Super Paper Mario is undoubtedly the oddball of the series. The modern entries may have marked a shift in direction from the classic trilogy, but at least they all remained turn-based RPGs! And even in aesthetics too, Super is nothing like any of the others. Incredibly geometric designs for both areas and characters, with the exception of course of actual Mario characters, who look the exact same as they did in Thousand-Year Door... Super almost ends up feeling like a completely unrelated game with Mario characters slapped in it. There's something sort of charming about the oddball-ness, though.
Seemingly contrary to Nintendo's design philosophy (I suppose it was developed by Intelligent Systems instead), the gameplay is Super's weakest aspect. The game is largely a platformer in which you switch between 2D and 3D, though you can only stay in the latter for short periods of time. There's health and damage values and items and stuff for combat, but combat itself is purely action-focused. The developers clearly knew people were going to be unhappy about such a departure from the last two games, hence the infamous line “I love going on message boards and complaining about games I've never played!” The underlying message here is, of course, to at least give a game a shot before declaring it bad. And when it comes to gameplay, Super Paper Mario isn't bad, it's just... well, a little uninteresting. It's lacking the mechanical depth of its predecessors (even if they weren't super complicated either) and would make for a pretty boring and uninteresting game if it stuck to the expectations it builds up after the first chapter. I wouldn't blame people for picking up the game, playing it for a bit, then deciding it wasn't particularly fun and putting it down. But I promise it gets more interesting!
Where Super excels is its writing and its story. It's able to hit a level of comedic self awareness that the two games before it never could, while also having an incredible ability to hit more complicated (and particularly somber) emotions. Super Paper Mario, hands down, has the best story of any Mario game. And that story is almost single-handedly what's keeping the game alive in people's memory today. The brunt of the story largely lurks in the background until you near the end of the game, and there's one particular segment that is quite simply Super Paper Mario's Big Moment, when the game briefly goes flying off the rails. If you're going to play this game for the first time, I implore you to do it blind, since it's so much more impactful that way (and that means don't read the spoilered text!). The World of Nothing serves as the moment Super Paper Mario finally shows you what you're fighting against, and the weight of it hits you like a sack of bricks. A series of tedious fights championed by individual Sammer Guys with their own goofy names and goofy dialogue cut short by approaching doom, as panic creates the sole realization of “I don't want to die”. In the context of the game, each world you venture through is a different dimension, and that's felt in the wide variety of aesthetics each one has, as they're not connected in any way. There's so much variety, but The Void seeks to destroy all that. The individuality of each dimension and its wide array of quirky inhabitants will all be reduced to nothingness. Empty expanses of white as far as the eye can see. It's horrific. For the first time in the game, Count Bleck feels like a real threat, and a despicable one at that. The stakes are as high as they possibly could be. (...and the segment would probably be made better in retrospect if Sammer's Kingdom wasn't magically restored as soon as you beat the game, if it instead stood there as a reminder of what was lost and what failure would've meant for all worlds... but I digress. As a sidenote, let's also not forget that immediately after this segment, Dimentio literally kills your entire party and you get sent to the afterlife. Absolutely wild game.)
The one other thing to gush about with Super Paper Mario is how it handles its villains. Without really any partners this time around (Pixls never really say a word past when you meet them, so they certainly don't fill the void), Super instead turns its attention to its cast of villains to flesh out. Count Bleck is the game's big bad, but he also has a little troupe of followers. Each one has a distinctly charming personality, and after every chapter, you get to watch a cutscene of them all plotting at Bleck's layer, so they certainly have a strong presence all throughout the game (something I think the following Paper Mario games would struggle with... among many other issues). Even if they're villains, it's hard not to fall in love with them. They’re treated with a level of humanity you wouldn’t expect from a game titled “Super Paper Mario” of all things. And that wraps back around to why it’s so important I think to stick with Super Paper Mario. The entire game is not Chapter 1.
As much as I love this game, I couldn’t reasonably rate it too high, because I know that the actual thing you spend most of your time doing when playing the game is, y’know... playing the game! And while Super Paper Mario’s gameplay isn’t necessarily bad, there are so many more interesting games to play in that aspect. Super Paper Mario is a game that hits hard with its story, especially considering that immediately after the game, it seems Nintendo reined Intelligent Systems back in a bit, and now they’re simply not allowed to make any narratives as ambitious. It’s sad to see, because with the refined gameplay, I think Super Paper Mario could be a masterpiece. It’s able to be both witty and somber; it can make you laugh and it can make you cry. And some of the scenarios it puts you through are just so amazingly out of left field. In the end... I think we all love the idea of Super Paper Mario more than we might love the game itself.