Dear Reader:
Nintendo on Paper Mario: Color Splash's humor, cards, level design & visuals
Coming from a GameSpot interview with producer Risha Tabata...
''When we think of what we cannot do in a traditional Mario game, what we came to was, 'Well, definitely humor.' So we wanted to focus on humor as much as possible. All these different people got together in meetings room and basically very, very diligently and seriously thought of how we could do the stupidest, craziest things possible.'
There are tons of different cards in the game. Obviously Mario is going to be throwing fireballs at some point. There's kind of like a spring jump where you can actually jump a ton of different times on one end. As you continue the game, you'll open up more card slots, [and] the amount of paint you're able to store in your hammer will expand.
We kind of focused on trying to have each course have a different feel. One course might be more focused on battle, but another course might focus more on puzzle-solving. There are definitely different places where you will need to have platforming skills.
'The artists spent a lot of time thinking like, 'Maybe we can try this and it'll look really like paper. Maybe we'll have to do this to make it look like paper'. The base of everything is made from cardboard and then on top of that you're layering different types of paper.''