no.16: Count Bleck - Super Paper Mario

If there was any deliberate theme that I could point to for this year, it would be making up for lost time, as many of this year's entries are characters I've been meaning to add for years and for one reason or another just sort of slip through the cracks as it were. Even in this countdown I found myself changing my initial choices, some down to the very wire. It's just something that happens with these kinds of projects. For one reason or another you decide against a choice you made for another you want to do more and before you know it, it's been several years and that one you put on the back burner has still yet to be used.

Well this year was the year to make up for all that lost time and what better to showcase this then Super Paper Mario, a game that is equal parts highly memorable and utterly forgettable! It's a weird thing, it wasn't the absolute masterpiece that was Thousand-Year Door and it hadn't yet totally fallen to shit with Sticker Star. It was simply mid. Coming off the heels of Thousand-Year Door and inexplicably thinking that the series needed to be reinvented, Super Paper Mario lacks any real self identity. It falls somewhere in-between platformer and RPG and is a completely muddled mess as a result and it would have been completely forgotten to time were it not for one key factor. The story.

I don't think I really need to state that Super Paper Mario lives on purely because of it's story. I myself didn't play the game until years after it came out, because it looked so bad and in a lot of ways it is. I would never go out of my way to play Super Paper Mario again...but I'm glad I did at least once. In that singular case, Super Paper Mario it almost surpasses Thousand-Year Door and much of it is spearheaded by the game's antagonist, Count Bleck.

Unfortunately as time has marched on I've become more and more aware that maybe the story of Super Paper Mario isn't nearly as good as I once thought. It's a tad basic, Count Bleck is cool, but not overly impressive and I struggle to remember too much outside of the game's final beats, which is probably why he's fallen to the wayside for me for over a decade now. Still, I'll never forget how Super Paper Mario made me feel. Obviously it could never top Thousand-Year Door, but the richness of emotion that they shockingly managed to squeeze out of characters of Blumiere and Timpani was something I never expected to see out of a Super Mario game and to that, I feel Count Bleck should always be remembered. He stands as a sort of testament to a time when Nintendo was still willing to take some chances, even if they were misguided...