My SO has the leak and has been playing it all morning and I've been passively watching. Dunno if any of this is new info since I didn't watch the treehouse but whatever, quick impressions:
1. It's got B-writer syndrome. The main dialog text is standard Treehouse garbage peppered with internet neologisms and bad references to pop culture, but a lot of the throwaway lines are actually genuinely funny and I get the distinct impression that the funny writer is bitter about the absence of combat. Also, I feel like it's a massive missed opporunity to not refer to the origami enemies as The Fold due to the sheer amount of wordplay you could get out of it, but maybe the mild religious implication would be too much for a Mario game even though it'd be really funny and fit their behavior well.
eta: Forgot to mention, Luigi's characterization is incredibly bizarre to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if he's third-act revealed to be an imposter.
2. More NPCs than just toad and some toads actually have modified designs ala TTYD.
3. Combat is piss easy to the point where it's insulting, at least so far. The game's clearly split into divisions analogous to 8 chapters and in the first one (which I'd put at about an hour and a half-ish in length) probably had about a dozen battles total, all of which consisted of moving the ring and doing one action to one-shot the fight.
Amusing to me is the fact that a game called
Iris and the Giant did a very similar puzzle-combat thing last year and this feels like a massively watered down version of that with added rubik's cube shifting mechanics.
All in all, less grating than sticker star but still probably a one-and-done rental playthrough. An infinite puzzle survival mode would be nice, hope that shows up at some point assuming the combat gets more complex (likely because the menu has a ton of deadspace).
Super Mario RPG belongs in the poll. Paper Mario literally would not exist without it. Different visuals? sure... But this series has changed its visuals multiple times over the years. The visual difference from Super Mario RPG to Paper Mario (And it wasn't even called Paper Mario in Japanese.) is about the same as the difference between 1000 year door to any of the other entries where they ran the "paper" aspect of the series into the ground. The gameplay is similar enough.
SMRPG is the only one that went the whole nine yards using mario as a silent protagonist, too. The physical comedy was funny as a kid in a cartoon slapstick way but seeing it a decade later and realizing how the entire setup was a gigantic charlie chaplin homage made me appreciate it much more.
