This is the main thing to me. I don't really mind them mixing up the combat, by all means. Straight back and forth turn based combat can get a bit old so trying new things is far from a bad thing. However when they aren't allowed to tell a story with unique and interesting characters, that is an abandonment of the core principle of the Paper Mario games.What these interviews tell me is that the Paper Mario fans of the first few want is well and truly dead. No more fun and unique characters save for a small few
It's too bad they screwed up so bad with Super Paper Mario. It's understand how Nintendo looked at that and thought Intelligent Systems needed to be kept on a short leash to stop all the NPCs from being random scribbles or whatever.