

While Mario remains a silent protagonist with a heart of gold, the other characters have slight shifts in their personality. Part of it is thanks to the excellent localization and likeable characters. The premise may be simple, but the plot is surprisingly good, especially for a Mario game. Eventually, three others come along to aid Mario on his quest. Mario agrees to collect them all, and thus sets out on a journey to different worlds to obtain them all. Count Bleck managed to create a chaos heart- the key requirement to end all worlds, and the only way to counter it is for Mario to set out in many different worlds and collect eight pure hearts. According to the Light Prognosticus, Mario perfectly fits the description of the hero with his trademark red clothing and legendary moustache. The Dark Prognosticus is a book of prophecies that foretells the end of all worlds while the Light Prognosticus was made to counter the events from that book. There, Mario befriends the town’s sage, Merlon, who tells Mario about two books called the Dark and Light Prognosticus.

She is a creature called Pixl and teleports Mario to a mystical town called Flipside. Mario is later awakened by a bizarre-looking butterfly named Tippi. This new menace to the Mario universe is named Count Bleck and he defeats Mario with ease and sucks everyone else into a vortex. Although Bowser was planning to kidnap Peach that day, the Mario brothers discover that someone else beat Bowser to the punch.

The brothers immediately assume that it was none other than Bowser who caused this misdeed and proceed to his castle to stop him. To no one’s surprise, Peach has gotten captured yet again. Luigi wishes for something to happen and shortly after, Toad comes screaming for the brothers’ help. The game starts off with the Mario brothers enjoying a ho-hum, peaceful day. The developers, Intelligent Systems, managed to mesh two genres very well into another great game for the Wii’s growing library. The first two games were turn-based RPGs with an emphasis on timed attacks whereas Super Paper Mario is a platformer/RPG hybrid. Super Paper Mario is the third installment in the Paper Mario franchise that’s been established since the Nintendo 64, but it’s much different than its predecessors. Super Paper Mario was originally in development for the GameCube, but due to how popular the Wii became and how the Game Cube was fading out, Nintendo decided to scrap the GameCube version altogether rather than have two versions as with Twilight Princess.
