Paper Mario: Color Splash - devs on utilizing familiar characters in interesting ways

A portion of a USGamer interview with Nintendo's Risa Tabata

USG: Another big change that the series implemented with Sticker Star was, instead of having a lot of unique original characters in the game, it focused more on Mario and Toad and Bowser, whereas the previous games had a lot of weird NPCs that accompanied Mario. And I see that's continued, or seems to be continued, with this.

Tabata: So, I wasn't really involved with the previous title, so I'll just talk about this one. But I think one thing is that because this is taking place within the greater Mario world, we wanted to focus as much as possible on the familiar Mario characters. All Toads, right? It's just a bunch of Toads. So, we had to think, if it's all Toads, how do we make them distinct and give them personality? So, one thing we thought, so, the basic Toad is red, and if they have something different about them, we'll change the color. And of course, a lot of the personality comes out in text. And so, you can also use the fact that they all look alike as the basis for jokes. So, one thing we're going to focus on, because we have all those limits, obviously, we're using all these familiar characters, is: How do we create variety, and how do we create interest?