itch.io

I may be biased because I helped with this mod and have otherwise followed its development fairly closely, but I still think this is one of the coolest mods I’ve seen in a while.

I can talk at length about how awesome each of the various aspects of the mod is, and there’s a lot to say in that regard, but I think the main thing I want to address is the level of polish. It is unmatched by any PM64 mod that has ever been released, and it is visible everywhere you look.

The music imports are not only clean, but they also sound amazing (and I’m not just talking about the one I made, of course). The sound design is top-notch, with audio details so subtle that I wouldn’t have even noticed if the dev hadn’t directly made me aware of them.

The maps are rich in actually meaningful detail, that is to say each map has something pretty to look at which adds character to the area as a whole. This is further strengthened by the fact that the maps have a strong sense of interconnectivity, so they lead into each other in a very plausible way. Because of all this, it’s inherently fun to explore the new maps just to see what’s lying around the corner. But exploration is also very rewarding, because there are secrets absolutely everywhere.

All of these are things that most mod creators don’t seem to put much thought into (myself included!), thinking it’s not worth spending the extra effort for things people aren’t actually going to notice. It’s my belief that, while people might indeed not notice some of the tinier details, they’d feel like something was missing if those details weren’t present. As a result, the focus on polish has created an inherently authentic experience, that feels like something Nintendo themselves might make.

With that all said, it’d be remiss of me not to point out the few places where this breaks apart a little. My main complaint is with the story and writing. The story is a tad generic (“find 5 magical artifacts to solve whatever problem Mario has now”), and I’m honestly still not sure if Mario was within his right to just waltz into that mountain and steal the artifact from those Goombas. Like, what did they ever do to him? That sounds like a joke (and it kind of is) but I think a well thought-out story could’ve really brought things home here.

As I said the actual writing often falls flat a little as well. In the opening letter, the Yoshi Village elder invites Mario over for a party, but not to the actual party, no, instead he tells Mario to show up “to discuss his role and whether he wants to participate or not”, which, aside from being an awkwardly written line to begin with, is also just a strange premise to me. Why not just say the party is happening and he’s invited to go to that? Luigi’s reading this letter, which clearly states that he’s also invited, but then just tells Mario to go alone anyway?

Some of the gags kinda fall flat as well due to less than ideal delivery. The whale mentions for seemingly no reason that he just ate something Tayce T gave him, then during the trip suddenly realizes something’s wrong, calmly apologizes, and just dies? Same with the initial Spear Guy meeting, I understand that some reason needed to be contrived for why you’re fighting him initially but I just don’t think that was it. The cutscenes in this mod are all beautifully animated and paced, the dialogue really is what ruins them.

Then some technical bits. Some indoor areas have a slightly janky camera, specifically there’s a cave map where the camera goes so far to the right that one of the walls starts to face away from the camera leading to it becoming invisible. Then there’s that one mushroom with the single missing collider face, you know the one.

All this to say, I hope the full mod can keep at this level of quality and perhaps address some of these issues, because it was an absolutely breathtaking experience playing through this demo.

The fact that this was rushed is very apparent in the end result, but I still love what you were going for here. More effort put into the maps, sound design and writing would have strongly helped the overall atmosphere, but I still had fun exploring the tiny submarine and finding all its secrets through the progressive ability unlocks. This is a game where you’re constantly going back and forth through the same maps, and I liked that when I did revisit a map I’d already been to, there would usually be something new to find there.

my lawyer will be in touch

LOL! why does mario d

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!!THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!! I really wish itch had spoiler tags…

This was a very enjoyable mod! I really like the stories you came up with for this and your previous mod, Sacred Trio. There’s fun characters, pretty visuals and some interesting battles as well.

I really liked your use of colors in every aspect of the mod. From the slightly tinted dialogue boxes to the recolored hud to the eerie hues of the maps, it’s clear a lot of thought was put into it and it resulted in a very atmospheric experience.

I do have some complaints, mainly the music. If you weren’t aware, significant progress has been made in the tooling for PM64 music imports in the past several years, allowing songs to actually sound good without hitting any pitch limits, without notes playing way longer than they should, and with fitting instrumentation as well (including percussion! which I found especially lacking here). Many mods have demonstrated this ever since 2022, but it seems the community at large still believes imports are just fated to sound bad. Heck, I’ve heard some eerily source-accurate ports of that boss theme in the music channel.

I absolutely loved that Jr Troopa was a partner, it was a very pleasant surprise and I think putting him over Parakarry was a great choice. He’s well animated and just overall very fun to lug around with you. I do think you got his character a little wrong in the writing, though. Idk, his dialogue just didn’t seem like things he’d say in vanilla. But who knows, maybe I’m just missing some context from the full game.

Then here’s some technical problems I encountered:

• The game crashed any time a Dry Bones enemy threw a bone in battle, eventually I just decided to avoid starting any battles with Dry Bones because it was that consistent.
• The mushroom platforms in the Flame Stomp map have some very weird collision, Mario is clearly just walking on air.
• There’s a blind drop in a map very early on. Worse yet, it’s at an edge that has collision on one side but not another, and there’s zero visual indication of where you can/can’t jump off.
• Some of the bushes in the right side room with the dry bones on it use the wrong marker, so if you interact with them a coin or item will pop out in a completely different spot on the map.
• Several maps started to lag as soon as even one item or coin was spawned on them. There’s ways to optimize maps, I think mov made a video about it at one point.

Overall though, I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to Star Nova even more than I was after I played Sacred Trio! (And if you’d like help with importing music, feel free to ask me 👀)

Very clever game, though as is common with detective games it’s fairly easy to make wild guesses based on half-baked assumptions.

If by any chance someone is reading this comment before they actually play the game: For every demon there’s a definitive way to determine their identity, you will know it when you find it.

I thought the art was pretty neat, the Wigglypaint style is a cool way of giving the demons a slight “otherworldly” vibe in a strangely adorable way. I was expecting the designs of the demons themselves to be more important to determining their identity, though.

What I love about this game is how immediately apparent everything is. I had read absolutely nothing about the game until I started playing, and almost immediately understood the premise.

I’m strongly reminded of VVVVVV, in part because of the presentation (levels mostly themed around one color, takes place in space, difficult levels with quick resets, etc) but mostly because of the gameplay aspect of throwing yourself at a challenging segment for 3 hours and not even feeling that much of a rush when you do finally beat it.

The buttons for making your ship go faster and making the level scroll faster are obvious but excellent additions, adding an extra layer of planning to the game. I also really like how levels have multiple routes, so if you’re sick of trying the same route over and over again you can vary your approach a bit.

Oh, and also the music’s good too, yeah.

Once I figured out how you’re actually supposed to play, it took me quite a while to even get hit once. Generally kind of a monotonous gameplay loop, especially since there doesn’t seem to be any risk involved in restocking on pies. You can really just spend most of your time at the back of the stage and only come out whenever enemies appear on the far sides. Music was good though!

For a first Paper Mario mod, this is absolutely mindblowing. The fact that you reused Chapter 5's Fearsome Five segments might initially come off as lazy, and while it certainly saved you time on map editing it's clear that you used that saved time to work on every other aspect.

The battles are significantly more difficult, which I wouldn't mind if it was possible to save inbetween battles without the enemies respawning. There's new enemies (well, they're really just heavily modified vanilla enemies I guess), some new items, and a ton of new dialogue. To counter the challenging enemy formations, the partners have been given a bunch of new moves which are just amazing really. Shoutouts to the Nuclear Bonk and the Triple Zest specifically.

With all that said, I still think more could've been done to separate this mod from the base game segment it's clearly patched over. You could've edited textures here and there, recolored a whole bunch of things (heck, maybe vertex painting would've been enough in some areas), changed some small details in the maps...

Still, this mod was a lot of fun to play, and I hope to see more from you in the future.

I'll be charitable, since this was your first mod and you didn't exactly give yourself much time. Still, this one isn't great.

The core idea as you originally intended it sounds cool, but that's not really what this ended up being. It's really just the Chapter 4 cooking intermission followed by a Bowser fight. However, the mod still demonstrates a light amount of script editing to make the cooking part work on its own, and some asm patches being used to give Mario the partners and badges.

The one modding discipline you've clearly mastered is string editing, but even that doesn't show very well. Once the cooking part is over and the Bowser sequence begins, there's like three edited lines and the rest are all vanilla. Basically nothing in the epilogue is edited.

Overall I'm not a fan, but I hope that now that you don't have to worry about meeting a deadline anymore, you'll take the time to flesh out your original concept and make something awesome!

Being Rain in the Paper Mario Modding server in 2022 must be difficult, I think I wasn't alone in having high expectations for this mod. While the result ended up being quite good, the crunch you two had to go through is very clearly visible and it's clear a lot of stuff was removed.

Let's start with the presentation, which appears to have been mostly MrN's territory. The sprites were all excellent. I absolutely love the Paper Mario-ified BIS enemies and NPCs. The writing was very in character and also quite funny, it's clear a lot of thought was put into that. Finally, which one of you was responsible for the battle theme? I've never heard custom music implemented this well in any Paper Mario mod.

On the gameplay front, the battles were fun but also very simplistic for the most part. The final battle against the M & L memories was absolutely stellar, though. The attacks were very creatively adapted from BIS and it was a good challenge.

Then there's the segments in between the battles, which is where Rain got a chance to flex a little bit. This is why I mentioned having high expectations, because Rain always manages to make really cool tiny additions to the game's mechanics using ASM. For this mod, the additions were quite minor.

The first segment deals with a Spin Jump, another idea taken from the Mario & Luigi series. It's a clever way to add some extra functionality to the spin jump, and there's some tricky challenges to go along with it. The second segment gives Mario a Hammer Throw ability to use in the overworld, and I can't stress just how happy I am that Rain finally brought that back after showing a short demo of it several years ago. Still, I was expecting a lot more, especially considering the cool stuff that he made for the Christmas Special which had a significantly shorter development time.

Overall, this mod was a short but really fun experience, and you get bonus points because I love Bowser's Inside Story so much.

You guys make an amazing team, just as I expected!

This is a really cool little mod with all sorts of neat details. You scale a giant cake and then you're tasked with finding several ingredients for a cake which are spread throughout the land. The maps are all made by my man Den, who (to my knowledge) also did a decent amount of the scripting.

The twists on the basic attacks are nice, they put an interesting spin on the standard jump/hammer choice. The "open world" aspect is great, and exploring is a lot of fun because every map has something interesting to find. Also the cutscenes are amazing, definitely the highlight of the mod.

I will say the final boss was kinda underwhelming, ultimately it was just a stronger Shy Guy. Also, while the maps were really cool, one thing I'd like Den to work on is to make them slightly nicer to look at. Y'know, add some cool details or an eye catching landmark here and there.

Overall, this was an amazing mod and I can't wait to see what you guys do next (individually or together).

Oh man, you've absolutely outdone yourself here.

Between this and Black Pit, you've not only demonstrated that you have a great amount of skill in terms of custom ASM, but also that you can create really fun core gameplay mechanics. Now I haven't played Overcooked, so I don't really have a reference for this, but I can say that the mod in isolation was insanely fun. Having to juggle all the different ingredients and bowls around to get an optimal time was very gratifying. I even managed to get 3 stars on the first level 👀.

I also like that there's multiple varieties of cake, not to mention other small things like the completely custom title screen with high score board (even if it doesnt seem to work all too well).

Really, you did a fantastic job. You've gone way beyond anything I could've ever expected from this jam, even though you didn't quite get to polish it to your liking. 👏

see my balls

I found it online :D

Damn DEN, this was FUCKING amazing!!!