Imagine you go to the store and pick up a bag of M&Ms, but when you get home and open it up,

Imagine you go to the store and pick up a bag of M&Ms, but when you get home and open it up, it’s full of Skittles. You check the front of the bag, and it says “M&Ms,” but instead of chocolate candies that melt in your mouth (and also low-key melt in your hand), you’ve received fruit-flavored, chewy rainbow candies. Now, Skittles aren’t bad by any means, but they objectively aren’t what goes in an M&M bag, so presumably there was a mix-up at the factory. You return to the store only for the same thing to happen again… and again and again; there are no M&Ms to be found, just lots of bags of Skittles that say “M&Ms” on the front.

After years of this, you start to wonder if M&M bags will ever actually contain M&Ms again. People who prefer Skittles and people who enjoy both candies equally don’t understand what’s wrong; they think you’re entitled for expecting M&M bags to contain M&Ms, they think that you hate Skittles and want to see them eradicated, they think you’re being mean and selfish and resistant to change, but all you really want is for the bag to match its contents.

It’d be one thing if they just stopped making M&Ms and M&M bags altogether- that’d be upsetting, but tolerable- making M&M bags full of Skittles, however, is  confusing for people who’d never tried M&Ms before this changed, as they’re being led to believe that M&Ms are fruit flavored and chewy, a constant reminder that M&Ms no longer exist (in this hypothetical scenario), and a sign of either incompetence or deliberate deception on the part of the manufacturer.

Paper Mario fans aren’t “rabid” or “entitled,” we aren’t “hating on” games because we expect Intelligent Systems to cater to our every whim, and we certainly don’t expect everyone to have the same taste in video games. Whether you do or don’t like Skittles, and whether you do or don’t like M&Ms, I think we can all agree that they’re two different things, and as two different things, they shouldn’t be lumped together under the same name.

Series /ˈsirēz/

noun. A number of things, events, or people of a similar kind of related nature coming one after another.

Despite having “Paper Mario” in the name, Sticker Star signified a dramatic shift in genre, cannon, narrative structure, setting, atmosphere, casting, characterization, tone, visual style, sound design, gameplay, length, UI design, UX design, and other of the various attributes that comprise any individual game.

The nature of Sticker StarandColor Splash, and evidently The Origami King, is barely even tangentially related to that of Paper Mario andTTYD, and the games aren’t remotely similar to Super Paper Mario either, so they’re just completely separate.

Do games need to change over time to stay relevant and fresh? Of course, but as with most things in life, it’s about balance, it’s about hitting that sweet spot between too much and not enough change. How do you know when you’ve hit that sweet spot? Well, it’s hard to say, because there are so many variables at play when you’re creating a sequel to another work of art, but chances are, if you’re changing more than you’re leaving the same, you’re crossing the line from staying relevant to totally rebooting the series. Taking two steps back when you crossed that line twenty miles ago isn’t going to win back the fans that you betrayed when you quite possibly destroyed the future of something they love.