Makes you wonder where things could've gone, had Square not moved FF7 development from the N64 to the PlayStation. It's just a really good game overall and it's easy to see how Paper Mario ended up evolving on these concepts and what's the good old 'Square weirdness' that's only present here. That said the game is definitely from a time before corporate brand management forced these characters to be stripped down to just their most basic personality traits. (Especially since a lot of the games humor in some places was derived from Japanese anime and stand-up comedy, so he had to invent certain things from whole cloth since the references are otherwise incomprehensible to a non-90s Japanese audience). There's a sort of oddball humor to the game because it was originally translated by Ted Woolsey who didn't have a series bible for the Mario games. I can't find myself saying that Geno and Mallow 'don't fit the Mario canon' - we've seen characters in the RPGs who have full arcs or 'emissary' style personalities (Paper Mario 64 and Super Paper Mario jump to mind immediately) and the baddies almost certainly are just as fitting as the random cadre of bosses you get in the platformers. From what I've seen, that's an element the remake has mostly left intact, which is good to see.

I don't think there's a JRPG more accessible than this one if you're not familiar with the genre - the UI of the original is very much geared around 'make it understandable to people who've only ever played the Mario platformers' and it just. It's absolutely 'baby's first JRPG' (but with actual stats, not the low stats of Paper Mario) and it wears that badge with pride.

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