Mario is the master of the mash-up and the spin off. Whether it’s kart racing, sports, brawling or any number of other things, the world of Mario has been combined with them all in one way or another. Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam might just be the first time that he’s been mashed up with, well… himself.
You see, it turns out that the world of Paper Mario actually exists alongside that of regular Mario, and when Luigi accidentally knocks over the book of the Paper Mushroom Kingdom, all of its denizens tumble out and into the 3D world. Though you’d expect that 3D Bowser would be able to take Paper Bowser in a fight, they actually brawl to a stalemate before deciding to team up and try to take over the world.
Naturally, the good guys team up to stop this, with regular RPG duo Mario & Luigi adding Paper Mario to their ranks – Paper Luigi, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen. With four games already under their belt since Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga first appeared on the Game Boy Advance, the gameplay here will be instantly familiar to anyone that’s played the series before.
It’s a classic case of follow the leader in the overworld, as Luigi and Paper Mario stick closely behind Mario as you run around, avoiding or running into the enemies that patrol and heading into battle as a consequence. However, the neat little gameplay hook within Mario & Luigi games has always been that they jump independently of one another, so that you have to first tap A then B in quick succession to leap both characters up to the next platform. With a third character in tow, there’s a third button to add to the mix each time, and just that simple pleasure of being able to smoothly navigate around the world.
The exact same can be said of the combat, which effectively just adds a third character to your team. When initiating an attack, there’s the familiar one-two punch of tapping to attack and then tapping the character’s button a second time at the point of impact to get bonus damage. Except that Paper Mario has more than a few tricks up his sleeve.
Within the game world, as you’re hunting around for the frightened Toads, he can squeeze through tiny gaps that his rather more portly counterpart can’t. Finding those Toads can actually be fiendishly difficult, as they’re particularly well hidden or require you to unlock a new ability in order to chase them down quickly enough.
In battle, just as the paper Koopas who come at you split themselves into multiple copies as they attack you – giving you the opportunity to jump to dodge and even deal damage – Paper Mario can make many copies of himself, so he can bop enemies on the head with lots of rapid hammer hits.
Special attacks see him constructing a huge papercraft hammer out of corrugated cardboard with which the three brothers can smash enemies and transport you to a damage-dealing mini-game. It might be a little game of squash, in which you tap each character’s respective button as the ball bounces back and forth between them, dealing damage as it hits the flattened enemies pasted to the wall, or Mario and Luigi could be tasked with throwing paper shuriken Marios at their foes as they float down from the top of the screen.
The Papercraft Battle mode takes this mash up to another level. Our three heroes stand atop a huge papercraft Mario facsimile, carried by a group of Toads underneath, and charges into battle with an assortment of similarly gigantic enemies. After charging up the power meter with a rhythm-based charge pad, you make use of suitably ungainly controls to dodge incoming attacks, charge into and knock over papercraft Goombas, before stomping on them.
It is quite unashamed madness, but it also feels like it could wear a little thin after a while, and I was already thinking to myself that I’d rather be taking the trio of heroes back to fight the forces of two Bowsers by the time a boss character appeared. Paper Mario’s addition to the Mario & Luigi team is really a rather simple one, when you think about it, and about as straightforward a mash-up as I can imagine. Yet it has that little spark of ingenuity that ought to put a smile on any fan’s face.