Blivsey wrote: ↑4 years ago
I hear BIS is pretty alright, but I'm the type who needs to play in order with a series like this, so...
BIS is just fine in my opinion. I've heard people say it's their favorite in the series, but honestly I think it's pretty overrated. I liked it a lot when it first came out, but it was the second game in the series I finished (I didn't own/complete PiT until a few years ago) so I wasn't really suffering from the fatigue of the series yet and I was just happy to play a sequel to one of my favorite games of all time. I believe I've completed it 3 or 4 times (once in the remake and 2 or 3 times in the original) and every time I find myself a little more unimpressed than the last. Switching between Bowser and the bros inside of him is clunky, and ends up just making fighting regular scrub enemies tedious and time consuming.
Also, the insides of Bowser all feel very same-ey throughout the whole game. Once you've seen one part you've seen the whole thing. And even the overworld areas feel pretty generic. Areas in SS all felt like they had a reason to exist. Stardust Fields is a border between kingdoms that's surveilled by the military. Hoohoo Village has inhabitants with ties to an ancient civilization whose writing can be seen all over on the walls. Chucklehuck Woods/Chateau de Chucklehuck has a backstory of an old man who has gotten so obsessed with perfecting his craft of brewing soda that he's gone insane.
Bowser's Inside Story has... a beach with giant rotten teeth? Which I guess is creative but it literally serves the purpose of any generic beach. And that's also literally the only area I can remember despite having played this game like 6 months ago. Googling, I see there's Bumpsy Plains which the wiki describes as "a small grassy area." Dimble Wood, "a dense forest filled with many trees." Blubble Lake, "a huge lake with many rock structures and stone walls." Nothing that happens in these areas is at all relevant to the place it's happening, you could easily make any story events happen anywhere because they're just so unimportant.
There's not really any new memorable characters in the game nor particularly good writing. There's that block guy who is a guy made out of blocks and speaks with a cartoony french accent. They introduced Starlow who has stuck around for all the games after it, and as far as I can tell she just serves the purpose of spouting dialogue for Mario and Luigi even though it was never an issue to just have NPCs have one-sided conversations. Or if you need to have a part where Mario & Luigi say something, have them spout a second of Italian gibberish because they don't know anything that the player doesn't know.
It just seems to me like they came up with the "Mario and Luigi are inside Bowser" thing and stopped the creativity right there cause they didn't want to overload people with new ideas. I'm pretty sure I saw an interview from someone who worked on Paper Jam that basically said they only used generic Mario characters and areas through the whole game cause having the real world and paper world together was already a big, new concept, and that game is the most offensively bland in the whole series. So I wouldn't be surprised if that same attitude is what has made the other games so unremarkable as well.
Anyway that got way more analytical than necessary so I'll end this here.
edit: I guess I should say, Dream Team kinda went in a better direction than these points I've mentioned, but that game is SERIOUSLY held back just by constantly being a tutorial for itself
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