Paper Mario (series)

Mario role-playing games
Genres	Role-playing
Developers	Square, Intelligent Systems, AlphaDream, Ubisoft Milan, Ubisoft Paris
Publishers	Nintendo, Ubisoft

The Mario franchise has inspired a variety of Mario role-playing video games to be released on multiple Nintendo video game consoles. All the games feature Mario as the protagonist, who is often accompanied by one or more playable characters, including existing Mario characters and original characters introduced in each game.

The first game to introduce RPG elements into the Mario franchise was Super Mario RPG, developed by Square and released in 1996 for the Super Famicom and SNES. The game does not have a direct sequel. Considered to be its thematic and spiritual sequels, two successive RPG-themed Mario series, the Paper Mario series and the Mario & Luigi series, followed conventions established in the original. The Paper Mario games were developed by Intelligent Systems, a subsidiary of Nintendo, and are renowned for their distinctive visual style, which consists of 2D paper cutout characters moving about in 3D papercraft worlds. The Mario & Luigi games were developed by AlphaDream, another subsidiary of Nintendo, all of which appeared solely on handheld consoles. The most recent entries in each series are Paper Mario: Color Splash for Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS crossover game Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam.

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Wikipedia