Super Mario Superstar Saga Bowser's Inside Story

If I could give this a mixed review I would, the game has a lot of charm, the comedy is pretty solid and the music is great but the game really falls short in the combat department which realistically should be the part with the most focus and polish. At the time of writing the review I'm not terribly far into the game, but 6/7 hours in and I could go back to the first area and it would take just as long to beat the enemies as it did when I first started the game, levelling up doesn't really make you stronger, it just makes you tankier and it really causes some battles to just drag on. Blocking attacks feels like it has some sort of delay, as you'd expect you would need to press it right before an attack lands, however sometimes you can get away with blocking way before the attack lands, but still get hit when blocking right before it connects. The menus are pretty morbid to navigate and the game relies on save points rather than just being able to save from the menu and actually locks...

I'm just starting out for now, but I'm really enjoying the feel of this game. The script is punchy, the combat encounters are clear and legible at all times, and the art style is very sweet. Looking forward to completing this!

This is a very fun Paper Mario-like (I feel like we need a genre name for games like this and Bug Fables) and I would highly recommend it to anyone, BUT with a few caveats. For starters, this game has a fair share of bugs in it. Nothing game-breaking, but plenty of issues like certain battles having "zombie enemies" that still attack you one last time after their HP hits zero, or the battle HUD vanishing when using a certain move. There's also the fact that the ending feels slightly anticlimactic after everything building up to it, could have done with a bit more punch. But at the end of the day, if you can handle a little bit of jank and love Thousand Year Door and Bug Fables, I cannot recommend Born of Bread enough. It's charming, the characters are all very lovable, the game is UNASHAMED in how much it loves puns, and it has plenty of heart. And at the end of the day, that's what matters more than anything else. (...seriously though the game NEEDS to put a cap on WP by endg...

cute

This is super cute and whimsical. It earns a lot of points for style and relative simplicity of its systems. Its pretty well polished for the most part, but I did encounter a handful of minor bugs.

First I want to say, the game has issues. There are quite a few smaller annoyances that are unlikely to get fixed, as the last update prior to this review seems to have been in June 2024. And despite those smaller annoyances, Born of Bread is a very fun play. The devs managed to create that feeling I've had with the first two Paper Mario games, art style, writing, and music all are as close as you can get. The game's balancing isn't really super tight, so on the harder difficulty it is very easy to be underpowered early on and still defeat the final boss without any issues, but the story and humor did make it up for me. I can only hope that the developers maybe do fix some of these issues and hopefully create another game like it in the future, or at least hope that the Paper Mario devs have seen this game and possibly go back to such fun turn-based gameplay.