Paper Mario: Color Splash

It's no secret that Paper Mario: Sticker Star wasn't the best received Paper Mario game to date. Taking a different approach to the established and much-beloved RPG system, Sticker Star came under fire for the somewhat removal of experience points and stats, necessity of using "Thing" stickers to progress further, and somewhat soulless presentation by replacing original characters with more Toads. One would think that Nintendo would've heard this response and acted on it prior to announcing the next Paper Mario game, yet Paper Mario: Color Splash looks like a direct continuation of Sticker Star from a gameplay perspective.

It's not all bad, though. Kotaku recently caught up with Risa Tabata -- a producer at Nintendo -- at E3 and pressed her for answers on what this new entry will bring to the table. Contrary to popular belief, it seems that Nintendo did hear the criticism against its predecessor, and is working to get it right this time. For one thing, the story is supposedly improved, focusing a bit more on mystery and the relationship between Mario and Huey, the game's companion character.

This time we have–I don't know if I want to say a proper story–but we have a story (laughs). It starts from kind of mysterious opening.. You're not sure what is going on, and as you go through the story, you'll realize, oh this is what happens. And there's a lot of interesting stuff that happens with you and Huey.

On top of this, she also spoke about how you can carry up to 99 cards in your inventory this time around, and how there will be a hint system in place to make it easier to figure out where to go and what to do next, hopefully to get around those issues in Sticker Star where progress was halted because you didn't have the right "Thing" sticker in your inventory.

What do you think? Are you looking forward to Color Splash? Do you think it'll properly rectify the issues of its predecessor? Drop us a comment in the section below.

[source kotaku.com]