Finished the game after 46 hours of playtime. It was good to great for the most part, but towards the end it felt like the development team just wanted to add more when it wasn't really necessary. Mario and Luigi's final partner attacks made this feeling worse, because their execution time is notably longer than everything that came before - making battles take much longer - plus it's especially annoying that Mario's final special is basically an all-or-nothing attack; if you don't get an Excellent on it, you do hardly any damage with it. Level ups also became sparse during the final stretch, so ultimately I was at the point where I just wanted the game to be over.
I didn't explore the game in its entirety, but completed more than 50 sidequests. The ones left are probably only about defeating super strong enemies.
In any case, this is a worthy entry into the Mario & Luigi series and the few shortcomings don't change that, because all games have their flaws, and none of them match the brilliance of the first two Paper Mario games.
Legend11 correctly predicted that GTA IV will outsell Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I was wrong.
