Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 26 (Patreon)

Welcome, everyone, to the 26th issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone.

I apologize deeply for another delay since my last update. With the arrival of a new year, and indeed a new decade, I will concentrate all my efforts into maintaining a regular Patreon update schedule. Please note that, as always, you are entitled to a full refund of all your contributions that will be issued immediately and without question upon request. 

Today, I will take a look at tiny textures of partners from the first two Paper Mario games found in the intro of Super Paper Mario and attempt to restore them to high resolution.

Restoring Photos of Old Friends

Super Paper Mario, released in 2007, is considered to be the last Paper Mario game in the trilogy that began with the original Paper Mario on the Nintendo 64 in terms of continuity. While its gameplay was entirely unlike the first two games, it acknowledged many characters from them, a tradition that was dropped starting with the next game in the series, Paper Mario: Sticker Star.

Most people who played Super Paper Mario will remember the Catch Cards, collectible cards of various characters throughout the game, mentioning the partners from Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. However, what you may not have noticed is that those partners appear as early as in the game's intro.

Take a look at this screenshot. This is Mario and Luigi shown inside their house, seconds after starting a new file. Do you see the partners? At the game's original resolution, this is very difficult - in fact, if you played the game back in 2007 on a CRT TV, the image may have been too blurry to make it out at all. Let us increase the internal resolution.

There, to the immediate left and right of Luigi, are framed pictures of the partners. Even here, at double the resolution, the images are extremely tiny. We need to extract the textures to be able to take a closer look.

The images are 64x64 pixels each, and I have enlarged them using a nearest-neighbor algorithm. While this results in extremely unsightly large pixels, it is the only way to losslessly enlarge the images to make my eventual recreation as accurate as possible.

To actually recreate the image, we need to figure out the source of all the artwork for the partners that is used. Starting with the Paper Mario partners on the left - the images are not from the original game at all, but rather the recreated sprites that can be found inside the data of Super Paper Mario for scrapped in-person appearances of these partners.

Luckily, these have been extracted and uploaded to spriters-resource.com by users "Androu1" and "Mageker", so that I could simply use these existing images. However, as you can see, there is one problem: Sushie is missing. There is, for an unknown reason, no data for Sushie in the game - either she was never meant to appear or it was only her files that were deleted instead of left unused.

Fortunately, Super Paper Mario was not the first game to have unused planned appearances by the Paper Mario partners - the same characters are also present in the data of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. User "Stooben" has extracted the constituent parts of Sushie's model from that game, however, they were not assembled.

Technically, I could have simply tried to recreate Sushie from these parts based on my own idea of how they should fit together - if not for the fact that despite her in-person appearance being scrapped, there is a single image of her already in Super Paper Mario: her Catch Card.

Using the image on the Catch Card as reference, I assembled Sushie's model as closely as possible, which resulted in it looking almost exactly like the Catch Card, only in slightly higher resolution.

Now I had the partners ready, but one thing was missing: the background. After very lengthy analysis of the few pixels of background I could make out around the characters, I came to a conclusion: if the ground portion was yellow with a patch of light green, the center/upper center was brown, and the rest was dark green, then it appears that the characters are standing in front of a giant tree. The area that has the same color scheme in Paper Mario is the main area of the Flower Fields, in front of the Wise Wisterwood:

With everything prepared, I could arrange the elements within a frame to bring you this recreation:

I have tried to make the characters overlap in the exact same ways as the original image. I also applied a yellow filter over the image to more closely fit the color scheme of the low-resolution photo, however, it is impossible to make every color fit exactly due to the extreme JPEG artifacting of the original distorting many of the colors (note Goombario being grey, Watt's pacifier being yellow, and Bombette resembling a checkerboard of various colors).

For the Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door partners, the sources of the images were slightly different. Goombella, Flurrie, the Yoshi Kid, Vivian and Bobbery use official art from the game that was widely available in high resolution from press kits. However, Ms. Mowz and Koops did not. From what I could tell, Ms. Mowz's image is just her in-game sprite without any other modifications.

As for Koops, it is clear he is holding up one finger in the original photo. There is actually no standalone artwork of him doing that, nor is there an in-game sprite. The only source for this pose is the game's title screen artwork:

There are two problems with this: the resolution of Koops's image here is rather low, and her is partially covered by Yoshi Kid. Note that, again, this is the only instance of this pose, so to my knowledge, no unobscured variation of Koops raising his index finger has ever been published. Interestingly, the creators of the portraits could have been working with the same obscured image, as Koops is covered by Bobbery in exactly the same spot covered by Yoshi Kid in the source image.

The background for the Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door image was likely Petal Meadows due to the dark green top and light green bottom. I chose this image:

With everything set in place, I have produced this recreation:

Unfortunately, the different quality of the source images for Ms. Mowz and Koops results in them looking blurrier than the other characters, which is unavoidable. I have cut out Koops's outline from the source image in an attempt to make it as smooth as that of the surrounding characters. Note how Flurrie's hand is emerging from behind Koops's shell, a detail visible in the original image as well. As with the other image, a filter was applied to make the colors resemble the low-resolution version.

I hope this attempt at restoring these photos managed to produce images that are satisfactory. If you wish to use these yourself, say, for a mod of Super Paper Mario that replaces textures with high-resolution versions, you are free to use these. Also, please let me know if you find any errors in these images that I can fix, and I will update this article.

This concludes today's issue. Thank you very much for reading.