You lost me there but ok.

Gameplay>>>Story....every time.

A good story never makes up for bad gameplay. Great gameplay will always make up for bad story. Perfect example: Metroid: Other M.

I trust Miyamoto's advice to these young developers. If the gameplay isn't compelling, people probably aren't going to bother playing through it to get to that amazing denouement. But as much as I cringed every time Samus spoke, particularly about Adam and "the baby," I knew that amazing gameplay was just a few agonizing moments away.

No probs :), it's this part of OP:

"With regard to the story, we did a survey over the Super Paper Mario game in Club Nintendo, and not even 1 percent said the story was interesting,"

Oh that, yea I read that part. Am I right to assume that you think Club Nintendo does not represent real nintendo fans or something of the sort?

No, I just don't think it represents me as a Nintendo fan, personally, and I know there are a few others like me.

Ah. Might wanna PM those people and get them to vote on the survey next time.

I also really really enjoyed Super Paper Mario... I'm sad that everyone else hated it. I thought the partners were super interesting and I thought the scenery was witty as hell, and the story between flipside and flopside was really well executed.

I do the Club Nintendo surveys, but not regularly, and not super seriously. I also wasn't aware that Nintendo cared a lot about what was being said in those surveys. I thought it was an obvious trend that gamers do care more about their stories now. Or maybe the gamers here are too skewed of a demographic to really make a good statement on this.

What I was saying is that the reason Paper Mario has an engaging story is its humor, not its dramatic tension. Sticker Star has that humor. Thus, its writing is no better or worse by nature than that of the other games.

I'm not sure what to say to your remarks that Paper Mario's humor is "less engaging" than... some other part of the story? I can't imagine what that would be. But if you're sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to see what plot development awaits you in Paper Mario, well, I think that's pretty funny.

It all comes down to personal taste, really, so I'm not going to argue anything with you. All I will say is this: I loved the third chapter of TTYD (the stadium fighting one) and I don't remember any humorous parts of it. Yet the scenario and unfolding story were really, really awesome in my opinion. The character development, mystery, and climatic battles were really fun, but the gameplay itself was extremely bland (running around back and forth and doing normal battles repeatedly).

Mario riding around on the little Yoshi is pretty slapsticky. And I wouldn't call the stadium battles normal; as I recall, a lot of the later ones had caveats like, 'you can't jump,' or 'you can't use items.' Maybe some other things like having to nail a certain number of action commands. I don't remember exactly.

I am genuinely curious though about what part of Paper Mario's story you find so engaging if it isn't the humor. The tournament is a good example but it's still just one instance. How about, say, the Toy Box chapter of the N64 Paper Mario?