Poll: Favorite Spin-off Mario game?

[Drathnoxis]

Donkey Kong is a character born from the Mario franchise. He's even still featured in a lot of Mario games. So technically, the DKC games are spinoffs. But usage of the term "spinoff" is always weird with Mario related titles, just because of the sheer number of established franchises born because of him.

You have that backwards, Mario was a character born from the Donkey Kong franchise. There were two games in the Donkey Kong series, Donkey Kong (1981) and Donkey Kong Jr. (1982), before the first Mario Bros. (1983) game.

And Partner's in Time was an extremely solid game. What's wrong with it featuring Baby Mario and Luigi? Two previously established characters from the Yoshi's Island games.

And there's nothing wrong with it being functionally the same. People wanted more of that particular series, so they made new games with the same gameplay. Essentially makes them all continuations, or big expansions.

It's been years and I barely remember the story, I just remember I didn't like it. I don't like baby characters in general, even if they are "previously established", I find them irritating.

When you make a big show of adding two additional party members to the game it sets expectations that there will be an interesting twist on the gameplay. There wasn't. The exact same moveset was instead distributed among the four characters. You can't even split into four groups to solve puzzles, having two groups of two plays the same as having two groups of one. And I was wrong about the game being functionally identical, because the gameplay is actually worse in Partners in Time. There were fewer out of battle techniques and fewer variations on them, a large part of this is that you can no longer reverse who is in front. Also, Bros. Items were far less interesting and fun to use than the Bros. Attacks were.

The only issue with functionality was that Mario and Luigi had the same gameplay as Paper Mario, which is why Paper Mario has since been reworked for new gameplay.

Another reason not to like the series. It caused Nintendo to ruin the vastly superior Paper Mario series.