Paper Mario: Color Splash

As I write these words, the final preparations to defend my home are being put in place: doors are being barred, windows are being covered with garlic, and precise lines of salt are being drawn in strategic places – they’ll never get me while I’m on the loo. For the truth is that Paper Mario: Color Splash is deeply influenced by the reception of the previous title, Sticker Star, which was released for the 3DS and is actually great. Did you hear that ominous hiss? That’s Pierre, the purist, coming for me, because since Sticker Star was heavily criticized for its barebones story and strange combat system, Color Splash now tries to present a more developed narrative – and is worse for it.

Color Splash begins with Mario traveling to Prism Island, where he discovers that the place and all its inhabitants had their color drained by Bowser’s minions. Luckily for Mario, his new friend, Huey, is a can of paint, so they embark on a journey to gather six special stars and return color and life to the region.

The first notable change in Color Splash, comparing it to its great predecessor (I can hear strange sounds outside in the rain, and now some furious pounding on the front door. Yes. So it begins), is the focus given to the story, which has an episodic structure. These episodes are all very distinct in nature, but while some repeat some common scenarios in the series, others prove to be far more creative and unique.

In a certain episode, for example, Mario needs to solve the mystery behind a haunted hotel. We must socialize with the staff and the guests, and solve their problems in order to deliver peace to the spirits that haunt the place. It’s not a very original set-up – even the great Sticker Star had a similar level (We cannot get out. Pierre has taken the corridor and the kitchen. We cannot get out) – but it works.

Fortunately, Color Splash also has some more imaginative sequences in store for us, such as when Mario needs to chase a Shy Guy who stole a star and, when we finally manage to catch him, the fiend simply gives up fighting and claims to regret his life choices (refrain from judging, we all get there in time. Case in point: my current situation). He promises to accompany us to the star to make up for his past actions, and the obvious ambush that follows is brilliant in the way that it plays with the series’ paper setting, turning it against Mario while, at the same time, functioning as the unexpected payoff to the strange warnings we previously saw in a nearby restaurant.

The humor in the Paper Mario games usually comes from subverting our expectations, and here it’s no different. Sometimes, it’s by breaking the fourth wall, such as when the game admits to its own narrative problems: a certain Toad is surprised that Mario wants to start a conversation with him, since he lacks any distinctive features. Sometimes, it’s the surprisingly mature tone of the dialogue that is funny:  another Toad, who is waiting in a long line, comments, “I don’t really mind waiting in long lines. Gives me time to contemplate my own mortality.” And sometimes, it’s the inadequacy of the message regarding the context that catches us off guard: there’s a poster on a secret base that says, “Your mom doesn’t work in this dungeon. Clean up after yourself.”

Despite its creativity, however, the story in Color Splash can still be quite repetitive. After all, it doesn’t matter that the locales and set-pieces are unique if the characters inhabiting and experiencing them are all one and the same: Prism Island is populated solely by Toads, and all Toads speak and behave in the same Toady way. And there are hundreds of them. Thousands. Everywhere we look, there’s a Toad, even in our dreams. And, apart from the change in color (there are blue Toads, yellow Toads, red Toads), and the thematic clothing (on a pirate ship, Toads wear a pirate hat, and in a restaurant, Toads wear a chef’s apron), as one of the Toads points out, they’re all, at the end of the day, the same Toad.

The main issue here is that Toads lack an individual personality. There’s this Toad who gives Mario a most terrible threat: “I’m gonna follow you passive-aggressively until you are mildly annoyed,” he says – and he says it very menacingly, so please be polite and shudder at the thought. This Toad is a mythical character in the story, but this dialogue could have come out of any other Toad’s mouth. In other words, his line may be funny in isolation, but similar ones are uttered by dozens of similar Toads with the same Toady personality all the time. So, if we’re still smiling at their jokes when we meet our first ten Toads in Prism Island, after talking to the eighty-sixth Toad, our dreams packed full of Toads are starting to become nightmares.

As for gameplay, Color Splash sticks with the combat system of the great Sticker Star (We still hold our bedroom, but hope is fading now. The ground shakes…), making some modifications that don’t necessarily improve it. As its name implies, the focus in Color Splash is on color, which here works as ammunition. In the great Sticker Star (The loo is up to the wall at the westside. There was a watcher already in the water. It took Big John), Mario’s attacks were tied to stickers, which were spent with each action: to perform an attack, we just had to spend the corresponding sticker. The idea is the same in Color Splash – you just need to change the term “sticker” for “card” to get how it works –, but an additional layer has been added to the system: now Mario needs to paint the cards before using them, and if the necessary color reserve is empty, his attack comes out weaker than normal.

This may make the combat system a bit more complex, as it forces us to manage our color reserves and change our strategy accordingly, but the tradeoff is that it makes the whole thing a tiresome affair. Because now three actions are required in the gamepad just for one attack to happen: we must choose the card, paint it, and then “throw” the colored card from the gamepad toward the television (we just flick it upwards and use the power of our imagination). So, at the end of the thirty-hour campaign, even the most patient of Toads will be exhausted.

Outside of battles, color is used to paint the landscape and bring the characters and the environment back to life: when drained of color, Toads don’t move or speak, for example. However, the act of hitting the first wall with our hammer to paint it is the exact same action as hitting the eighty-sixth wall: this is a static mechanic, one that never evolves or changes throughout the game. We just get to a place and hammer everything to paint it. Just like the combat, it feels like busywork. Not to mention that an unwary Toad interested in 100% of the game will have to go pixel hunting in each level in search of what is left to paint.

Another problem comes from the fact that Color Splash makes the exact same mistake that the great Sticker Star was often accused of (I have barred my bedroom door, but cannot hold him for long. I can hear hisses, hisses in the night): the arbitrariness of boss battles. Each one of these encounters needs a specific card, which represents a three-dimensional object and works as a special attack with absurd, out-of-left-field animations. The “drums” card, for example, takes our enemies to a mountain in Greece and strikes them with lightning in the rhythm of a god’s screams. However, unlike Sticker Star, which categorized the objects to give us more options during battles, and usually put the one necessary to defeat a boss in a stage close to them, here each object is unique, and the confrontations may require a card acquired several hours before.

To get around this, there’s a Toad – who else, right – in the main city who warns us about which objects we’ll need, but there are two problems in this design: having to talk to this Toad every time before leaving for a level is tiresome (a word that seems to define the game), and if the level requires the use of these unique cards to solve puzzles, the Toad will only show us the solution to these, ignoring the battle against the boss that will follow.

There are times when the game seems to rejoice in making us waste our time. Mossrock Theater, for example, is a level that contains three stars, but two of them are at the end of the same course, in the same room, making us go through the level twice without offering anything new. In the same vein, a battle against a piece of steak requires the special cards to be used in a specific order, but only warns us about this crucial detail after we have already lost the battle. Finally, that poor unwary Toad who intends to 100% the game will have to win twenty-four games of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” – a design choice as absurd and random as it is… tiresome.

At first glance, Paper Mario: Color Splash may seem like the great Sticker Star (A shadow lurks in the dark. I cannot get out) with a funnier story and some new mechanics. However, all these elements leave something to be desired, making the game more complex, yes, but also more problematic than its great predecessor (He is coming).

May 25, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on December 16, 2016.