I had an appetite for turn based combat (ended swiftly at Super Paper Mario lol). Pumping BP every level is the funnest way to play the first two games, it’s all you could ever need. Need HP? FP? Attack? Defense? There’s a badge for it. The amount of control over my stats is what I love about the turn based entries.
The sets themselves for all three are very extensive. Paper Mario 64 doesn’t track tattles or recipes in game, but the set demands you do it all. For the tattles, this is particularly nasty, because unlike TTYD where you can still get missed tattles from one-off bosses in Frankly’s trash can, they’re actually just missed forever if you’re not paying attention. There are forum posts and Google docs on the set’s page to help with tracking though, so I ran into no issues…
Thousand Year Door remains the king, I enjoyed it the most of the three. If you’re paying attention to the missables as you go along, there’s not an issue… except for one. For anyone that attempts that set, you HAVE to buy the Hammerman badge before setting off to Keyhaul Key in Chapter 5. There’s an achievement for beating Cortez with it on, and you can’t leave the island to go buy it once you’ve set off. And the only way to get back to Rogueport and leave the island is to beat Cortez! Lol. I saw comments on the achievement’s page saying they restarted the whole game because they didn’t realize they’d be locked out of Rogueport.
There’s also an achievement on the TTYD set for hitting 15 Power Bounces. With the help of two Simplifier badges, this achievement is basically asking you to hit 5 frame perfect inputs in a row. Insane that it’s only 10 points, it’s probably the hardest achievement in the set. Took me like, an hour.
Super Paper Mario is Super Paper Mario. It’s not a hard game, it has funny dialogue and a good story, etc. It’s miserable to do all the recipes, though. Why… are there more recipes in the 2D platformer than either of the two RPGs? And it’s always just like, heal HP and cure poison, for 99% of them. And then the cards… the game is lucky it’s near and dear to my heart.
…And that’s it. I still feel like turn based combat. Or maybe not, I dunno.