Like any other fanbase, certain sects of the gaming community can get a little … intense. Today that troup's target is Paper Mario: Color Splash, the newly announced sequel to 2012's Paper Mario: Sticker Star and the continuation of Nintendo's longstanding experiment with Super Mario RPGs.
Paper Mario: Color Splash was announced during a Nintendo Direct held earlier today and, within 30 minutes of its trailer debuting, already had a petition on Change.org calling for the game to be canceled.
You might be thinking, "Well, the game probably has some offensive material in it like a hateful, sexist message or an attack on a group of people."
That might be the case normally, but from the brief one minute and ten seconds we've actually seen of the game, it didn't look like it.
So why are some people up in arms? Fans of the franchise claim that the game looks too similar to Paper Mario: Sticker Star, the last entry in the series that was released in 2012 to positive or slightly less than positive reviews from critics and media.
Check out the trailer from today's Nintendo Direct for yourself below. (The portion with Paper Mario: Color Splash starts at 12:30 and ends at around 13:30.)
On some level, I totally get it. If they remade my favorite game of all-time, a Japanese role-playing game called The Legend of Dragoon, as a driving simulator, I might get pretty upset at the creators.
But to create a petition to cancel the game after a one-minute trailer? That might be going overboard.
It's worth pointing out that not everyone is on-board with the whole pitchfork and torches movement. One of the people who signed the petition said, "You may think this petition is childish...because it is. I'm only signing so I don't have to deal with all of these babies bitching about 'Sticker Star 2' for years to come since I've already had enough of them not playing yet still complaining about Sticker Star."
While a vocal minority throwing stones is nothing new, the speed at which people put down a game that no one knew existed before today is a frightening example of how quickly, and harshly, we judge games we know next to nothing about.
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