I feel like the things Brad mentions as having been polarizing were actually pretty uncontroversial. I don't think people cared much about battle transitions or that FF12 wasn't set in it's own universe. It was really what you thought of the gambit system that determined whether you loved or hated this game.
I genuinely wonder if there's some suit at Nintendo who decided that they didn't need two separate Mario RPG franchises and threw their lot in favor of Mario and Luigi (which, given the lukewarm reception of Paper Jam, maybe isn't doing so hot either) leaving Paper Mario as the weird experimental guinea pig. Maybe it was Miyamoto himself, if you want to buy into the conspiracy about his influence on the development of Sticker Star.
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