Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time

[toblix]

I've talked earlier about how fantastic this game is, but it's like I'm alone in believing this is one of the greatest looking, best-playing, funn(i)est games ever. I can't any info about a third M&L game... what in the fuck is going on here? Why haven't Nintendo or Alphadream announced this? All you game people, have you heard any of your Japanese colleagues speaking secretly about recruiting for M&L3?

[Noyb]

I liked it. Not as much as the original, but I personally felt it was much more charming than the horribly boring grind of Super Paper Mario, straightforward puzzles aside. I really liked how the enemy patterns kept changing as the game went on, keeping the combat always interesting as you played a 4-player single-switch minigame by yourself to do special attacks. And I have to give Nintendo props for creating a game where throwing younger versions of yourself into spiked pits and enemies is not only possible, but encouraged.

[Roderick]

I think I've mentioned this before here, but the game didn't fall very well with me. To me it has become (perhaps slightly unjustifiably, but only marginally so) the example I always use when I explain how too much polish can be a bad thing. Partners in Time was to me a bit of a frustrating experience because the game was constantly taking gameplay away from you by showing you what you had to do instead of letting you figure it out yourself. In my head it's probably worse than it was, but it all felt way too slick and overproduced. Sometimes the rough edges around a game can add to its charm, and Partners in Time stands to me as a game that had been completely sterilized by its overproduction.

Its predecessor got it right by offering a bit more freedom in movement.

[toblix]

I think I've mentioned this before here, but the game didn't fall very well with me. To me it has become (perhaps slightly unjustifiably, but only marginally so) the example I always use when I explain how too much polish can be a bad thing. Partners in Time was to me a bit of a frustrating experience because the game was constantly taking gameplay away from you by showing you what you had to do instead of letting you figure it out yourself. In my head it's probably worse than it was, but it all felt way too slick and overproduced. Sometimes the rough edges around a game can add to its charm, and Partners in Time stands to me as a game that had been completely sterilized by its overproduction.

Its predecessor got it right by offering a bit more freedom in movement.

Holy shit, that sounded interesting. I'm not quite sure I get what you're getting at, though. Could you explain some more (or point to some posts or whatever)?

[lobotomy42]

Ugh. I *detest* this game. It took all the clever charm of Superstar Saga and squashed it with a bunch of poorly executed slapstick jokes. The combat system was made worse, the game was into a *completely* linear one, and...well, the whole thing was boring.

Consider: The premise was based around time travel, and the best plot development that the developers could apparently come up with was "babies." Or, taken another way, the developers so wanted to integrate babies into their game, that they introduced the idea of time travel just to have them appear.

Maybe my opinion was soured because I'd played Superstar Saga before Partners in Time, but I really really did not enjoy it.

[miffy495]

I played Superstar saga first as well and still loved PiT. Not as much, maybe, but I still thought it was a very charming and fun game. Got a little repetitive towards the end, maybe, but I still finished it with a smile on my face.

[Roderick]

Well, it's more a feeling I get than really a set of rules that applies everywhere. Let me reverse-engineer it with my favourite example Morrowind. Morrowind would be the perfect example of a game that's buggy and flawed and lacks a lot of polish here and there. Most of the time you don't know what you have to do, no one ever explains how fundamental elements of the gameplay work (alchemy or enchanting are especially arcane), the levelling system is mysterious with seemingly random modifiers and stuff, and it's all just a complete mess.

But it's awesome. You get a real sense of accomplishment just by learning all of this. The rough edges of the game help you love it because there's a sense of pride in scaling a totally inaccessible game.

Now take Partners in Time, where every move, every battle, every collectible and basically every aspect of the game is very thoroughly demonstrated and explained through usually long cutscenes (that are entertaining, but that doesn't make them not long cutscenes). If you look at the contrast, you see that PiT is missing that whole inadvertent meta-game. This is usually the case with every well-produced game that takes its user into account, but PiT takes it further by somehow giving me the feeling that it's playing the game for me. It's been a while, so I don't have examples, I just remember feeling that a few years back. You get a cutscene, you get sent into a walled-off level and you return for another cutscene. I missed the part where I had to figure out something for myself. It felt like a rollercoaster ride; it can be exciting, but ultimately you're not really doing anything yourself.

[toblix]

Yeah, it was really intent on demonstrating every little fucking thing. I don't know if I prefer rough undocumentedness over that, though. That's the kind of stuff I associate with half-assed game mechanics, and I seldom appreciate playing the unintentional "game" of trying to figure out stuff like that. I'm sure PiT could benefit from letting some of the mechanics be discoverable by the player, though. The linearity would mean most of them would be obvious anyway. I think it's worth mentioning, though, that one of the things I found the most interesting and rewarding with the game was figuring out the enemies' attack patterns. These were not documented or explained at all, and you had to figure out what to look for for each type of enemy. I found this to be executed perfectly. Finding the "sign" was always possible, but there were variations and gotchas to be figured out, and it was always fresh. This has to be the perfect example of the type of gameplay you're describing. Never explicitly documented, but crucial to the gameplay.

[toblix]

What?

[Scrobbs]

I have to agree with OP. I didn't realise this was a sequel, thought it was just another in the neverending franchise. This and phantom hourglass are the two games that have had the most play on my DS, and I've had the most fun playing.