I tried a search and didn't see an 'official' topic on just this game. From what I've heard so far there are two groups of people that have played this game: those that absolutely loved Superstar Saga and thinks PiT is pretty good but not as good, and those who absolutely loved Superstar Saga and pretty much think this game is crap. I have this game and I will play it anyway, but I have a huge backlog of games and I don't know if I should take a break in between after finishing SS. (by the way, I pretty much think SS is the greatest game ever, and I usually hate the RPG's where you have to take 'turns' fighting)
The battle system is refined and better. Higher level Bro Attacks are actually useful this time around, and the game on the whole is probably a little bit harder. Bosses actually take some thought, although for all of those who are going to say the bosses take too long to kill: Weaksauce. Properly master the Bro Attacks as you get them, use the right ones, and no boss takes longer than seven or eight minutes (edit: except for the final boss, but hell it's the FINAL boss, and even that doesn't take more than 15)
In my opinion, the environmental puzzles are at least slightly more interesting than the ones in SS, since it forces you to use one set of brothers alone. So even if the puzzles are no better (they're certainly not any worse than those in SS), the fact that you're forced to change tactics in battle makes up for it.
The setting, dialogue, and translation are all top notch just like SS, but the story is no where near as good as the original. I think this is where it falls apart for a lot of people around here. Quite a few people fell in love with the story and characters (Fawful) of Superstar Saga, and besides a few incredibly charming moments (
getting peach to stop crying
), PiT is a little lacking in comparison to its predecessor.
Overall though, I'm a gameplay whore in RPGs. I enjoyed PiT more than SS, and I'll probably be more likely to play through it again, whereas I'll never touch SS again. I'll just look for a script online if I want to relive the classic Fawful quotes.
I'm down in the Volcano and I had to take a long break from the game. It's nice to see new locales and everything, but the the game is getting so repetative. I'm sure I'll enjoy it again in a month and finish it up. I do like it more than SS.
I'm down in the Volcano and I had to take a long break from the game. It's nice to see new locales and everything, but the the game is getting so repetative. I'm sure I'll enjoy it again in a month and finish it up. I do like it more than SS.
That's actually right around where I got pretty sick of it too and picked up Mario Kart instead. It's a quality game, but it does get tedious in parts and for some reason doesn't really compel me to keep going like, say, Paper Mario 2.
I just wish they could make a PM/M&L-type game that ditched all the "kiddie" conventions altogether. Not the "kiddie" themes, necessarily, but the dumbed-down elements of the game. It's nice to have a fun battle system and occasionally funny dialogue but it's frustrating when you can obviously tell that the game is hamstrung by trying to appeal to such a broad audience. This bothered me even more in PM2, which was otherwise one of the best games of last gen imo.
It improves the one point where SSS sucked - the boss designs. The level rigid based structure stinks at first but definately gets better later on. I'm not sure about the battle system being better though, I rarely need to use the hammer at all!
Still a very, very good game. Exceeding SSS was a damn high bar to begin with, so failing at that doesn't render this game bad at all
The battle system is refined and better. Higher level Bro Attacks are actually useful this time around, and the game on the whole is probably a little bit harder.
Bullshit. The battle system is repetitive and shit compared to the first. Once you master copy flowers, trampoline or the shell attacks you will never use anything else. Hammers are useless, the babies are useless when they're on their own and the enemy variety was so pathetic that the player was rarely forced to use different attacks.
Properly master the Bro Attacks as you get them, use the right ones, and no boss takes longer than seven or eight minutes (edit: except for the final boss, but hell it's the FINAL boss, and even that doesn't take more than 15)
2 or 3 seperate bosses, I can't remember because I blurred the boring out of my mind,
and there is no fucking way you beat it in less than 15 minutes. You're smoking crack. Encounters with goddamn boxes that copy themselves could take longer than 15 minutes when the CPU got cheap.
Other Negatives:
--The overworld sucked. Peach's castle was small compared to the Superstar saga overworld and had less interesting levels overall. The Mario block factory from the first game had more creativity than PIT in its entirety.
--Excepting the scenes with
Fawful and the Hammer Bros.
the humor in this game was juvenile and forced in comparison to SS. IT IS FUNNY that Luigi is a pussy compared to Mario, but the heavy-handed treatment of elements like this was shit.
I should have bought Animal Crossing when I had the chance.
I'm about to hit the volcano section...I'm enjoying it alright. I mean, it's nothing revolutionary, and the story isn't exactly compelling, but I'm having a pretty good time. I wanted something with a bit more story for my DS to go with my non-games, and this does the trick for me.
Bullshit. The battle system is repetitive and shit compared to the first. Once you master copy flowers, trampoline or the shell attacks you will never use anything else. Hammers are useless, the babies are useless when they're on their own and the enemy variety was so pathetic that the player was rarely forced to use different attacks.
First of all, the fact that you're complaining about not needing more than three attacks when you didn't need anything but the shell in the first game (it was far more powerful than anything else in the game if you mastered it), is to use your own word, bullshit.
The game emphasized using the bro attacks all the time. You found them everywhere like candy, and you certainly got enough money to stockpile it. To point just one item you didn't mention, the Chain Chomps; they were very useful in clearing out an entire screen full of enemies in about a minute if you were any good at using them. Did you ever use mix flowers? It was like nuking the screen if you were any good at it. If anything I thought it was overpowered, but considering it was the absolute last bro item you got, and a pretty expensive purchase to boot, I forgave it.
In any case, the fact that you posted the following:
reggieandTFE said:
Encounters with goddamn boxes that copy themselves could take longer than 15 minutes when the CPU got cheap.
is extremely telling. Oh, hey, use the Fire Flowers. Never took me more than two turns to wipe them out of the screen with those. In fact, now that you've reminded me, I'd consider the over-abundance of Bro Items around the levels as a negative in my list. It makes it way too obvious what you should be using to get past the enemies in the area when you keep finding caches of 10 shells/trampolines/flowers/whatever.
Then again, the way you're going on about it, means that you didn't use those items properly and you did have trouble, so I suppose the hints were merited. Shows what I know about game design.
reggieandTFE said:
EVEN MORE BULLSHIT. The final boss has
2 or 3 seperate bosses, I can't remember because I blurred the boring out of my mind,
and there is no fucking way you beat it in less than 15 minutes.
OK, the following is all off of very fuzzy memory, so things may be off slightly, and I wouldn't mind you calling me on them, as long as you stop with the "BULLSHIT" and the insults.
There were
three seperate "final" bosses, Princess Shroob's twin had two phases, and then the twin again at the castle when she posseses Bowser
. For now, let's just forget about
the last one, since that battle is different from all the rest
.
As for
Princess Shroob's twin's first phase, just use Princess Peach's help, and be smart enough not to knock the mushrooms back at the boss when Peach tosses them for you, and use Mix Flowers.
If I'm remembering right, worst case scenario per turn was that I was doing over a 1000 HP of damage (
1 Mix Flower per brother (~5-600 HP each) - maybe 150 HP that the boss got healed from her ships
), and she only has
3000 HP
.
Her final phase, was her as that giant alien thing with the tentacles.
This battle forces you to use a variety of bro items to be truly effective.
First things first, Mix Flower her until her tentacles go away. This takes 1 turn, 2 max if you screw up in making a sufficiently large mix flower fireball. The crown is next, because it's the key to opening up her defense. Knock that down with the trampoline or copy flower. Thanks to the mix flower getting it down some, it shouldn't take more than a turn. Once that's gone, you have a turn, maybe two if you're lucky, to get as many attacks as you can get in while her defenses are down. Mix flower her to death. Again, about 1000 HP per turn. She has 3000 HP as well.
This
final phase
is the boss I was talking about taking fifteen minutes by the way. The
previous one
shouldn't take more than ten.
Honestly, the boss that took me forever was
Commander Shroob
as it took me fifteen minutes of battle before I realized that
you have to kill the back two shroobs to roll the giant bomb back to him
. That one was a little obtuse, and while I enjoyed the inclusion of puzzle elements in my boss battle, I can understand if someone was frustrated by it, considering that there were no real hints as to what you were supposed to do. I just kept
killing the outer shroobs, flattening the middle one
.
If you want to make any of this go even faster, I'd recommend using the
Dynamic Badges to increase the Bro Items attack power
, and if you can get enough beans, the
Ulti-Free Badge on one of the characters to make the use of Bro Items free, which helps negate the use of 2 Bro Items per attack while using the Dynamic Badge
. I've found that equipping the
Easy Badge on the babies
is helpful if you're having trouble with timing.
As for your "other negatives" list: I agree with all of them. They just didn't matter as much to me. Outside of a handful of titles such as the Golden Sun series (which I didn't like very much, although I still have to play The Lost Age), which have interesting environmental puzzles, in my opinion overworlds tend to be boring in JRPGs and are just a prolonged interlude between dungeons and towns. But that's my opinion, and I'm well aware it's not shared by many. I already touched on the relative quality of the story and dialogue compared to SS in my first post.
The game gets very boring in a hurry. The writing isn't anywhere near as funny as it was in SS, badges are nigh worthless, and the addition of the babies was completely unnecessary. It may be worthy of a "price drop get," but no more than that.
The game gets very boring in a hurry. The writing isn't anywhere near as funny as it was in SS, badges are nigh worthless, and the addition of the babies was completely unnecessary. It may be worthy of a "price drop get," but no more than that.
Most of the people knocking this game seem to be doing so just because it isn't as great as Superstar Saga. Well, sure, okay -- Superstar Saga was a fantastic game, and it would've been extraordinarily difficult to top it. But the game is still awesome.
Complaining about the writing? Please. The writing in this game is extremely good (with the same quality that's been in titles like Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, Paper Mario 2, and other recent Nintendo titles), and the humor is very strong. I guess that one is debatable, because humor is so subjective, but I laughed constantly during the game.
The Hammer Bros. were classic, the Star Gate was absolutely hilarious, the babies were funny, Luigi was funny, Stuffwell was priceless, the Yoshis, and so on
. I don't get knocking the writing here, because it's clearly very strong.
I didn't find the game repetitive just because there was such a wide variety of attacks available, much more than in Superstar Saga. If you chose to use only one, then that's your loss, but each of them had particular benefits and were useful in the right situations. While the basic hammer attack did suck, the variety came from the Bros. Items, which were varied in type and so plentiful and cheap in the game that you could basically use nothing but those in every fight -- one of the benefits of integrating special attacks into items rather than MP-consuming skills.
I also never had problems with bosses or fights taking too long. I've heard more complaining about the replicating cubes than anything -- anyone that had difficulty with those, though, just wasn't playing the game right. Aside from the fact that they're easy as hell if you use a group attack item to take them all out at once, they're also amazingly easy as long as you counterattack to weaken them.
The level design was great:
particularly the Giant Yoshi, Princess Shroob's Castle, and Thwomp Volcano
. Also, this game had some pretty awesome bosses that were interesting and clever, and I loved, as someone mentioned earlier, adding puzzle elements to boss fights.
Again I bring up Giant Yoshi, because the boss fight in there where the Yoshis needed to be freed in order to have them attack the boss was a fantastic fight. So was Commander Shroob and the Elder Shrooboid once I realized what to do.
I'm not saying the game is perfect -- I would've liked an overworld, too, and a few more towns to visit, for instance. But the bottom line is that while this game isn't as good as Superstar Saga, it's still very good and a lot of fun, and definitely worthy of purchase/playthrough.
I didn't want to start yet another new thread, but I just beat Superstar Saga today. I'm not sure where, but somewhere someone was saying how the last boss was super hard, etc. but it was worth it because of something hilarious Fawful said. Did I miss it? Someone fill me in, either spoilerized or PM, please... I am NOT going through that again!
The only Mario RPG I've finished is the first on the SNES.
Paper Mario: TYD got boring and I never finished it.
SS got boring and I never finished it.
and now PiT got boring and I doubt I'll finish it.
They are awesome while they last, but to say one is better than the other is ridiculous. SS and PiT are from the same mold.
Hey hey, just bought this 20 minutes ago when Best Buy claimed to not have any Devil May Cry 3: SE. They said the same thing about the Castlevania Double Pack about a week ago so I made them look in the back and *poof* they had it. This salesman was a little more persistent and wasn't going to walk 100 steps for the guy who has probably put him through college.
Just beat Partners in Time last night. Both Shroob sisters only took about 15 minutes because of how powerful the mix flowers are. I bought a ton of them as well as the badge that gives 10 health back each turn. Didn't die once and the fights were really easy.
The biggest problems of Partners in Time was that it lost some of the humor of SS, and it opted for a hub system instead of a world map. If they had just added some exploration to the game, it would have been great, and I don't think anyone would notice the lack of humor as much as they do.
the battle system is so much better in PiT i didn't really miss the humor. the bosses in both games are pretty lame, and they both are very HP inflated, though it's more noticeable in PiT.
the battle system is so much better in PiT i didn't really miss the humor. the bosses in both games are pretty lame, and they both are very HP inflated, though it's more noticeable in PiT.
