Paper Mario GC, oddly liking it, not sure why

[Tanooki]

Went flea marketing today, found this dude selling GC games on the cheap, bagged Paper Mario to honestly flip so I could get more Transformers.

I have no idea what the hell motivated me to do it, but I didn't just start up the game and flip it off after 5min to make sure it was fine, I kept going. Suddenly I think I was like 3 hours into it. I cleared the prologue and all of chapter 1 and parked it barely within the 2nd chapter.

I loathe and despise the original one because it was rigged for failure unless you were VERY good at timing because they'd cap you at health forcing you to be very good using the timed defense. Now this game has it too, but they have all these interesting badges that can negate some damage or help if you're critical I'm finding. Also the timing isn't so nitpicking nasty, it is if you B button to superdodge(which counters for 1 damage) but on regular that 1/2 damages it's not hard to nail it down often enough. The story seems amusing enough, the helpers aren't useless wastes of space like the old game, it's actually quite interesting.

Is there anything I should be aware of going into it further where I may hit a problem? Can I bore myself to death staying in an area and re-loading monsters so keep leveling up if I wish, or is it rigged to cap out like the N64 game did? I never got more than 2/3 through the old original before I got fed up with it. I don't want to blow that kind of time, but if this can be enjoyable like Mario & Luigi was on the GBA I'd be interested in continuing on.

I'm going to cross post this on another forum as I'd like to get opinions/help figuring this out.

[prfsnl_gmr]

It is a pretty great game...until right before the very end. (Also, and just like the original, you can't grind levels.) There is an extremely annoying series do fetch quests at the end that really pad out the play time and drag down the experience. It is wonderful up until that point, however; so I still recommend playing through it (and consulting a walkthrough to complete the fetch quests as painlessly as possible).

[9Volt]

When I was a kid I receive this game on my birthday, I played like crazy, most likely finished on 3 days. One of my favorite rpgs of all time.

The name of my Yoshi was Link!

[Tanooki]

Can't grind eh, that's a shame. It seemed like I was a bit in later chapter 1. I started going around between the areas to re-populate them and the star total didn't seem to drop taking out parties of koopa troopa as I wanted to make like 40ish more stars to hit another level.

So far I'm evenly trying to raise all three stats at this point. 20HP, 10SP and 9BP, need to raise the SP to 15 next time.

[Sarge]

In my mind, BP trumps all. At least until you can equip enough of them.

If you think this is hard, though, don't play Paper Jam...

[Tanooki]

I think the chapter 1 boss was hard, went through my 3 fire flowers and my SP and even lost my grunt in the last couple blows in the back part of it after eating the audience. Other than that I have not had a problem at all. Maybe I needed to grind some, I don't know.

[CFFJR]

I think the chapter 1 boss was hard, went through my 3 fire flowers and my SP and even lost my grunt in the last couple blows in the back part of it after eating the audience. Other than that I have not had a problem at all. Maybe I needed to grind some, I don't know.

I'm sure you were fine. That boss is a bit tougher because he has a weakness to a specific badge that the game wants you to exploit.

Of course you can beat him without it. I did, as I found the badge but didn't use it since the description makes it sound useless and I didn't catch on. The badge makes it easier though.

[PartridgeSenpai]

TTYD isn't too hard (at least until the very very end) if you play it with the Mario & Luigi mind-set for grinding: You never actually have to "grind" if you fight just about everything you see. It's not quite so black and white as M&L because you can't completely dodge every attack like in that game, but it's what made it so I never had a problem when I re-played through it a few months back.

I also second Sarge: BP is the best stat. Once you start capitalizing on every possible damage boost and defense boost, you start getting craaaazy stats (offense is the best defense). Same went for the original game too, tbh. Both are MUCH harder if you don't capitalize on Power Plus badges and the like to really lay the whollop on the baddies. And in the GC game, you even have partner-directed Power Plus and Defense Plus badges, so they can whollop too ;p

[Tanooki]

I had no idea what the badge was, it just kept saying obviously 'cricket' spaced out. I just slugged it out old school and thrashed him. I never found any cricket badge. I knew I was at his door at the top of a tower when I saved, but I really didn't want to run all the way back looking around. I did get the badges you can see like the one across a gap with the vertical shaft and all that.

I get ya. So what would you raise the least, the flower points then? Drop maybe equally into health and BP like 2 ea/ then 1 for FP? That way you have far more ability to really exploit the hell out of the badge perks while also having healthy hit points?