Escape from Ever After

While I would recommend this game to anyone trying to get their Paper Mario fix in the present time, don't go into this game expecting the same level of depth and creativity that came with the original 3 Paper Marios. First, the good: -Concept: This is the only Paper Mario clone i've played that ACTUALLY has a good reason for the characters to be paper-y and flat. However that falls apart towards the end of the game. But taking well-known literature and characters and giving it the sarcastic twang of Paper Mario humor works pretty well at times. -Art Style: The games art style is charming and looks professional. Other Paper Mario games can sometimes look too cheap trying to emulate that flat style, but this does it very well. -Combat: The combat is good, not great but good. I'll talk about my issues with it later, but at a basic level the battle system and action command system works pretty well. Then we come to the bad: -Deeper combat and Badges(Trinkets): As the game progresses, you gain Trinkets that function exactly like badges did in Paper Mario. However, the devs were too focused on TTYD's ability to equip multiple of the same badge so eventually you stop getting new badges and instead just get a bunch of copies of the badges you already have. And the badges you get barely change anything offensively besides Attack Ups. There are so many defensive Badges and nothing that changes up the way your characters can attack aside from their given moves. In Paper Mario they gave Mario his jumps and his hammer. If you ran into an enemy you couldnt jump on, you used the hammer. This game has your characters fit into a single archetype and keeps them there for the whole game. You can switch betweeen partners easier, even swapping your main character out, but too often i found myself starting a battle with the main character realizing that he was completely useless for the enemies in front of me. For your main character you have; The move that hits from the front, the move that hits from the top, the move that hits from the back, and the move that hits from the front but multiple times. Only one of those moves doesnt cost this game's equivalent to FP, and especially in the early game those costs are WAY too high. As the game continued, the Combat got VERY repetitive and felt like a slog to get through. -Synergy Points: Way too many things in this game use Synergy points (AKA Star Power from Paper Mario) You have a version of Refresh that any character can use, ONE special move for every character, a revive mechanic that halves your remaining partner's HP to revive a downed ally, AND it costs synergy to switch your partners out and still allow them to act in the same turn. Don't expect to be able to use any ability that costs more than 1 synergy point multiple times in a battle without playing defensively and using Trinkets that increase your synergy gain when successfully performing action commands. -Shields and Stacks: During combat, you'll run into enemies with shields (completely blocks attacks from the front) or enemies arranged in a stack or tower. Only 4 abilites directly interact with these mechanics. One that breaks a single sheild, 1 that pulls away a single shield, A flying attack that hits all enemies in the stack from the top down, and a plant attack that hits all enemies in a stack from the bottom up. These 4 abilites are on 3 characters total, so you're always going to spend the first turn of battle switch characters around because you can't build your starting character to remove shields or do damage to the whole stack. -Backtracking: If you decide to go into old worlds looking for collectables or getting a trinket you missed, be prepared to get into way too many meaningless fights. Battles pretty quickly drop in XP drops as you progress through the game so you'll get stuck in battles where you have to use a TON of FP trying to get through the fight quickly cause this is the 6th fight in a row you couldn't get past and because it costs 5 FP to do the one move that actually hits all the enemies in a line, but because of how bad the damage scaling is in this game, you only deal 1 damage to any enemy beyond the first even with Attack ups equipped. So any battle with more than 3 enemies in it takes WAY too long and requires too many resources. You also only get 1 attack upgrade through the entire game so don't count on being strong enough to one shot enemies from earlier areas as even level one enemies have 3+ HP for some reason. This game just feels like fans of Paper Mario TTYD trying to make their own version of the game without really understanding the finer details of the Paper Mario series. It feels like a game that killed Paper Mario and is wearing its skin trying to pass itself off as a perfect copy, but has very little of the depth that Paper Mario games have. Oh but they have a Pit of 100 Trials for some reason even though the rest of the game is so short and there's barely any side content. There's more that I have issues with, (Like almost the entirety of Chapter 3, ugh.) but I would still recommend the game as a decent Paper Mario like. If Steam has number ratings I'd probably give this a 5 out of 10. It's just OK