Chapter 2 takes the winning formula established by Chapter 1 and adds some extra difficulty to it, establishing fights that require using your fancy tools, like Clefts and Swoopers, and raising the stakes of everything else. It also introduces Super Blocks and the Super Hammer, showing off the actual offensive upgrades that the level up system isn't accommodating.
Mt. Rugged is a simple introductory area, giving us a partner early before we get to the desert. Interestingly, I think this makes Parakarry the party member who has the least to do with the Chapter he's found in. Kooper comes pretty close, but he makes up for it with his adoration for Kolorado, but most party members we'll get for the remainder of 64 and TTYD will care about the plot of their home Chapter. Parakarry's more important for his role in the mailman sidequest.
Into the desert itself, we have Kolorado himself and he's accomplishing a whopping nothing. In fairness, Kolorado is supposed to be this pathetic- he somehow has enough of a reputation that Kooper looks up to him and he's generally regarded positively, but as far as his role in this narrative is concerned, he's pretty pathetic and almost entirely comic relief. His main job is to be a major character in Chapter 5- this is a recurring trend in the Paper Mario trilogy, and Kolorado is the only one of these characters to appear beforehand. This might be a good opportunity to set up his character... if he had much of a buildup to provide. They didn't exactly give him much time for that anyway.
The mystery of Dry Dry Ruins has a neat setup, with a backstory and everything, but the Town Story is pretty... short. I mean, yes, if you know the steps you need to take, you can literally skip the whole thing the next playthrough, but still. Moustafa as Sheek is a nod to Ocarina of Time, and him looking for a nice guy to share the secret with makes sense, but because he doesn't actually know Dry Dry Ruins is in any peril, there are no stakes to the story. What's Moustafa's approval worth, when, at best, we're being positively compared to Kolorado? Somehow, I feel like there'd be a solution to both of these issues in one package, although if I don't exactly know what that is, I can't expect anyone else to figure it out.
Onto Dry Dry Ruins proper, Tutankoopa taunts us throughout the dungeon as we progress. Well, I say "taunt", but he's somehow even more pathetic than the Koopa Bros. The Koopa Bros. were clearly signposted as comic relief, but they hid keys in inconvenient positions, set traps that actually worked, and had a killer endgame move with the Koopa Stack. Tutankoopa... all he does before the fight is threaten us with curses he clearly has no capacity to back up, and his boss fight lacks the cool tricks of the Koopa Bros., using just raw damage and Chomp as backup. One of his attacks is finite and the other has a chance of backfiring. Paper Mario is a very light-hearted game, and Bowser himself is very pathetic when he's not wishing himself the power to say otherwise, but we've got actually threatening bosses in this game too. Sure, we've shuffled the easiest bosses first in the sorting algorithm of evil, but if we're three-for-three on "bosses making fools of themselves", we're establishing a tone that these more competent villains are compared against. These later bosses can all be said to have the same story of having their wish granted by Bowser in exchange for guarding the Star Spirit and doing evil, which connects the tissue, but tonally, we're also going to see them step up in terms of what they do with their power.
Mechanically, Dry Dry Desert's Super Block represents the first major choice to be made. Early-game, because you just don't have a lot of Badges, your Badge setup is pretty identical from run to run, so the Super Block is a good chance for some individuality. Even now, after giving Goombario a shot alongside Kooper, I'm still not sure what the optimal first partner upgrade is, and perhaps it's better that way. If multiple partners are helping in different situations, that's a good sign you can let player personality fill in. Super Blocks don't really get used in this way going forward, though- a bit of a shame, but they wanted you to have enough for everybody. The Super Hammer also adds some much-needed utility to an option that's fallen by the wayside: Outside Quake Hammer, Mario's Boots are just factually better than Hammer, so by giving the player the Hammer upgrades first, they keep it competitve. We are getting Boot upgrades, though, so this won't last long. They tried.
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