Born of Bread Review (Paper Mario Inspired RPG)
Born of Bread Review
Born of Bread is a love letter to family friendly RPG’s, mainly Paper Mario and even though the task seems impossible to capture that childlike wonder, Born of Bread manages the insurmountable task of getting fairly close to capturing the essence with a game that will surely scratch a lot of the same itches that fans of Paper Mario have.
Flour Power
Mario has the big advantage of being a part of pop culture since the 1980’s. This means that most people are somewhat familiar with the story of the Mushroom Kingdom at this point. Born of Bread, unfortunately, lacks familiarity and this leads to a heavy amount of dialogue at the start, which is a little tough to immediately digest between all of the information about the plot as well as how to play the game.
The visuals are gorgeous with its clean and cartoonish art style, the score serves the journey well and the writing is fun and whimsical, but lacks a witty sense of humour that is a defining quality of the Paper Mario series. There is also a fun active turn based system, which each skill requiring a different mini game to execute. Tying back to the information overload most of the new skills you acquire are given to you with no education, which leads to a few failures before you grasp each skill.
You aren’t alone in your journey to save the world as you quickly find an eccentric group of characters willing to help you on your adventure. Each ally you find has a different skill for battle, but also for exploration, which means that you always need to be aware of your environment and how to access hidden areas. Unfortunately, there is no hot swap button for your ally, which means that you need to go into your menus which can be a little cumbersome and also interrupts the flow of the game.
Exploration is fun, for the most part, and going off the beaten path is usually rewarded. The platforming does lack refinement at times, as you can easily fall off precarious sections while you are looking for solutions and secrets. It would be great if there were a few more invisible walls during some of these sections, but the best way to deal with this is to turn off the environmental damage. This negates the loss of health that amplifies the frustration.
Underbaked
One of the biggest gripes is that there is lots of backtracking. The regions are quite far apart and contain subregions. Each region contains a different quest and when you are finished the quest, you need to return to see Papa Baker in the town, but instead of having a fast travel unlocked once you finish the quest, you have to slowly trod your way all the way back through each sub-region to get to the bakery at the center of town.
One of the most underbaked ideas is the lack of interesting and epic boss fights, which are usually one of the most exciting aspects of RPG games. Boss fights typically push the player to the brink and show you something you haven’t seen, but instead they are mostly just stronger enemies that seem out of place in this imaginative world. There are also a few occasional visual bugs but nothing that affected the performance of the game. It is also crucial to save after every large story beat because when you die, the options are start from beginning or last save, which lead to some disappointing revelations.
VERDICT
All of the elements, or in this case, ingredients are here that have made Paper Mario such a cult hit since its introduction over 20 years ago. Turn based adventure, vibrant worlds, whimsical art style, eccentric allies, interactive combat and many other things, but Born of Bread does plenty to stand on it’s own, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Most of the issues with Born of Bread can be tweaked with some post release updates including a few more invisible walls, fast travel and better autosave system. It might not reach the same joyous levels of Paper Mario, which was an impossible task to begin with, but Born of Bread is a charming adventure with a good foundation for the series that will hopefully return.