest character who uses his two-dimensional morphing powers to fight alongside the 3D versions of Mario and Luigi throughout the adventure.

At the game’s start, we find out that Mario and Paper Mario actually exist in two different universes. Chaos ensues after a typical Luigi pratfall opens a rift that sucks all the characters from the paper universe into the 3D universe.

Interestingly, every character in the game seems to have a paper double except Luigi. Perhaps he is wandering the paper universe alone, like a green-clad, two-dimensional Omega Man.

With most of the characters now existing in duplicate, it stands to reason that Bowser, the main villain of Mario games, would team up (reluctantly) with his double and kidnap both versions of Princess Peach. It’s the standard Mario plot, and its well-worn nature is even called out in a humorous conversation between the captive princesses.

Paper Mario teams with Mario and Luigi to rescue the princesses and return the paper characters to their now presumably empty universe.

The combat is surprisingly deep and can be quite challenging for those not used to “Mario & Luigi” games. Each character is linked to a button on the 3DS, and while attacks are turn-based, defence comes in real time.

When a characters is attacked, the player needs to press the corresponding button with perfect timing to counter or dodge, or the character will take significant damage. Each enemy has several different types of attacks, and learning how to counter is as much trial and error as quick reflexes.

Nintendo has added help for those who are finding the fights too difficult. A player who loses a battle is given the option of restarting the fight, rather than returning to a save point and potentially losing progress. Players are also given the option to practice attacks during the fight, and later on cards which can give the heroes boosts are introduced.

If all else fails the difficulty can be set to easy mode, boosting the heroes’ attacks and helping the player with timing on combo attacks.

The combo attacks are where the player can do some serious damage. Mario and Luigi can team up to kick shells or throw fireballs at enemies, and on Paper Mario’s turn he can initiate a devastating three-way attack that invokes his paper powers, like creating a kite to crash-land onto unsuspecting foes.

Less fun are the “papercraft battles,” which are basically mech battles between giant Mario characters made out of cardboard. They are ponderous, break up the flow and feel hastily thrown in.

Some clunkiness aside, “Paper Jam” does a pretty good job of encapsulating 20 years of Mario’s RPG adventures. The trademark humour and charm of previous “Paper Mario” and “Mario & Luigi” games hasn’t faded over the years, and the deep combat and on-point boss battles meet the standard of quality gamers have come to expect from any title featuring Nintendo’s intrepid plumbers.