Never have I played a game so irresistibly charming that tries its damnedest to be mediocre. Paper Mario: Color Splash may be a better game than Sticker Star but it fails to learn nearly half of the lessons it should have. Every step forwards is proceeded by a baffling stumble backwards, punishing you every time you start to have fun. I don't fault anyone for being lured in by Color Splash's gorgeous visuals and toe-tappingly phenomenal music, but player beware: beneath the captivating aesthetic is the same exact crummy design document that sunk Sticker Star like a stone lobbed into a lake.
Or rather—a rock, eh? Eh?!!! Get it?!!!!!!
Lord almighty do I loathe Paper Mario: Color Splash's obsession with rock paper scissors. Anyone that's played the game knows what I'm talking about—and likely feels the same. The best way to earn coins in Color Splash is to enter into one of the eight (!!!) rock paper scissors tournaments that pop up on the world map. Blatant hints are provided to assist you in the first two battles, but you're on your own for the third—and as the game progresses, the hints grow vaguer, culminating in a tournament that's entirely dependent on chance. Gone is any semblance of strategy; you either know the outcome of a match before it starts, or are helplessly beholden to a random roll. Does that sound fun?
Because it's not. The first tournament is entertaining in a kitschy way (given how seriously it's presented), but the novelty wears off quickly. I avoided the Roshambo temples after conquering the first two, but restocking my arsenal later on got so expensive that I'd be a fool not to do them—a single tournament can shower you in thousands of coins. Plus, seeing as a goddamn minigame quiz show was mandatory for progression, I assumed the Roshambo temples were as well. Only at the gates of final level did I say "screw it", ready to incur the wrath of an impossible boss fight as long as it meant I could maybe skip playing rock paper scissors for the 50th time.
For those familiar with Sticker Star, you're likely to notice two big red flags from that last paragraph: the need to restock and being unaware of what's mandatory for progression. Color Splash thankfully improves on its predecessor in both categories... but I wouldn't call either of those problems "fixed." Attacks continue to be consumable resources but they're cards now instead of stickers, meaning you won't have to deal with gigantic adhesives clogging up your inventory space. And in the main hub is a handy toad that'll clue you into what Thing you need next, avoiding the urge to keep a walkthrough open at all times. Buuut you'll continue to fiddle with deck management more than you should (largely from wanting to retain stronger cards for boss fights), as well as repeatedly backtracking to Port Prisma to check if you have the right Thing or not. Intelligent Systems keenly demonstrates that acknowledging a problem is not quite the same as addressing it.
In regard to boss fights, Color Splash likewise makes a minor improvement. What were once one-note fights (er, one-sticker fights) have transformed into actual battles that require proper healing and paint management. That is, until a specific event happens and you're forced to use the Thing that beats the boss—or face annihilation. Again the root problem is sidestepped, transforming "fights where a Thing trivializes a battle" into "fights where a Thing is mandatory for victory." And I mean mandatory—bosses are literally impossible to beat without their weakness! I would've readily taken reduced damage, or a penalizing status effect, or a difficult-to-dodge mega-attack over the brick wall that is invulnerability. It's a shame too because besides that prickly point, most of the boss fights are clever and fun (Wendy, Roy); the final boss in particular is a great duel, solely because no one particular card is required to beat it.
Another aspect Color Splash aims to improve but eventually bungles is its world map. Zones in Sticker Star were quarantined off like blobs of paint on a palette, locking you into exploring them one at a time. Color Splash mixes this up, adding multiple exits to every stage so that paths encircle the entire island. It starts off promising enough, feeling like a nonlinear adventure where you can solve things out of order, but the freedom is fleeting—you'll soon noticed that zones are still quarantined off, blocking you from making progress unless you tackle stages in the right order. This is especially apparently halfway through the game, where you're yet again traversing through stages in a boring linear fashion, with any secret exits tacked on in the most half-assed, shiftless way (Mossrock Theater).
Yet another problem Color Splash kicks further down the road is its random encounters—more specifically, making them meaningful. In Sticker Star, there's really no reason to fight enemies when you're armed with full health and stickers. However in Color Splash, battling will occasionally increase the maximum amount of paint you can hold, which is (sadly) as close to the concept of "levelling up" as the game gets. But after the first handful of expansions, upgrading your paint bucket hardly provides a benefit—the last few increases I got were a paltry 3% each. While paint is valuable early on, helping transform blank cards into better cards, powerful attacks eventually require so much paint that a single turn can deplete most of your chromatic stock. Therefore it's often better to stock up on paint-refilling green mushrooms and simply avoid battles—rendering the fights as superfluous as they were in Sticker Star.
But hey—at least Sticker Star gave numerical feedback for its battles!
Whoever thought it was a good idea to nix the damage numbers in Color Splash is a categorical fool. Depriving an RPG of such key information sends the player spiraling into an abyss of increasing uncertainty: does a hammer do as much damage as a jump? Does a fully painted jump do as much damage as an unpainted big jump? What about three half-painted hammers compared to a quarter-painted huge hurlhammer? A fire flower to an ice flower? A fire extinguisher to a lemon? Even when you manage to grasp one card's strength relative to another, you're still holding on to a formless adjudication that can never be tallied. Without a baseline of data to help determine the proper card for the situation, you'll just choose whatever card feels right.
But it's not like Color Splash requires a serious level of planning anyway. The gameplay here doesn't fare any better or worse than Sticker Star, as both suffer deeply from a simplified and recycled bestiary. Most of the fights boil down to "what attacks don't I want to waste," given that most of the enemies are a droll variation of one another. Maybe the shy guy will have a straw sticking out of his gob, or a crease across his middle, or a cardboard shield—all you really have to pay attention to is whether you should jump or hammer them. If that doesn't sound all that exciting, it's because it's not; the enemy gimmicks are mildly entertaining for the first encounter, but fail to distract from the fact that you're fighting the same overused archetypes over and over, attacks and health pools all vaguely blending together.
Color Splash's pathetic bestiary unfortunately extends over to its NPCs as well, seeing how Prism Island is home to a cabal of low-effort NFT Toads. Occasionally they'll wear a little hat, or a different colored vest, or maybe even some sunglasses—but they're all the same, bland, neutered creature in the end. Ironically a good chunk of them possess distinct personalities (the captain, the foreman, the bridge-loving toads), showing that Intelligent Systems (or at least the translation team) still yearn to tell stories. It's just a shame that the game has sterilized of any sort of visual whimsy—a problem which similarly plagued Sticker Star. But hey, at least the Koopa Kids are back this time!... again! A first for a Mario RPG Paper Mario game!
I do apologize for the unending comparisons to Sticker Star, but it's honestly hard to analyze Color Splash independent of the flawed ancestor it shares so much DNA with. I honestly feel that Color Splash is the better of the two, largely thanks to its crisp visuals, witty writing, and alarming creativity. Jokes land successfully more often than they don't, and there's a lot of fantastic paper-craft gags that reveal a stunning attention to detail. Plus I could gush about the music all day, about how it majestically evokes the chromatic tone of each colored star's episode perfectly, culminating in an energized boss theme which utilizes each episode's motif. I'd even go as far as to say that Color Splash is an aesthetic masterpiece, blowing the first three Paper Mario games out of the water...
... It's just that when it comes to the gameplay, everything comes tumbling down like a house of cards.
Just like Sticker Star.
Diehard Wii U fans may rightfully gush over Paper Mario: Color Splash's vibrant art style and charming script—but I'm unable to call it a good game, given the encyclopedic tome of annoyances and missteps. Every controllable aspect of the game is glaringly flawed—and I didn't even touch on how pointless the shy bandit is, or how annoying Kamek is, or the unforgivably stupid decision to make ally cards flee in boss fights! Those are the encounters where you need allies the most! If this blog post comes off as more negative than the one I wrote for Sticker Star, chalk it up to growing older, writing more honestly, or just a bur in my boot; the important takeaway is that neither game holds a candle to the Paper Marios of old. I mean, is there anyone that even prefers the rudderless direction the series is taking?
Worst of all is that Color Splash isn't just bad—it's bad in spite of its good parts, smothering whatever redeeming qualities it had in boneheaded decisions. It's a meticulously-crafted still life caked in dirt, a twinkling star strangled by needless smog.
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Images obtained from: nintendo.com, geekdad.com, theyoungfolks.com, expertreviews.co.uk, mariowiki.com
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