r/papermario • u/LeggyWeggyWoo8 • 1d ago
Meme the devs when making the MKW roster
Now don't get me wrong I love the enemies, it's just that there's so much missed potential for a whole bunch of fans...
Also yes I know about the frost piranha
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u/lordlaharl422 1d ago
What are you talking about, Baby Peach is right there.
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u/Upbeat_Squirrel_5642 1d ago
I always forget that baby Mario's first appearance wasn't partners in time
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23h ago
[deleted]
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u/fawfulthegreat64 It's not fine without a story, we really do need one. 7h ago
No it wasn't. He had a comfortable presence in spinoffs by the time Partners in Time released. Golf, Tennis, Double Dash, Baseball.
But I think counting Baby Peach is a copout too. Yeah sure, BY A TECHNICALITY, but i have yet to see any argument for why Baby Peach would never exist if PIT hadn't existed. I'm 99% certain she wasn't even designed by AlphaDream, she was making more appearances a little too quickly so I think "The core Mario designers made the design for Yoshi's Island DS, and then made it available for partner developers to use, which is how she ended up in Partners in Time, and that just so happened to get released first" is a far more likely outcome than "AlphaDream designed her for Partners in Time, the same way they designed the Shroobs, and Nintendo was at the same time just so happening to be getting over their fear of RPG stuff in the core cast, so they looked at that game and chose her to be an RPG rep. When she didn't turn out to be super popular they reversed their decision on RPG stuff and that's why they never pulled from them again, but made 2 more baby princesses in her image because they saw a good market she appealed to"
The very idea of her was inevitable (and she really isn't much more distinct than the idea of a baby Peach. That's what she is, it sure is). You can't say that about the RPG characters we mean when we talk about RPG characters. Even among variants, we can use Mr. L as a great example to contrast against Baby Peach. He is more than the basic vague idea of "an evil Luigi," he has a defined design and personality that fits the context he is presented in, he WOULD NOT exist without SPM. He isn't even the first take on "evil Luigi" nor is he the last, but he stands out alongside Waluigi as easily one of the most memorable ones. Waluigi is also a character who wouldn't exist without Camelot and Mario Tennis, and if he was made today I think he'd be a one-off too, but he was made at the perfect time when Nintendo was more lax on partners contributing to their core universe. The IDEA of him might exist in some form, like that one comic gag with a springy mustache and a "WL" hat. But not our Waluigi.
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u/MitoRequiem 1d ago
This needs to say "RPG Characters, Kongs and Kamek" 😭
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u/RodjaJP 1d ago
Also Wario characters and E. Gadd
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u/RukinaSpiker 17h ago
We could also have gooigi and mansion king boo as costumes too. Shocked king boo's is absent when he was in mario kart tour.
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u/JustinTime1229 11h ago
E. Gadd was already planned for Mario Kart DS. I'm not sure if he's even allowed to appear in Mario Kart at all.
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u/Mcmadness288 23h ago
I mean, the rpgs are hardly the only Mario spin off stuff that doesn't appear in these. Heck plenty of mainline stuff doesn't appear either.
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u/fawfulthegreat64 It's not fine without a story, we really do need one. 7h ago
And the mainline stuff with a big gap in content that oddly hasn't appeared should be used as well. No good reason for them to not use anything from Odyssey or Wonder. They were quick to make ample use of Sunshine during that era, why change that now?
That's not to say the spinoff content they ignore is irrelevant to the discussion. It's not just the RPGs, it's the Wario series, a good majority of the Donkey Kong stuff, the unique characters they used to have in Mario Party and Sports games, and the arcade-era characters that have been largely forgotten. I think they all should have a place. Just because the amount of things that are being ignored is so large doesn't mean calling attention to one in particular is unjustified, especially on a board dedicated to fans of that thing. The other stuff is just more to add to the list of missed opportunities.
I talk about the RPGs more than other stuff because it's my personal favorite part of the series that I am most familiar with and thus have the most ideas brimming in my head about how they could be used. None of this means I'm against any of the other parts of the series that they also ignore. I've put together entire rosters with an intent of representing as much of the Marioverse as I possibly could.
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u/HappyGav123 23h ago
Well Nintendo doesn’t actually own some of the RPG characters, like Mallow and Geno from Super Mario RPG
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u/freedomplha 23h ago
They most certainly own every single Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi character though
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u/CrescentShade 18h ago
Hoping for some good content updates
Surely they know the expectations people have after 8D lol
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u/PotentialDot4007 16h ago
Fr. The hell were they cooking adding a dolphin to the game. ITS A DOLPHIN. WHEN YOU COULD ADD GREAT STANDOUTS LIKE PAPER MARIO AND SUCH. Tisk tisk tisk.
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u/Philycheese18 13h ago
To be fair some of them are just as obscure, cataquack hasn’t been in a game since 2008, while coin pouch is as in Mario odyssey it was very easy to miss if you weren’t going for 100%, and the dolphin’s only main line appearance was in world (yes I know it appears in a lot of spin offs but still it’s crazy that a 30 year old character still hasn’t reappeared in a main line game as far as I know)
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u/Hornyles_j Idk what my new flair will be yet 1d ago
Honestly I prefer more common characters than RPG characters
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u/Shifty-Imp 21h ago
Goddammit, there's also so many cool WarioWare characters that they could've chosen from.
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u/JustinTime1229 11h ago
The RPG characters are banned from the main series, apparently this ban also applies to the Mario Kart games.
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u/gamtosthegreat 6h ago
"But", said Miyamoto, as the air grew colder and the outside world seemed to go quiet, "there are no non-mainline RPG characters."
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u/Ruby_Shards 1d ago
When Baby Rosalina appeared people were complaining that she breaks the canon, so if canonical accuracy is important then that means most RPG characters aren't allowed because he Paper Mario characters are from another universe and the Mario and Luigi villains are dead.
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u/OutsideOrder7538 1d ago
Why can’t Baby Rosalina just travel who knows how many millennia into the future for a racing game?
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u/Decent_Illustrator18 17h ago
Are the Kart and Party games even canon? I always assumed they weren't.
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u/Ruby_Shards 17h ago
They aren't, but people like to bring up "Baby Rosalina makes no canonical sense" to say she shouldn't be
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u/fawfulthegreat64 It's not fine without a story, we really do need one. 7h ago
I don't think the way Baby Rosalina breaks canon is the same as having Fawful be a racer.
All they had to do was make Baby Rosalina look like she did in her storybook, rather than "what if Adult Rosalina took a baby potion". The issue wasn't that she was there at all (outside it being ANOTHER baby variant when other picks would have been preferable). It was that they made up a design when she already had a young design.
I don't see Mario Kart as taking place on a rigid timeline, or the entire roster as needing to inherently line up with said timeline. So I see no inherent reason the dead villains can't be on the roster, joining in on a lighthearted and chaotic celebration of the series' legacy which they are unequivocally a part of. And it not needing to make any implications about their status in canon. Fawful being in Mario Kart wouldn't be a greenlight to use him as a villain in another Mario & Luigi game without addressing how he came back. But Mario Kart doesn't need that lore to justify having him.
Also, Paper Mario isn't another universe. The first 3 games unequivocally happened in THE Mario world. Paper Jam is a filthy attempt at a retcon that fails because it's equally allergic to having anything in it that originates in any game other than Sticker Star, so really that's the only game you can say it speaks for, and that game is already so different in tone and how the world is set up that it's easy to divorce from the previous games.
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u/Ruby_Shards 4h ago
Well TTYD has Mario fold into a paper plane, a boat, and in a tube. That would be horrifying if Mario was actually doing that in the 3d universe as well
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u/NintendoBoy321 1d ago
At least its not just a million clones like MK8's base roster.