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Fun Club You can only have one: a Super Mario RPG sequel or a brand new Paper Mario RPG

Which would you rather have?

  • Super Mario RPG 2

    Votes: 91 66.9%

  • An all-new Paper Mario RPG

    Votes: 45 33.1%
  • Total voters
    136
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Super Mario RPG director Chihiro Fujioka has expressed interest in making a Super Mario RPG sequel, and now that a remake of the original is coming soon, that no longer feels like an impossibility.

Meanwhile, Paper Mario hasn't had a traditional RPG since 2004's The Thousand-Year Door, with fans actively wishing for the series to one day return to form with a brand new RPG in the same style of Paper Mario (N64) and TTYD.

So for fun, let's say that you can have one and only one of these. Which would you personally rather have?
 
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I would probably rather have a Super Mario RPG 2, mainly because I feel like there's more you could expand upon from SMRPG.
 
Unless its a direct sequel to super paper mario with several of the same characters and audacity, just in 3d instead,just make a sequel to the mario rpg, please.
 
As much as I love the first two PMs, the original SMRPG is still my favorite, and I think I would like to see a sequel to that because we've already seen what a sequel to Paper Mario looks like, but a SMRPG sequel is uncharted territory. So it's a tough choice, but I'm going with SMRPG here. The only caveat is Shimomura needs to be back as composer.
 
RPG2, easy.

All I'd ask is that it stays as a turn-based game, and the Square Enix team are able to keep worldbuilding their wild take on the Mario World.
 
Super Mario RPG because we only ever got one game in that style. While I'd love another true Paper Mario rpg sequel, I still have two excellent games I can go back to.

I don't ever need another Mario and Luigi, we got 5 of them and only 2 were great (sss and bis), and both of them are worse imo then SMRPG and the Paper Mario rpg duology.
 
The Origami King is a wonderful game, but its turn based battles were its weakest element. If the next PM game goes full-blown real time action, like in the paper mache fights, that wouldn’t be the end of the world.

I think most fans of Mario RPGs would prefer a sequel to SMRPG.
 
I want to combine the parts I like about both. Keep the isometric view and three party members of SMRPG, but also have badges with a good variety of badge builds. Give each character their own supply of badge points on top of having one weapon slot and one accessory slot (with weapons and accessories being unique to each character while badges are interchangeable).

Also, have the ground/aerial move split from PM as well as the whole body-contact vs. weapon vs. ranged attack split to add variety to what moves work on what enemy designs (spikes on head will hurt you if you do an aerial body-contact move) as opposed to SMRPG making jump an element. But you could also have fire/ice/lightning elemental strengths/weaknesses on top of that

edit: oh, also add a visible turn queue like every other modern turn-based RPG
 
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This will be ny first time playing SMRPG and I loved PM and TTYD, but I'll say SMRPG2 just because I feel like there's more potential to it gameplay wise and world wise.
 
SMRPG2, if only to keep the Paper Mario series from regressing. That way we can have a more standard Mario RPG series (since Mario & Luigi seems to be dead with Alpha Dream being gone now) while also having Paper Mario retain its unique gameplay.
 
Smashed that Super Mario RPG 2 button immediately. Both series have their charms, but personally I just love having parties of more than two people in battle and everyone is equal. Also I really dig the isometric platforming in Mario RPG, it’s so unique and gives it a more active feeling than Paper Mario. Otherwise the two games scratch similar itches and I think some of the strengths between the two could cross over without much fuss.
 
if you got a new Paper Mario RPG, you'd only get 1 new game

if you got Mario RPG 2, then you'd get it and a new Paper Mario game
 
Super Mario RPG 2. Gameplaywise, Paper Mario is basically just a simplified version of Super Mario RPG anyway. Can't really imagine any Nintendo studio other than maybe Monolith Soft who would be up to it though.
 
Red Monster said:
The Origami King is a wonderful game, but its turn based battles were its weakest element. If the next PM game goes full-blown real time action, like in the paper mache fights, that wouldn’t be the end of the world.

I think most fans of Mario RPGs would prefer a sequel to SMRPG.
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Paper Mario should have just embraced being an action game with rpg elements after Super. SS/CS/ToK all suffered because they felt compelled to include turn based combat that doesn't fit the rest of the game design at all.
 
Never got what people see in Super Mario RPG, as someone who played the later Mario RPGs first. The gameplay is just a half-formed Paper Mario, a lot of its stuff doesn't really fit with Mario's universe, and it's way more thinly written than Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi. I don't even expect a new Paper Mario to be very good if we're assuming this is a remotely realistic hypothetical, but a Super Mario RPG 2 would have to be almost as big a departure as the other successors to Super Mario RPG were for me to care I think.

Also, isometric platforming is the devil.
 
Paper Mario had 5 games after the original, let Super Mario RPG have its fabled sequel already please.
 
I don't quite get the appeal of SMRPG. It feels like one of those things that became popular and beloved, but then it's popular and beloved status outgrew its actual worth. I've personally never played but I have watched entire playthroughs of it, and it just doesn't seem all that amazing or grand imo.

That said I don't trust anyone at Nintendo or intelligent systems to make a proper Paper Mario 3, so if they're gonna screw anything up, than let them make a SMRPG2.
 
Stilt Village said:
Never got what people see in Super Mario RPG, as someone who played the later Mario RPGs first. The gameplay is just a half-formed Paper Mario, a lot of its stuff doesn't really fit with Mario's universe, and it's way more thinly written than Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi. I don't even expect a new Paper Mario to be very good if we're assuming this is a remotely realistic hypothetical, but a Super Mario RPG 2 would have to be almost as big a departure as the other successors to Super Mario RPG were for me to care I think.

Also, isometric platforming is the devil.
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Mario RPG is fast for one thing, both in terms of movement/combat and the general pacing of the games. PM and M&L all feel like they're in molasses by comparison. Part of what makes Mario RPG compelling IS the blend of Mario with Sqauresoft design philosophies. Mario RPG is constantly throwing new ideas and unique gameplay moments at the player like the moleville mine cart segment, the waterfall/river segment, and the dodo statue dodge segment.

Mario RPG also has great comedic writing and timing, lots of fun slapstick humor, and hilarious optional scenes of characters yelling at Mario (the trailer even shows the infamous "only I'm allowed to kidnap Peach" scene from Bowser). On top of that it can get serious when it needs to and does that well, with some genuinely touching moments from Mallow in particular.

There is a reason the game has been held up by many as one of the best rpgs on the Super Nintendo, a console known for being a beast when it comes to rpgs. The game is just special, and none of the later Mario rpgs have ever captured it's magic, though TTYD came close imo.
 
Mango said:
It feels like one of those things that became popular and beloved, but then it's popular and beloved status outgrew its actual worth
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I hardly think SMRPG is overrated. It really was one of the better RPGs in its time. It's not "amazing" but it's above average. The mix of Nintendo and Square elements is pretty cool, too.

BassForever said:
Mario RPG is fast for one thing, both in terms of movement/combat and the general pacing of the games. PM and M&L all feel like they're in molasses by comparison
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Man, I have to disagree with that. SMRPG battles are the least fun of the three. Timed hits was a good idea but it was obviously in its infancy there. I I think the boss battles are cool but the battles against the mooks are typical JRPG filler.

Overworld movement in Paper Mario and M&L definitely feel a little slow, sure. But I don't agree that they're "molasses" compared to SMRPG, which has its own issues (most prominently the dodgy isometric platforming).

BassForever said:
Mario RPG also has great comedic writing and timing, lots of fun slapstick humor, and hilarious optional scenes of characters yelling at Mario
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I will however concur that the humor in Mario RPG is pretty great. Definitely has the best story and character writing out of the Mario RPGs.
 
BassForever said:
Mario RPG is fast for one thing, both in terms of movement/combat and the general pacing of the games. PM and M&L all feel like they're in molasses by comparison. Part of what makes Mario RPG compelling IS the blend of Mario with Sqauresoft design philosophies. Mario RPG is constantly throwing new ideas and unique gameplay moments at the player like the moleville mine cart segment, the waterfall/river segment, and the dodo statue dodge segment.
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It's definitely fast-paced, but I wouldn't say that's actually better than how slow the later games can be, because it just creates the opposite problem. It throws stuff at you constantly with almost zero build-up or context, which is a large part of why I said the writing was thin. There was a lot more of an attempt at building a coherent world in the later ones, and dividing the game up into satisfying arcs. The pacing of the journey is very strange, even though on the surface it would seem to have the same thing going on with the seven stars as Paper Mario. But sometimes you'll go a long time without acquiring one through multiple different areas, and sometimes you'll immediately go from one to the next. This leads to weird anticlimaxes like Star Hill, where you just wander around before eventually picking up the star piece. I feel like the game might have been better served without halfheartedly committing to this Dragon Quest vignette structure where you come across a town and solve its problem, but then again it might come off even more like a rapidfire series of random events than it does now.

I personally really wasn't enthused by the minigames, but I guess I don't recall any of them being particularly awful to get through either. Though I do remember listening to a friend's extended rant about Dodo back in grade school (the game's never held my interest past the monster town despite several attempts, so I have no idea how that part goes myself).
 
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meatbag said:
I hardly think SMRPG is overrated. It really was one of the better RPGs in its time. It's not "amazing" but it's above average. The mix of Nintendo and Square elements is pretty cool, too.


Man, I have to disagree with that. SMRPG battles are the least fun of the three. Timed hits was a good idea but it was obviously in its infancy there. I I think the boss battles are cool but the battles against the mooks are typical JRPG filler.

Overworld movement in Paper Mario and M&L definitely feel a little slow, sure. But I don't agree that they're "molasses" compared to SMRPG, which has its own issues (most prominently the dodgy isometric platforming).


I will however concur that the humor in Mario RPG is pretty great. Definitely has the best story and character writing out of the Mario RPGs.
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The reason PM and M&L have much slower movement is that the games have a much larger puzzle emphasis. That's fine (and I love me a good puzzle), but it's intentionally a very different vibe then what SMRPG went for, which was a more pure rpg with some platforming elements. I also think the isometric platforming complaint has always been over blown. For one there's very few places in the game where your progress is limited by needing to do platforming over gaps where you can fall and lose progress. Most of the time Mario's jump is used to climb up the environment where precision isn't needed at all. Most areas will have optional goodies/rewards tied to a platforming challenge, but they're often contained to one screen, and make use of area gimmicks to trivialize them (like the rotating flowers, or locking Mario into place where he auto jumps).
 
meatbag said:
Fair enough, it’s been a while since I played SMRPG so I’m only going off vague memories of Mario not feeling good to control.
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Like even in the trailer we got for the remake, most areas are flat and open. Even when you have to jump, Mario has such a big booty shadow it's super easy to see where you're going to land. Even the most notorious segment of the game (nimbus land climb) all the vines are on a single axis, meaning you only ever jump need to jump in 2 directions to grab all of them. It's partially why in my "what could a remake fix" thread, I suggested a 45 degree camera rotation, as it would make that axis completely up/down or left/right for those segments. In the original, and as we see in the trailer, Mario can only move in 8 directions. I imagine on the analogue sticks, most people will find the 4 diagonal directions Mario can move a lot easier to move consistently.

The lava area in the trailer is also very deceptive, if it works like the original it's a single tile wide area emulating a 2d Mario underground level in 3D. The remake makes it seem big and open where if you're not perfect as isometric platforming into the lava you go. Assuming it works like the original, as long as you're holding literally any of up, right, or up-right, the invisible wall will guide you the right way. You're almost never required in Mario RPG to do actual 3D isometric platforming, then I would get the complaints.
 
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Paper Mario. Easily. I think the SMRPG hype is still high at the moment. Don’t think the poll results would quite be the same if a TTYD remake was announced or something.

SMRPG’s combat is kind of basic and it would lose all it’s charm if the cast was reduced to just Mario, Peach, Bowser, and more mainline characters. Geno definitely isn’t coming back, Mallow maybe, but i’d rather just have two entirely new characters and i’m not sure Nintendo would actually go that extra mile vs just making Luigi or Yoshi a party member (which are boring choices, i’m sorry)

That’s partly why I have always seen SMRPG and the PM series as superior to M&L. M&L ALWAYS restricts you to just Mario and Luigi. The others always used to introduce new and oddball characters to your party that stay for the entire game.
 
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Paper Mario, but that simply comes down to the fact that I never played Super Mario RPG until later while Paper Mario obsessed me as a younger dude.
 
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Give me a Super Mario RPG 2 that pokes fun at modern Square-Enix.

Also a Super Mario RPG that rivals production values of Final Fantasy XVI.
 
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I would literally take either. Mario RPGs are my jam and we haven’t really had a good one since Bowser’s inside story.
 
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How's this a question? Super Mario RPG 2 (even if technically exists already).

I don't trust Nintendo with Paper Mario anymore. Get Square and Nintendo to work together again.
 
Paper Mario Thousand Year Door is a beloved game from my childhood.

Mario RPG is a weird, off-brand looking game I tried on the Wii Shop back in like 2008 or so. I didn't really get into at all, felt weird and awkward to play I think? (But I haven't been back to try it in over a decade, so it might secretly be good.)

The choice is obvious.
 
VegiHam said:
Paper Mario Thousand Year Door is a beloved game from my childhood.

Mario RPG is a weird, off-brand looking game I tried on the Wii Shop back in like 2008 or so. I didn't really get into at all, felt weird and awkward to play I think? (But I haven't been back to try it in over a decade, so it might secretly be good.)

The choice is obvious.
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Say you're a GameCube Kid without saying you're a GameCube Kid.
 
I'm having a hard time visualizing what a modern "SMRPG2" would even look or play like. While not its sequels, the M&L series and the first 2 PM games basically were its spiritual successors in terms of the use of action commands in turn based combat. There's just a lot of evolutionary steps in the genre that SMRPG missed out on in the over 25 years since it came out.

A new Paper Mario RPG is easier to visualize just cause it doesn't feel like it's format was copied over the years by other Mario games. Also just cause it's easier for me to imagine what a modern sequel to a Gamecube game would look like than a SNES one.

Personally I'd be more interested in a SMRPG2 just cause it has more opportunity to surprise us cause it's really hard to know what to expect. (Although it's a possible pitfall in meeting fan expectations) Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi each feel like they need a break on the other hand.
 
Hailinel said:
I'm just making light of the dismissive tone used referring to Super Mario RPG as "off-brand" next to a goofy game with a paper aesthetic.
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Ah yeah, that's reasonable actually! It's just everything in Paper Mario looked, to me as a kid, like Paper Versions of Mario characters from the mainline games, whereas the Mario RPG characters looked like their own weird thing. Same as when you watch a Mario cartoon and it's some animators making up a guess what the characters should look like based on the sprites. It was an odd vibe.
 
Are there actually TTYD fans saying that SMRPG’s reputation has outstripped its value?

My friends, you may want to consider a mirror.
 
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The indie audience has got me covered plenty for games like the n64/GC style paper Mario's.

I'd in all earnest rather than either of the poll options, I would prefer that they continue making new experimental games, even if some of them end up duds like sticker Star.

Sticking to making the same game over and over again is what they did with the mario and Luigi series and it did that series no favours whatsoever.
 
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If we're talking a Paper Mario that's similar in style and quality to TTYD, then Paper Mario all day long. If it would just be another Origami King, Color Splash, then Mario RPG easily.
 
It's a tough call. I have no nostalgia for Super Mario RPG - I gave it a go for maybe 3 or 4 hours in late middle or early high school after being obsessed with the first two Paper Mario games and thoroughly enjoyed what I played, but I got tired of emulating it and went back to playing my Xbox 360 lol. Paper Mario 64, meanwhile, was one of the first games I ever played and I was absolutely obsessed. I still think 64 is a gaming pinnacle in general, and TTYD is also masterful and equally nostalgic for me while being better than 64 in some ways and worse than others.

However, when I think about which franchise would benefit more from a popular, critically acclaimed remake, it's gotta be SMRPG. It's a far older title whose visual enhancements will be more impressive, and it's the only Mario RPG game that ever existed under that specific titling so there's less baggage attached to the franchise. Paper Mario has so many split fans and even though the first two games are among my all-time favorites, it feels like the world and formula of SMRPG have more untapped potential.

It's all good though, because we're going to get a TTYD HD Remaster next year and we'll be able to discuss the possibilities of an old-school PM sequel just like we are right now with SMRPG :)
 
Here's a question: would y'all rather get a remake or remaster of TTYD or PM64 if those were your choices? I think TTYD has more potential to be improved as a game if some pacing and backtracking issues were corrected, but level design is ultimately still level design. PM64 is basically a perfect game to me, which is why a remake or remaster modernizing the incredible art style and seeing that exquisite world and level design with 2024 graphics would make me so hype. Still, I love these games equally for different reasons, so either one is a huge win.
 
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The RPG parts of Paper Mario aren't the thing I miss. It's the really out there scenarios, locales and characters. From a gameplay perspective, I'm perfectly fine with current Paper Mario. So, since I'll still be getting those, and this poll doesn't promise anything back outside of genre, I'd rather pick the one that wouldn't exist otherwise
 
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Can't really decide without knowing more details. Unlike other Nintendo fans suffering from joint pain I'm not a huge fan of either SMRPG nor TTYD but I love the first Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (with several people from the SMRPG team) so I don't have a strong preference there. But Fujioka doesn't have a studio right now whereas IntSys is super experienced. All things being equal with ideal circumstances I'd have to go with SMRPG2 if only because it'd give us an additional game.
 
I like Super Mario RPG, but I have always thought the first two Paper Mario games are much better efforts. So give me a new Paper Mario RPG.
 
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