There are few game series I've become as charmed by and enamored with over the years more than Paper Mario.

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see deal Paper Mario: Color Splash - Wii U Standard Edition $44.97 on Gamestop

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Like many fans, I've watched the franchise evolve from a straight RPG to more of an adventure game over the years, though with the recent release of Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, it seemed like the series might be returning more to its roots. But once Nintendo announced Color Splash , Paper Mario's long-anticipated debut on the Wii U, it became clear that developer Intelligent Systems wasn't looking to change up much from the new battle system and gameplay format it introduced in the 2012 3DS release Paper Mario: Sticker Star.I got a chance to play a behind-closed-doors demo of Paper Mario: Color Splash at E3 in anticipation of its October 7th release , but perhaps even more exciting was a chance to pick the brain of assistant producer Risa Tabata about the decision-making behind the project. She cut to the core of why Paper Mario keeps moving away from RPG elements: Nintendo's other Mario RPG franchise, Mario & Luigi."Really making this game started with the idea of wanting to use cards," she explained of the decision to develop Color Splash. "Since you've got this parallel Mario & Luigi RPG series, we definitely wanted to make a distinction between the two series and have them go in different directions."So with that in mind, it should come as no surprise that Paper Mario: Color Splash The humor that's become a staple of the Paper Mario franchise remains, with funny quips like a Toad saying "no one ever thinks they'll become a statistic" after being saved by Mario, but so is the card-motivated battle system. The stickers from Sticker Star have come to Color Splash in all but name; here, they're battle cards, and you need to paint them to make them more powerful. The Thing Cards (virtually the same as Thing Stickers) still offer funny cutscenes throughout a battle when you play them and can sometimes interact with the environment.The cards are held in a deck on the Wii U game pad, and to use them in battle you need to select them, paint them to make them more powerful (this drains your paint gauge, so paint management is key) and then flick them up to the screen to implement them in battle. Throughout the game, you will earn the ability to use multiple battle cards at once."We definitely want to make it more of a feeling of you actually are holding the cards in your hands and you're actually using them," Tabata told me during our demo. She also confirmed you can use off-TV play solely on the gamepad.There was some clear smart improvements with thecards from the last implementation of this battle system: you gain hammer-like objects after defeating enemies, which helps increase your hammer paint storage. This seems like a smart way to incentivize battles more than Sticker Star did by adding in experience as a motivator without having literal EXP. Also, once you've defeated an enemy, you can get enemy cards to have the creatures fight alongside you in battle.In the demo level Nintendo created especially for E3, I had the most fun (and spent the most time) making sure I covered every last piece of colorless anything with my Paint Hammer, which you use by pressing X on the game pad. It was an extraordinarily fun and messy way of interacting with the environment. The way the paint spreads means you don't have to be precise to fill in areas, and even a sloppy paint job still looks great.Any Paper Mario fan knows you navigate through those games by hammering every object you can find for hidden treasures, and the painting addition to the gameplay evolves that concept. You have a running paint gauge that depletes every time you use the Paint Hammer, but at least in the demo it was pretty easy to replenish it by finding bubbles of paint around the world. Not only was it visually appealing to leave behind big puddles of colored paint around the landscape, but also a fun and satisfying motivation for exploration.Visually, Color Splash is stunning. The first Paper Mario game played around with a new 2D aesthetic in a flat but 3D world, and 16 years later Intelligent Systems has evolved that look to something that is pretty impressive. Paper Mario began as a console game franchise before it moved to the 3DS with Sticker Star (and Paper Jam, to a certain extent), and the series' debut on the Wii U takes advantage of the system's hardware. The attention to detail and evolution of the cardboard aesthetic in the demo's cutscenes were really striking.My biggest concern with seeing Color Splash once again travel down the Sticker Star path is whether the gimmick will overwhelm the gameplay. I understand that it wouldn't make sense to bring a game to the Wii U and not take advantage of the touch pad, but I also can see myself getting bored with constantly needing to flick cards up on the screen and hold down on them to fill them in with paint. Tabata said Intelligent Systems worked on this design to try to create something that wouldn't frustrate players, but the two battles I played during the demo didn't have me convinced.There also seems to once again be a big focus on elements like Thing Cards and incorporating painting into the world, and there's always the concern that the primary focus being there might mean other areas of the game come up lacking.But this seems to be the type of Paper Mario game that Intelligent Systems is dedicated to making. I asked Tabata whether there is any thought about alternating the adventure style with a more RPG-focused game similar to what AlphaDream put together with Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, and her answer was that it "depends on what kind of game we like to [make].""Since we already have this established RPG series, rather than just making another RPG series as well, we wanted to do something different and provide a different experience to players," Tabata said. "I think what was good about the original Paper Mario games wasn't just the RPG elements but the puzzle solving and the humor, so as we've gone forward we've put more of our effort into the puzzle-solving aspects and really emphasizing the humor in the games."

Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN, and believes Sushie is far and away the best Paper Mario sidekick. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz