Foxx Heart

This game is Paper Mario is name only. The battles are central to the game but have no reward--no exp, no items. absolutely nothing but a waste of time solving yet another puzzle before taking a few more steps to enter another worthless battle. Characters are nearly all generic toads. The "partners" are only with you for certain areas and cannot be controlled in battle. Everyone's favorite feature of Switch games return with breakable weapons, which was super disheartening to realize. Despite breaking, there is almost no variety in weapons. Aside from a few hammers (fire, ice, throwing) everything is just a direct upgrade from the last option. This made the unrewarding battle system even more boring. It was honestly very fun for the first half with some great writing, but the entire experience became such a grind that I didn't even want to finish it. There was an extremely noticeable decline in the writing as the game went on with more and more reliance on "LOLpaper!" which has been an ongoing problem since Sticker Star. There is a section of the game where you can look at concept art for the game and it was unbelievably telling when the last few areas had little to no changes from the unlocked art. That last half feels rushed which makes absolutely no sense since it would have been finished by the time it was announced. By the end I realized that there was no reason for this to be a Paper Mario game; it could have been any other Mario game and very little would have changed. The bosses are indeed a problem, as everyone else is saying, but not for the same reason. It's not just that they're completely devoid of creativity or passion (which they are), but also that the way they're beaten is so incredibly violent in ways that made me, a grown adult who loves horror movies, uncomfortable. SPOILERS: The first stationary boss is beaten by grabbing its colored pencils and violently stabbing it repeatedly with motion controls. Another boss further on is finished off by grabbing it by the neck and ripping feathers from its head, again with motion controls. END SPOILERS. These fights feel so out of place in a Mario game and just inappropriate. With the main bosses all being stationary and the final move being physically done by the player, this is the first video game I've ever legitimately felt would be scarily immitatable by kids. This isn't the game Paper Mario fans wanted, or a game Nintendo fans in general asked for. It's shallow and a rehash of previous games (yet another Blooper fight, finding even more toads, etc) that fails to stand on its own in any meaningful way.