Review Information
Game Reviewed Paper Mario World, by Superadammario
Review Author Vitiman
Created Jul 14 2021, 5:46 AM

General Commentary and Game Overview
...yup. This sure is going to be a review.

Mhm.

All right, so my quest to review the entirety of MFGG's early (let's say pre-2005) repertoire has led me to the inevitability of... having to do a Paper Mario World review... 😒

Yes, I'm simply all too 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱 to spend any amount of time writing the same cliche cliches and overthought thoughts. You certainly don't have to be an experienced game designer to take one look at this masterpiece and come to the same conclusion everyone else has: whew, it's pretty bad. Is it the worst thing ever? Well, some may have you believe just that! But does hindsight (of nearly 20 years) do this game any favours? Well... no. But I almost think it'd be more interesting to dissect the reviews 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴 have taken the time to write down over the years and see if the critique of this game has evolved much beyond the usual astonishment that, yes indeed, sometimes MFGG let in a few rough games.

Wait until these jokers find out that one of MFGG's longest serving administrators openly supported this game back in his youth and even supplied voice acting for it!

Okay okay, enough chit-chat, let's dive in. This will be a slightly different review than usual... let's consider it a review of reviews.
 
Pros The pros lists tend to come off much the same way: struggling to put to words anything they actually liked about this little game that couldn't.

- "Makes you feel incredibly good at fangaming even if you aren't."
Geez, buddy. Starting off with some passive aggression here, which is a very common trait among the pros lists for this one.
- "Umm... uhhh..."
Jeff Silvers was left speechless. I mean, how couldn't he be? The dude made Mario Epic 2. He's already above us.
- "Mario music is decent ... You can use party members."
SP/Pedigree finally gives us our first legitimate praise. It's... not much, but an earnest attempt was made here.
- "Zip, nada, zero."
Kitsune doesn't even try. He ain't having any of this.
- "the sound"
This is from a particularly atrocious review, I'd like to add. This is all they wrote for the pros list.
- "None. Absolutely no Pros at all."
You sure, guy? You can't think of anything at all? How lazy 😏
 
Cons The cons lists are where people get especially interesting...

- "Too many to list."
Starting off simple, I like that. He's gonna save you the cons for later (he doesn't, his review is pretty brief).
- "... Mario RPG sprites do NOT go well in a 2-D game."
A legitimate gripe, but would you believe this is kind of the only con he bothered listing? Haha, I appreciate the focus.
- "This game is so BAD, none of the pros want to play it. i.e. EVERYBODY"
Who are the pros? Oh, everyone. Thanks for the heads up, man. I can't imagine why anyone would want to play this... it's
not like it's one of the most over-reviewed things on this site or anything.
- "... Poor attempt at a storyline. Creepy Yoshi narration. Mediocre programming. ..."
Finally, Jeff Silvers comes in with some blunt and to-the-point gripes. His review is one of the better ones I've read.
- "Everything else"
God, you people are lazy. You can't even write your complaints out. Too much work, I guess!
 
Impressions
Gameplay
2 / 10
Let's lay the ground rules going forward: my scores are my own. I'm not scoring the reviews. I'm just going to be quoting them and adding my own bit of commentary for... let's say "flavour"!

"If I had paid for this, I would declare highway robbery, but since I hadn't, I'll just sit back and laugh at how pitiful the gameplay is."

Yoshimaster's review has been what I've been quoting first in all of the sections, and it should come as no surprise that I find his to be one of the most poorly-written, 'Robert Christgau wannabe' pieces of fluff I've seen thus far on this site. Everyone wants to be that biting critic. The one who says "this game is pure garbage. undeniable. move on" without adding anything remotely of value. Yes, anyone can take one look at this game and tell it's pretty shoddy, even - dare I say - terrible! It's hard to declare that as subjective. But I'm honestly a bit astonished (well... not really) that these denizens of early MFGG took to being such harsh and unforgiving borderline flamers at the sight of a mediocre fangame.

"NO. I could just stop there, but I have to point out that this game has the same gameplay found in SMMGM. Which means there is no gameplay. Period."

What's SMMGM? Super Mario's Minigame Mayhem, it's a game Superadammario released just prior to PMW, and true to Xgoff's (yes, 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 Xgoff) word, the games do play remarkably similarly. Almost as if they were both created by an amateur teenage Mario fan in the early 2000s. Imagine that.

I would go ahead and dispute Xgoff's claim that there isn't any gameplay, but I figure he's speaking in hyperbole and leave it at that. I've done that a lot in some of my reviews too. Although I've since tried to distance myself from that kind of hammish writing - it's pretty amateurish.

"... The game uses built-in platform movement, but I'm not so against that. You can't stomp enemies, which annoys me (yeah, I know I committed the same crime in Super Mario Epic, back off). ..."

Jeff might very well be the only reviewer in the entire lot to actually acknowledge some degree of hypocrisy in his admonishing of PMW. He also is the only one to, while not exactly being 𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘥 to the game, does make an effort to provide legitimate criticisms and word things as directly and seriously as possible. For a review from 2004, this seems to be quite the rarity. Jeff Silvers was the OG VinnyVideo in that regard, we could say!

"At least there was some effort to try and vary it. Standard TGF platform movement, 4-directional movement, and even a few racer movement levels. Everything is the default movement, and falls prey to the same all familiar bugs. So it doesn't play very well."

It should probably not shock anyone that our gracious webmaster Retriever II gave a pretty sincere and non-catastrophic review. I think his complaints are perfectly reasonable and he isn't even terribly banged up about how the game plays. It's almost as if he's expecting it and has probably played worse. As we all have, by now...

"Um...next question, please."

Next quote. (yes, that's really all they wrote for this entire section)

"UGH! First off, An MFGG exclusive screen pops up when you start, And it looks like crap! ..."

That's not really a 'gameplay' problem, is it? Methinks you could have at least written this in the section right below this one, that might have served us all better. I guess I've seen worse. Lord knows I go on tangents in some of my reviews myself, so I think we can all let it slide.

"The engine is horrific. I wanted to quit immediately, but I just couldn't. None of the glitches, however, forced me to reboot the game."

I'd actually want to point out how I disagree with this fairly benign critique - you see, the glitches 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 booted me out of the game... sort of! When I recently stormed through the game as quickly as possible, I wound up having to quit because Mario's fireball just kind of stopped working on one screen. I think it had something to do with the game checking if the fireball was on screen or not, and the way it was programmed it meant that I couldn't fire another one until that one was destroyed... and it never hit anything. So off to purgatory it went.

"... Some would say [the controls are] crap. And it kinda is. This game WAS made with Multimedia Fusion ..."

Bruh.

Okay, I'm pulling your leg here. This isn't the end of his thought, I'm quote mining for a gag. He goes on to say that the default Clickteam movement is crap and he saw it coming. Even compares it to a Game Maker tutorial for making a platformer engine. So he's not butting heads with Click users here.

"... Level design, well, can you really call it level design? It feels like babies first videogame. ..."

The latest review as of me submitting this. I couldn't think of a better note to end this section on. A decent review, with a fair point. You can't ask for much else these days.

I just wish people would try better, you know?
 
Graphics
1 / 10
"Even though most of this is taken from libs, the graphics are still terrible. ..."

Can you imagine there was once a time when using things entirely from Click libraries was considered a net positive? My my, how times have changed.

"Here we go again... Good graphics with no attention paid to placement. ..."

Nobody can fess up and admit that some of these sprite rips aren't actually that good. Because they come from beloved creators at the time. It's almost as if there's a festering bias under all of these reviews... wouldn't that be a laugh?

"... It never specifies what exactly Yoshiman added to the game, but if you play it you'll be able to tell."

Oh, can I? I actually happen to know exactly what Yoshiman added to the game (thanks in large part to the developer sharing this information in his elaborate Youtube docuseries about its creation - no, I'm not making that up), and it sounds to me like you're pulling this kind of comment out of your arse to cover for the fact that you couldn't imagine someone like Yoshiman, a person I'm sure you looked up to at the time, being involved in this trainwreck. Everyone in these reviews are just stuffed with bias and hypocrisy. Who even wrote this comment?

...oh, Jeff... 𝘑𝘦𝘧𝘧... I'm rather disappointed. I guess even the most level-headed of us have our weak moments.

"... The use of a grid to allign objects and better attention to detail would have improved the graphics."

Oh, absolutely. I can agree with this verbatim. Everything feels really misaligned and... you know, this wasn't too uncommon back in those days.

"... It looks like "digital dog dookie", to quote Seanbaby."

Oh, did Seanbaby review Paper Mario World? Or- oh, uh. You're just... quoting a thing he said once. Because he was really popular at the time. I guess. Meh. Got my hopes up.

"... Wario, lo and behold, is the hilariously bad Wario sprite from Biebersoft's weird game, Super Mario Vs. the NWO World Tour ..."

Which is a sprite that a lot of people used at the time. It wasn't the world's best Wario sprite by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel it actually has this dorky charm to it. Hard to explain. But I guess he has a justification in finding it to be out of place - it's not like he's wrong, really.

"... The Mario sprite looks jpegged, hell, pretty much everything looks jpegged. ..."

Some of the first open critiques of the Mario sprite come to us in 2009, well after those old libs were ancient history and the necessity for reviewers to mince their words out of fear of hurting their friends was significantly mitigated. Too bad it couldn't save anyone from being as hurtful to the creator of this game... I guess it built up too much of a reputation by this point.

"...Wait what? You forgot the SNES pixel transition? You did literally every transition EXCEPT the one transition that would have forced Super Mario World to scream to the heavens for vengeance over your blasphemy?"

I... I'm sorry? What?
 
Sound
4 / 10
"The best aspect of this game, because, obviously, you can't ruin sounds."

Oh I beg to differ there, smartass. Source: I've been an audio engineer for many projects. You absolutely 𝗰𝗮𝗻 ruin sounds.

Before I move on, I'd like to point out the grand irony of Yoshimaster putting this game on blast when he's directly responsible for two of the worst fangames I've ever played. I guess it's true what they say: you don't need to be a chef to say a hamburger tastes like garbage.

"I don't remember a single sound effect in this game. Were there any? I don't care. I'm not going to bother checking."

You almost have to admire how little some of these people care about writing an honest review here. It must have been a race to beat on this game the quickest or something, because some of these reviews just say the same old tired crap like "this is too terrible for me to even comment on, next" or "uh, I forgot, but it was probably bad". Laughable, if it wasn't kind of infuriating.

"The Mario music is decent. Yes. Probably the only good thing about this game really. ..."

A lot of people seem to agree the music wasn't half bad. Well, by past-standards, I suppose.

"Those voiceovers were the best things ever. Seriously, this is the first game where I looked forward to the dialog. ..."

God, hard disagree. 𝘏𝘢𝘳𝘥 disagree. That voice acting was super awkward and I skipped it - without fail - each and every time. Gee, I wonder who contributed that part of the game?

It was Yoshiman. That's Yoshiman doing a weird squeaky voice. Hahahaha, you're welcome.

"... The actual voice acting, to quote Dr. Quinn from Sealab 2021, "OH SWEET GOD!" ..."

A contemporary critique of the voice acting, surprisingly. And you know it's contemporary to the game, because it expects you to know a Sealab 2021 character and something they said. Man, early [adult swim] seemed to appeal to a lot of early MFGG. One has to wonder why that is.

"... And it looks like Gollum got to audition as a voice actor, because I honestly don't think thats a real voice."

Haha, right? I have no idea how Yoshiman did that voice in his youth, but it's such an absurd thing to hear. I'm also pretty sure he did that in his Yoshi RPG game that I reviewed a while back. It was dreadful in that, too.
 
Final Words
3 / 10
Is this the worst fangame ever created? Hardly. Is it still pretty bad, you bet!

But I don't think that's why people are so eager to harp on it. I think it's become something of an in-joke for the community. One that thrives into the present day, no less. Some of these reviews are out-of-this-world unfair and brutal, and reflect the writings of a website predominately populated by preteens and potty-mouths - the exact kind of people who could find an easy target and let it rip. So maybe I'm being much too harsh on their critiques, but I thought it was worth a look down memory lane and see exactly how justified these paragraphs truly were.

To end on a quote from Akruru... "There are lots of good ideas, but... They all went wrong."

That goes for more than the game, too. MFGG has come a long way in how it responds to the games of others.

Comments
User Icon
VinnyVideo
Jul 16 2021, 10:56 PM
Paper Mario World is well-covered ground by now, but this is a fun and clever way to review this oft-reviewed game!

Quote (Vitiman)
"... The game uses built-in platform movement, but I'm not so against that. You can't stomp enemies, which annoys me (yeah, I know I committed the same crime in Super Mario Epic, back off). ..."

Jeff might very well be the only reviewer in the entire lot to actually acknowledge some degree of hypocrisy in his admonishing of PMW. He also is the only one to, while not exactly being 𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘥 to the game, does make an effort to provide legitimate criticisms and word things as directly and seriously as possible. For a review from 2004, this seems to be quite the rarity. Jeff Silvers was the OG VinnyVideo in that regard, we could say!

Aw, thanks! When I review games, I try to include some kind of concrete, constructive suggestion for improving the game. Even if the game's concept isn't that great, or if it's a brand-new developer who doesn't have much experience making games, I can almost always find something the developer could do to make the game better - something uncontroversial and within the developer's skill level. At least, that's what I try to do!

Quote (Vitiman)
Some of these reviews are out-of-this-world unfair and brutal, and reflect the writings of a website predominately populated by preteens and potty-mouths - the exact kind of people who could find an easy target and let it rip.

Yep! It's important to remember that most fangames are made by a single developer. Someone put a lot of time into making them - and they were kind enough to share them with us for free! Someone is probably proud of them - they're someone's baby! They might be an ugly baby that only knows how to cry, drool, and poop, but it's important to be gentle and helpful when providing critique. I think MFGG has improved in this regard over the years, but yeah, sometimes people reviewing games are more abrasive than they ought to be.
 
2 likes from: Q-Nova, Vitiman
User Icon
Q-Nova
Jul 17 2021, 4:30 AM
This is a very creative, excellent review! I agree with VinnyVideo in that people shouldn't be so rude when reviewing other people's games. While fangames take a lot of time and thought to make, they're just a fun hobby. Most of them are made by a single person indeed, and such people don't get paid for it nor can they work on it full time. I think it's unfair to compare a made-for-fun fangame to a commercial game -- one that is made by an ever-growing number of professionals that get paid for their hard work. I wouldn't like it if I shared a game that I had fun making and then everybody labels it with naughty words, giving nothing helpful at all, as if they expected it to be the next Super Mario World.

To be honest, I feel like there are still some mean-spirited reviews today, especially for the games made by a certain person. (I'm not sure if it's safe to name that person, but you might know who I'm talking about. At least the hate seems to be cooling down, though.) Kind of like how some people just destroy this game just because of it's reputation, without acknowledging the effort Superadammario put into it, even if he may not be the world's most experienced game maker. However, at least there are some good people around here! Even the old days have some good fruits like Jeff Silvers and Parakarry (the latter of whom still hangs around today)!

I think some of my reviews in the past were too harsh and amateurish, not to mention some of them are stuffed with pointless fluff and plagiarization of other people's reviews. Nowadays I try to be unbiased, honest, and straightforward with my reviews while providing helpful, meaningful criticism. For a long time, I've actually thought of going back and revising some of my reviews.
 
1 like from: Vitiman
User Icon
Vitiman
Jul 17 2021, 5:47 AM
Hey, I'd say go for it if you have the time and energy to. I actually re-reviewed Mario's Mansion 3 about a year ago for basically the same reason: my old review was shoddy, devoid of meaningful commentary, and was mainly just me going "it's great! but it's unfinished =(", which left a lot to the imagination.

Of course, I left the older review up - mainly for historical record. But also for some transparency: I reviewed this game when I was younger, and it wasn't a very good review. So here, enjoy two reviews for the price of one! Which is still free, I guess.
 
1 like from: Q-Nova
Pages: (1) 1 | Last Unread