Paper Mario: Color Splash producer on the humor, cards, level variety, art style

Paper Mario: Color Splash will have a big emphasis on story. Humor is a big part of that, as producer Risa Tabata told GameSpot.

She said:

“When we think of what we cannot do in a traditional Mario game, what we came to was, ‘Well, definitely humor.’ So we wanted to focus on humor as much as possible. All these different people got together in meetings room and basically very, very diligently and seriously thought of how we could do the stupidest, craziest things possible.”

Color Splash takes inspiration from the last game in the series, Sticker Star, through the use of cards. You’ll use cards in battle gathered throughout the adventure to take down enemies. They can also be painted to perform more powerful attacks.

Tabata said of the card variety:

“There are tons of different cards in the game. Obviously Mario is going to be throwing fireballs at some point. There’s kind of like a spring jump where you can actually jump a ton of different times on one end.”

Tabata also elaborated on the cards by saying that it’s possible to “open up more card slots, [and] the amount of paint you’re able to store in your hammer will expand.”

Something else fans can look forward to in Color Splash is variety. According to Tabata, levels will offer different types of challenges.

“We kind of focused on trying to have each course have a different feel. One course might be more focused on battle, but another course might focus more on puzzle-solving. There are definitely different places where you will need to have platforming skills.”

Lastly, Tabata had this to say on the game’s style:

“The artists spent a lot of time thinking like, ‘Maybe we can try this and it’ll look really like paper. Maybe we’ll have to do this to make it look like paper.’ The base of everything is made from cardboard and then on top of that you’re layering different types of paper.”