Paper Mario’s Badge system: Expert levels of customization.

 

If you were born before the years when Nintendo decided to stifle the creativity of its producers and developers by demanding that Mario games follow a very established formula by heavily limiting what one can do with the IP, you may have become enamoured by some of Mario’s great forays into the RPG genre. Super Mario RPG and the first two Paper Mario games were simple RPGs with a lot of hidden depth, with interesting characters and locales to explore. Paper Mario was released a generation after Super Mario RPG, and so, it took on a lot of ideas from Super Mario RPG, to the extent that Yoshihiko Maekawa, who worked heavily on Super Mario RPG (and who later directed the Mario & Luigi games) was brought in as a consultant. In fact, the game was initially going to be called Super Mario RPG 2.

 

Original Paper Mario before it got its name

Super Mario RPG has some customization of its own. Every time you would level up, your stats would generally go up, but you would be given a choice to also give yourself an additional boost in Power, HP, or Special Attack. It was a small branching decision, but it was enough to give you options for different party compositions. Paper Mario built upon this idea by letting you level either HP, FP or Badge points. HP is pretty obviously Hit Points, FP is Flower points which serves as your magic system, and badge points actually gives you slots to equip various badges, which is a sort of equipment system.

 

Level up giving you branching choices

Paper Mario’s RPG system has never really been about Mario becoming significantly more powerful. Level ups tend to offer incremental improvements, and enemies seldom have that much HP. Doing damage in the double digits is considered massive amounts of damage. In essence, your level ups bog down to incremental increases in durability, ability to use specials, or more badge slots. The first two are very straightforward buffs, and ideal for those who do not want to make things too complicated, but the later… that is where things get interesting. You see, badges can do many things. They can electrify Mario, give brand new skills, alter certain abilities, give passives, power up partners, and even stack for increased effectiveness. Not only that, in The Thousand Year Door at least, the amount of badge slots you get per level is just enough to equip a badge that gives additional HP or FP equivalent to what you would have had if you chose to level up in those stats. In other words, if you are willing to get enough coins, choosing badge points for every single level up can let you fully customize Mario into any potential build. What this allows for is giving players control over the complexity of the battle system. The more they choose to get badge points, the more complex and malleable the battle system becomes. The less they choose it, the more simplified the battle system becomes. Most players will tend to cycle between benefits, thus giving people a fairly simple to understand combat, whilst leaving some room for customization through badges.  

 

Badges can be equipped and taken off at your leisure

When it comes to the badge system, it adds a surprising amount of replay ability if you choose to get out of your comfort zone and decide to try different builds. On my first playthrough, I cycled through each stat as I leveled up. It was always: HP -> FP -> Badge points. However, going back through the game and choosing only badge points for every level up, and refusing to use any HP badges, I went into most battles with very low HP, but being able to heal myself or avoid damage with passives, and doing high amounts of damages to take down bosses quickly. It was a thrilling high risk and high reward play through. The game was not particularly hard, but I have had to think quite a bit more than usual. I relied more on my partners tanking hits for Mario, which was something I had never had to do before. It gave me new appreciation for the game, and it made it feel very refreshing.

 

Some badges even let you make the game harder

It is always very difficult to balance a game’s depth to a game’s accessibility. On one hand, a game that is very deep but not very accessible will likely be very rewarding to those with the patience to master it, but in most cases, the average player will stop playing before they reach the core of what makes the experience appealing. On the other hand, a game that is accessible, but not very deep will not hold attention for very long, and it will be an easily forgettable experience. Yet, games are not usually all one or the other. Even some widely classified as “casual” titles like Animal Crossing have some amount of depth in giving you a plethora of options to customize your living space. Super Smash Bros. Melee is a very accessible game with an unending well of depth to it. What people often forget is that depth and accessibility are not mutually exclusive, and the golden balance is to have a game that has both available. Paper Mario’s badge system exemplifies this quite well. The player chooses how deep they want to go with the battle system, and that therefore appeals to a wider range of players that want to be invested at all levels of play. In a sense, this respects the player’s time, as they can decide how much cognitive effort they want to use. Sometimes, someone just wants to relax with a cold drink. At others, they want to get their coffee on and get serious.

 

Paper Mario was full of that hidden depth that I am so fond of, and I had never actually stopped to consider how much I liked the mechanic until I decided to break my habits and play differently. It is a shame that there has not been a Paper Mario games since 2004.