Gametraders Live September Magazine

The Negatives
Centered on collecting stickers/cards, Color
Splash is, unfortunately, bland. While past
games featured numerous different cultures
and races, with levels based on wonderfully
imagined and unique aesthetics, Color
Splash continues where Sticker Star left off
- with toads everywhere. And I mean that.
They are literally everywhere. If you read
up on the developer team’s justification for
this, it’s utter nonsense. They wanted it to
‘feel’ like a Mario game, which ignores all the
different and wonderful species/creatures
from the original three games and from the
multitude of other Mario titles as if they
aren’t canon.
It felt like the Star Wars expanded universe
being retconned all over again. Are you
telling me Rawk Hawk doesn’t exist, or
Dimentio, or Count Bleck, or the dozens of
other crucial characters from the first three
titles? I tolerate minimalism in the real world
(though it isn’t my cup of tea). I cannot
tolerate it infiltrating a game series I love
above any other.
Another flaw is the sticker collection. Before
important battles, this can be a nightmare.
If you don’t want to obsess over a simplified
game akin to Roshambo (rock, paper,
scissors), then you can look up how to get
through it online to unlock thousands of
gold coins and then just buy all the cards
you need. Sadly for me, I played it before
there were any guides out there.
I imagine the majority of the lowly 860,000
people that bought this game at retail (the
worst sales in the series) were in the same boat
as me, which meant they had to do something
that’s incredibly rare for a Nintendo game:
grind. “Am I suddenly in an MMO,” I wondered
to myself, “surrounded by ore nodes I have to
mine in order to build some amazing thing?”.
Paper Mario is supposed to be fun, with the
ability to beat the game if you obtain the
limited skill set required (in general) and learn
certain patterns. Now, all of a sudden, you had
to farm for huge stickers for hours on end in
order to progress. Who thought that was a
good game design?