Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam devs on Paper Mario's inclusion, decision to add dash button

The following comes from a Nintendo Dream interview with producer Akira Otani (Nintendo), director Shunsuke Kobayashi (AlphaDream), and director of battle team Jun Iwasaki (AlphaDream)...

ND: Was it decided from the start that Paper Mario would make an appearance in this game?

Otani: We were thinking about the next project after developing the previous entry “Mario & Luigi: Dream Team”, but before deciding which characters would be in, there was an idea that we had to re-examine the use of buttons and the way of playing. The layout of controlling Mario with the A button and Luigi with the B button has been established in the series, but this was the first game in which we decided to add into the formula and use three buttons, even though the controls may became a bit complicated.

On dash:

Otani: Some people who played the previous game commented that movement on the field felt a bit slow, and it was decided in an early development phase that we’d introduce dash instead of increasing the movement speed. Originally if you didn’t push the A, B and Y buttons with a good rhythm within a fixed time, you couldn’t dash and you’d stop soon if you couldn’t keep up with it. We created this system as we thought the continued input was interesting even though it was a bit complicated, but when we brought it to Miyamoto, he said: “That’s too much trouble, one button is fine.” (laughs)

Kobayashi: The X button [dash] is perhaps the most often pushed button on the field. We conducted a survey within our company and some people went as far as saying “you can’t live without dash” (laughs).