The other day when thinking about Color Splash, I had a strange thought. What if they made a book adaption for it? It would be very possible for them to do that, yet it was in thinking about this that I realized RPGs and books just don't go together. Books are almost all linear. A good book is like a roller coaster in how it's experienced; you go across the same path every time.
Role Playing Games are by their nature, about agency. A role is an instruction book for how to act a certain way which the player then uses to act the role however they see fit. In a game of tabletop Dungeons and Dragons, you have a dungeon master, and players. The master comes up with a place and a story beginning, and the characters, through the roles they play, use their agency to create their own story with the master there to keep things organized. That is the origins of both Japanese and western role playing videogames. The Japanese took more interesting in using the mechanics to tell a linear story (pokemon being a rare half-exception) on their old consoles, and not long after, westerners did the same thing, but we later used our advanced technology to make role playing games that cared a little more about the role playing than the original mechanics used in table top games. After games like Fallout 3 were born, I fully expected RPGs to be born that would take that turn-based gameplay and combined it with an open world that allows the player to choose their role. Sadly that never happened.
It was once okay for JRPGs to all be linear when games couldn't handle allowing the player to use agency, but those days are far in the past. Games like Fallout 3 allow the player to experience the game world freely, which is the aspect that originally attracted people to tabletop RPGs. In Fallout 3, the game is the dungeon master and you are the player. You decide how to be in this role, and you get to watch as your independent thought and actions lead to logical outcomes. If you wanted to steal from someone's file cabinet in Fallout 3, you could, and it might lead to you getting in trouble. However, Fallout 3 lacks the turn-based battling and uses a real time version of V.A.T.S. which I consider to be fairly similar.
There's something wonderful about the take-your-time strategy of a turn-based RPG, and Paper Mario TTYD's battle system feels like the nature progression of it. The problem with Paper Mario TTYD is that it lacks player agency. Yes, you collect things at your discretion, have the option to recruit Ms. Mowz, can choose to beat the pit of trials at any point in the story, but otherwise you're being forced to experience the game in one precise way. Nintendo had a very clear idea for the story and absolutely did not want the player to experience it any way other than by the one path they laid out. Who you play as is predefined: you're Mario, and only Nintendo can tell you how Mario acts. I have to ask, is it still role playing if your agency is deciding who to fight, what to hit with your hammer, and how often you jump? That's all you can do as Mario. In my mind, linear-JRPGs aren't actually Role Playing Games at all, and that's a shame.
If you need me to point to something, think about the events of Chapter 1 in Paper Mario TTYD. You do thing A before you can do thing B which you must do before you can do thing C, and there is no other method to go about the adventure. If the game was the dungeon master, he or she would be telling you how to do everything, and would practically not allow you to have a thought that isn't his own (except when your are in a battle).
Paper Mario Color Splash was at least willing to admit it wasn't a Role Playing Game, because frankly it's extremely far from. Yet again, you are forced to play a single role. You're forced to live the same exact experience each time you replay the game. Your only agency is deciding which card you will use. The NPCs have a tiny handful of lines each and are happy to stand perfectly still for all of time. It's 2016 and Nintendo is still treating non-playable characters like game objects. Is it too much to ask for Paper Mario's world to be believable? Instead it feels as fake and empty as what it's made of: cardboard! Our generation is getting to experience Virtual Reality headsets, yet Nintendo is still refusing to make their game worlds feel believable. Paper Mario is a shadow of it's former self. Rather than refine and improve the first two games of the series, they went for cheap gimmicks and threw away everything that made TTYD cutting-edge in the world of JRPGs.
The reason I'm talking about this is because I want Paper Soul Theater to be more open and to give the player agency without moving too far away from the original formula (without becoming drastically more of a sandbox game). A linear RPG feels to small and boxed-in for me; I want to set the player free to do things how they naturally would. I want people to decide who Aponi is, to a degree. How pacifist is she? How would she try to tackle a complex problem? Who will you try to befriend? The power is in your hands.
More than that, I think videogames have the unique opportunity to simulate reality in fantasy locations. You could make the sun rise and set. You could program a crow-like animal to fly onto a tree branch at a specific time of day on the third day. You can make an NPC sit in a rocking chair after supper time each day, and have them return into their house when the sun sets. It feels great to be one among many people in a fantasy world because suddenly the fantasy is real for the duration of the play session. That's what Paper Mario should learn from a game like Skyrim or Fallout: New Vegas, but Nintendo never learns. That's why I try to improve the formula through our game. Why settle when there are still opportunities to make things even better?