So, who's playing the new Paper Mario?

I downloaded it last night and started playing first thing this morning, and while it's probably no shock to anyone here that I'd be enamoured with a Mario game, I could barely put it down to eat.

Even with all the press this game got, I found the concept rather baffling. How do you make a turn-based RPG with no experience points, levels, or even stats? Isn't it just an adventure game minus the pointing and clicking at that point?

Having put in some hours, I get it now. It's not about the stickers, it's about the coins.

Basic attack stickers are in absolutely no short supply. The thing is that stomping a bunch of goombas will get you nothing, but stomping goombas with finesse gets you coins, which you can use to buy better stickers in order to fight bigger and stronger mobs with greater finesse. Also, the more coins you have, the more you can pump into the battle spinner, which gets you bonuses as well as letting you use multiple stickers at a time.

Better stickers can lead to better coin bonuses, but the game is balanced such that, at least at this point, I've yet to find a way cheese the system into giving back more coins than what it cost to buy the better stickers, so there's a good push and pull of just fighting regular goombas and koopas with basic stickers to build up coins to use in more urgent situations. At the same time, enemies are visible on the map and are very easy to simply avoid, should you prefer.

The humour is still there, and it's a breath of fresh air to play a game with actual wit and wordplay rather than just regurgitating tired references and internet memes. (okay, so someone did shout "hey, listen!" at me once already, but I'll let it one incident slide)