@Goku Black
That’s because of the new policy that bans midgame ability unlocks. Makes me worried for Metroid Prime 4 if that really is a company-wide policy, given that’s the whole point of Metroid. Hell, it’s probably the reason development is taking so long…
Also, I found this comment on that video:
I’ve been thinking about this video a lot after watching it, and I’ve come to a few conclusions.
In its current iteration, Nintendo’s design philosophy works with Mario and Zelda because of their fundamental enemy interactions. What is Mario’s fundamental interaction? He jumps/stomps/use’s the current game’s gimmick to defeat the enemy. What is Link’s fundamental interaction with enemies? He hacks and slashes, dodges, blocks, or uses a bomb/bow and arrow to fight enemies. This general interaction holds true across most Zelda games as well as all of the main Mario games.
However, Paper Mario’s fundamental enemy interactions are through a turn-based and separate-screen battle. For Paper Mario, the fundamental enemy interaction is, in essence, a minigame. Thus, the HP/FP/BP system works very nicely because they make the minigame generally fun and diverse interactions, and they provide an incentive to engage in the minigame.
In the Mario and Zelda series, the incentives for enemy interactions have always been relatively minor. Except for minibosses and bosses, you didn’t have much of a reason to engage in combat in Zelda. For BotW, much of this design philosophy holds true. Although enemies can drop items and/or weapons, they’re not entirely necessary for the progression of the game. Similarly, with Mario, he never had much reason to attack enemies in any of his core games because progression was always tied with finding an object or objects, but how you interacted with enemies was always consistent.
In Paper Mario, each battle encounter took more time than in either the Mario or Zelda series, and, the point of battles was to give progression in the battles (and the boss fights). So when they started changing the battle systems in Super Paper Mario and then the paperbook Mario series, they removed a lot of the point of battles (by taking out the arbitrary progression systems). But because they couldn’t remove the battles altogether (though SPM tried), a key part of the Paper Mario games was neutered.
Thus, in Paper Mario, enemy encounters are not only fundamentally different but they hold a different emphasis in the games than in Mario or Zelda. Part of me wonders what the games would have been like had they retained more of SPM’s real-time battling system with the open-world exploration of Color Splash or Origami King.
