5/5 ★ – DoseofLux's review of Paper Mario: Color Splash.

You know what? I've had it. I've just had it. Five stars. Yep. Five. Stars. You want to know why? Because this game is such a masterpiece. A wonderful, epic, diverse masterpiece with a sealed title of being the most underrated game I have ever played! Do you have any idea how unfair everybody is being with this game? There are SO many complaints that aren't justified just because of emotional ties. For example, people seem to complain about the battle system being so slow and repetitive. Well, has anybody ever thought of using some of the game's features to make it easier? The term is called "Quality of Life" for a REASON. There's an entire battle system mode that merges the card selection and painting steps as one, shortening the process and giving a more flexible feeling when setting up a move. And as if that's not enough, there's also a button accessible at ANY TIME that automatically sorts the cards in a specific order so you can mentally visualise the order and reach the cards you want to use. Essentially taking the Sticker Star combat system, and easing its way into becoming far more enjoyable. Oh, and if you give me the "No EXP" excuse, nice try! You DO actually level up paint storage, which counts as mana capacity due to how much strength you give to your cards. The locations you get around to are also great! You seriously travel to a Coliseum, a forest with not only a giant theme, but a miniature theme as well, an ocean with a parallel world filled with Dry Bones and Boos, a road that gets rolled up, a haunted hotel/river park, a troubled train ride and into a giant monitor, and you seriously yell at Nintendo for the game's locations being too generic!? HONESTLY! Oh, and don't even get me started on the characters. Yep, we're actually doing this again. You thought 2020 was over? Oh, no no no no no. I'm not done yet! You can't tell me that the pirate captain you travel with in Chapter 4 is the exact same character as the restaurant waiter with the French accent in Chapter 5 or the Toad who clings onto Bowser's airship early in the game because he thinks he's a superhero. Or the tea party ghosts. You can easily decipher the personas that the characters radiate by the interactions! From the characters who play individual roles in each level to the serviceable characters that travel along with you like the Chosen Toads, the train conductor, the aforementioned pirate captain, and Huey, to the NPCs who throw a witty line every four text boxes. But of COURSE you only care about how they look and what names they're given for no reason whatsoever! Because you all love to judge people by their LOOKS, not their ACTIONS. Speaking of dialogue, has anybody ever considered ONCE that maybe, just MAYBE, the paper references actually contribute to WORLDBUILDING? No? Because you've all got the whole "pop-up book" notion? Well THAT EXPLAINS A LOT! Plenty of other franchises have sequels that don't tie into the predecessors, but the one series with entries that are concieved to be separate entirely and can be as diverse as it pleases is also the one that so many people bash on the art style for, to the point of ranting about the cutout outlines the characters have!? ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? You all praise Nintendo for doing so many different things throughout the 2000s, but when they want to do different things 10 years later, you all suddenly HATE them for it! And then there's the whole "Sticker Star sequel" notion and how the series "lost its soul." Oh my gosh, how petty are you? Once again, strong emotional attachments attack Color Splash for stupid reasons. Look, I get that it has a lot of similarities, but this is out of control! Any format can be tinkered with to be enjoyable! Have you even READ some of the behind-the-scenes development and how healthy it was? IS went out of their way to make large explanations on such small elements that just give more of a spark in the output, like giving the Battery thing a German song when you use it, to referencing Super Mario Bros. 3 when you use the recorder, to giving the tea party ghosts an entire backstory, to the folk dance the Shy Guys perform when they suck colour from the ground in large groups, to hosting an ENTIRE IRL BARBECUE just to model an asset for a boss fight! But no. The INTERVIEWS are where we need to concentrate the attention to. Why, so you can find out who you need to rant at when the next Paper Mario game comes out, like what you all did with Shigeru Miyamoto, Risa Tabata and Kensuke Tanabe? And then concentrate that negative energy on an even BIGGER group, like Intelligent Systems and even Nintendo as a whole without even realising that they are individuals who have their own style and thought process that may not align with millions of fans all at once? You have got to be kidding me! This whole Paper Mario conundrum is REALLY getting on my nerves. And it's been like that for the longest time! Do you even remember a THING I said in my Miitopia review? "Say a game will be bad, and you will believe it is bad!" Yet people KEEP ON FALLING FOR THIS TRAP. It's really frustrating me whenever I want even a single person to understand, but nobody ever listens despite reading my reviews, and they all obey the big Paper Mario ranters like Demeech, Arlo, Scott the Woz, TheLonelyGoomba and Nathaniel Bandy, who I know for CERTAIN will inevitably read this because they're old-school Nintendo fans so they've pledged themselves to hate on anything modern Nintendo related and anybody who stands up for it and as a result are going to search around for positive modern Paper Mario reviews to twist the truth and say these reviews are terrible. And they keep going with complaining videos and reviews that say the same thing we've been hearing for the past five years, throwing the little line here and there, and actually having the AUDACITY to RANK the series. Yep. Just the Paper Mario games. A series with only SIX entries at the time of this review. And with a majority opinion set in stone THIS badly, you can predict the order of the entries with as much effort as you all say Nintendo puts into their games. Look, my problem isn't with TTYD. Do I think it has the potential to be better than this? Yes. Am I going to play it with an open mind? Yes. Do I think that because of that game's existence, Color Splash is bad? DEFINITELY NOT! I've tried so hard and so long to tone down all of these negative responses and try to observe a game on its own merits and not let representation get in the way. But in a post-Sword/Shield and Origami King world, it's just worse than ever! If you can't accept the idea that some people actually enjoy Cars 2, how do you expect me to believe you can respect my opinion with this game!? I've tried so hard, I've explained so many times to observe a game's positive side rather than letting your anger inflate your hate towards anything modern Nintendo related! But there's no stopping you! There's no SAVING you! Everybody hates positivity! Everybody hates my reviews! And the fanbase has become THE most toxic fanbase out of all of them! Yes, even beating out Pokemon! And I've had enough! I'm tired of this hate! And I'm tired of this redundancy to bash on modern Paper Mario! Yet people keep on doing it anyway! They keep on hating and shunning away all the good elements of Paper Mario: Color Splash! They keep on ignoring my individual thought process and insulting me for having it and demand I stick with the mob mentality! Everything I've been believing about modern Paper Mario haters is true, like the fact that they're all big-headed, life-controlling, selfish little FUCKHOLES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *pant, pant* There. I did it. I. Actually. Did it. That is how you KNOW I've hit my breaking point. I swore. Uncensored. Maybe now, for the first time in my life, you'll understand just how frustrated I feel.