![[OFFICIAL] - [CS] Extra Characters](/data/resource_icons/0/342.jpg?1741366867){kind=icon}
- Author Yuyake "FunkyLion"
- Creation date
Reviews
TL;DR, Very fun mod, but character balance is all over the place. Some characters are more useful and others are underpowered or just aren't that fun to play as. Voice acting is off for all characters except for Pauline, really needs better voice direction and sound quality. Models are all around good, except for Peach and Daisy who have Megamind-level craniums and Pauline 
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DISCLAIMER: This review is coming from the perspective of a kaizo player. This'll only matter for the moveset section since my skill level will change the way I see these characters, and they may not be how you might view them.
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Gonna start this off by saying that this mod is genuinely really fun to play, I love seeing new characters be added, and I don't intend for my review to affect the way you see EC. If you love this mod, then more power to you. I'm just here to voice my critiques from my own perspective, and if that doesn't align with yours, that's okay. With that being said...
MODELS
I honestly don't have much to say on most character models, they generally work just fine or are really good (specifically Rosalina and Spike). The only ones I have issues with are Peach/Daisy and Pauline. Peach and Daisy just look weird to me. I know they were based off the N64 Mario Party games, which is honestly fine by me, but why did the creators make their faces so small and their heads so big? Anatomically, it doesn't look right, and even the original models had reasonable proportions for their faces.
Then there's Pauline, and her model just isn't scaled correctly. I get that characters should scale to around Mario's height, and generally, the human female characters have very slim bodies, but on Pauline, its so apparent how small she is that her model should be considerably larger. Not enough to where she's well above Mario's height, but just enough to not feel tiny in comparison to everyone else. On top of that, Pauline is animated like a fish, which is understandable given how applying dress models works
putting this part here for a friend but the color mapping for Toadette and honestly most other characters needs work, since palettes should look good on every character without needing to making new color schemes.
VOICE ACTING
Just to preface this, I am mainly critiquing the voice direction and guidance that led to what the voices sound like today, not the voice actors or their capabilities. Some people can get that misconstrued and I felt like clarifying this in case people get he wrong idea.
With respect to the voice actors, the voices given to (almost) every character just don't sound great, either having poor audio quality, or just bad voice direction, with the most egregious being Rosalina's voice, which sounds tired and dead when there should be more enthusiasm and whimsy in her inflections. Peach's voice is too breathy and the sound quality is not that great. Yoshi sounds like Alvin from the live action Alvin and the Chipmunks movies. Toadette's voice is inconsistent, has bad sound quality and is too dainty imo. Spike sounds good, but needs a lot more gruff in his tone. The voices don't need to be a one-to-one impression of the original voices, but even on their own, they aren't that good.
Pauline and Birdo's voice are the only one I'd consider to be good in comparison to the rest with Spike at a close third. They sound accurate to the source material, and other than Pauline's double jump voice clip and a few other nitpicks, everything sounds great. The rest of the cast just needs a bit more tweaking in regards to their voice direction to sound just as great. There really needs to be better voice direction so that characters can be more accurate and just sound better to listen to.
MOVESETS
From what I understand about the mod, the balance between each character comes down to whatever the creators feel like doing. I'm all for making broken movesets that are fun to play with, but if you have a lot of characters packed into one mod, they should be balanced around the characters within said mod. It's clear that every character has some advantage over Mario, but even when taking him out of the equation, there's a lot of imbalance.
2/3 of the cast (Peach, Yoshi, Daisy, Toadette) are entirely overpowered in comparison to Mario, while the other 1/3 (Pauline, Rosalina) are better than Mario, but not by a huge margin. Peach and Daisy are movement powerhouses, being able to make leaps and bounds over anything that blocks their way. They're honestly a bit too overpowered if you think about it. If you make amazing characters that are way too overpowered in the very beginning, then to make new characters feel balanced you need to match future characters with release characters. Not to say they aren't fun, they're most definitely fun to play as. But you can tell that newer characters aren't nearly as great as the old ones are, and I'd personally like a reason to choose Rosalina over Daisy, or even Yoshi over Peach.
Speaking of Peach, she is THE prime example on how to not make your first character. Her signature ability allows her to float midair for around 2 seconds. The most significant nerfs given to Peach are a speed reduction the longer you float and her float losing small amounts of height the longer she's in midair. But if you look at what she can actually do with these nerfs, you'll notice she can refresh her float with just a wallkick. No limits or drawbacks for using multiple floats. You just get insanely long wallkicks at the cost of a tiny bit less height and speed identical to not floating at all. there is no reason why I would want to pick any other distance related character when Peach is everything I would need in a character.
To continue with the talk of balancing, the way they sometimes "nerf" characters either make characters feel LESS fun or feel like said nerfs never existed. Take Yoshi as an example of a character who isn't as fun as he could be. He's a combination of Peach and Daisy, achieving great distance and height from his flutterkick, but he can't use it during backflips, sideflips or wallkicks. Now when you play as Yoshi, it'll feel like a part of his kit is just missing, all because the creators had to make the flutterkick way too overpowered. It hurts the amount of fun I had with the character, and makes playing with him very frustrating when I can't use his flutterkick in crucial situations.
Spike doesn't even have a moveset yet, so I can't include him in this. But the creators really need to rack their brains and think of something new instead of leaving him as is.
But while covering this, I feel like an overarching issue with these movesets are that the underpowered characters follow their source material too faithfully. Peach and Yoshi don't play like their source material. They do take inspiration from then, but ultimately, Peach can't refresh her float on wallkicks and Yoshi has always had fluctuating speeds when flutterkicking.
Rosalina and Pauline are the opposite of this. Other than very minor differences to their source material, they play just as you'd expect from a direct translation of their game's respective playstyles. Rosalina only has one non-refreshable spin and Pauline just has the GPD. No insane buffs like with the earlier characters.
Why? Beats me.
SUGGESTIONS TO CONSIDER
Gonna start off with mentioned suggestions here for all aspects of the mod:
- re-balance characters to either fit the potential of the older characters OR fit the potential of the new characters
- nerf Yoshi's flutterkick to allow for a less busted move with all around versatility
- buff Pauline or just give her more moves from Odyssey
- allows Rosalina's spin to refresh on every wallkick (if you can do it for Peach/Daisy, you can do it for her)
- give Spike a creative moveset, don't leave him untouched moveset-wise
- prioritize fluid and fun movesets, not just adhere to canonicity
- redo Peach/Daisy's heads to be more anatomically correct
- increase Pauline's model size
- improve voice direction for all characters and improve voice clips that don't sound great or are inconsistent
And some suggestions for topics I don't have the room to point out in detail (im nearing the character limit):
- let Birdo kick while grounded when holding A
- make Birdo's instant acceleration after using Egg Shot dependent on whether you hold the B button
- revert Toadette's sideflip nerf (it does nothing when her triple jump is just like Mario's
- rework color mapping for some characters or use fewer colorable body parts (Toadette, Yoshi/Birdo)
- increase the quality of future characters in regards to the criticisms above
CONCLUSION
Despite the mountain of critiques for EC, I really do enjoy this mod and what it has to offer. You don't really see mods for these characters come up publicly, so when it does its a pretty big event for the community. I can't deny how fun it is to play with most of these characters, nor can I deny how people have received EC as a whole. I do hope they clean up these issues I've pointed out, or at the very least consider them, but overall this is a great mod for people to try out for their first time on CoopDX. It just didn't meet my standards of a great moveset mod. Regardless, if you want to just have fun playing as different characters, try EC out. It's still worth giving your attention towards.
Rating: 3.8/5
. DISCLAIMER: This review is coming from the perspective of a kaizo player. This'll only matter for the moveset section since my skill level will change the way I see these characters, and they may not be how you might view them.
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Gonna start this off by saying that this mod is genuinely really fun to play, I love seeing new characters be added, and I don't intend for my review to affect the way you see EC. If you love this mod, then more power to you. I'm just here to voice my critiques from my own perspective, and if that doesn't align with yours, that's okay. With that being said...
MODELS
I honestly don't have much to say on most character models, they generally work just fine or are really good (specifically Rosalina and Spike). The only ones I have issues with are Peach/Daisy and Pauline. Peach and Daisy just look weird to me. I know they were based off the N64 Mario Party games, which is honestly fine by me, but why did the creators make their faces so small and their heads so big? Anatomically, it doesn't look right, and even the original models had reasonable proportions for their faces.
Then there's Pauline, and her model just isn't scaled correctly. I get that characters should scale to around Mario's height, and generally, the human female characters have very slim bodies, but on Pauline, its so apparent how small she is that her model should be considerably larger. Not enough to where she's well above Mario's height, but just enough to not feel tiny in comparison to everyone else. On top of that, Pauline is animated like a fish, which is understandable given how applying dress models works
putting this part here for a friend but the color mapping for Toadette and honestly most other characters needs work, since palettes should look good on every character without needing to making new color schemes.
VOICE ACTING
Just to preface this, I am mainly critiquing the voice direction and guidance that led to what the voices sound like today, not the voice actors or their capabilities. Some people can get that misconstrued and I felt like clarifying this in case people get he wrong idea.
With respect to the voice actors, the voices given to (almost) every character just don't sound great, either having poor audio quality, or just bad voice direction, with the most egregious being Rosalina's voice, which sounds tired and dead when there should be more enthusiasm and whimsy in her inflections. Peach's voice is too breathy and the sound quality is not that great. Yoshi sounds like Alvin from the live action Alvin and the Chipmunks movies. Toadette's voice is inconsistent, has bad sound quality and is too dainty imo. Spike sounds good, but needs a lot more gruff in his tone. The voices don't need to be a one-to-one impression of the original voices, but even on their own, they aren't that good.
Pauline and Birdo's voice are the only one I'd consider to be good in comparison to the rest with Spike at a close third. They sound accurate to the source material, and other than Pauline's double jump voice clip and a few other nitpicks, everything sounds great. The rest of the cast just needs a bit more tweaking in regards to their voice direction to sound just as great. There really needs to be better voice direction so that characters can be more accurate and just sound better to listen to.
MOVESETS
From what I understand about the mod, the balance between each character comes down to whatever the creators feel like doing. I'm all for making broken movesets that are fun to play with, but if you have a lot of characters packed into one mod, they should be balanced around the characters within said mod. It's clear that every character has some advantage over Mario, but even when taking him out of the equation, there's a lot of imbalance.
2/3 of the cast (Peach, Yoshi, Daisy, Toadette) are entirely overpowered in comparison to Mario, while the other 1/3 (Pauline, Rosalina) are better than Mario, but not by a huge margin. Peach and Daisy are movement powerhouses, being able to make leaps and bounds over anything that blocks their way. They're honestly a bit too overpowered if you think about it. If you make amazing characters that are way too overpowered in the very beginning, then to make new characters feel balanced you need to match future characters with release characters. Not to say they aren't fun, they're most definitely fun to play as. But you can tell that newer characters aren't nearly as great as the old ones are, and I'd personally like a reason to choose Rosalina over Daisy, or even Yoshi over Peach.
Speaking of Peach, she is THE prime example on how to not make your first character. Her signature ability allows her to float midair for around 2 seconds. The most significant nerfs given to Peach are a speed reduction the longer you float and her float losing small amounts of height the longer she's in midair. But if you look at what she can actually do with these nerfs, you'll notice she can refresh her float with just a wallkick. No limits or drawbacks for using multiple floats. You just get insanely long wallkicks at the cost of a tiny bit less height and speed identical to not floating at all. there is no reason why I would want to pick any other distance related character when Peach is everything I would need in a character.
To continue with the talk of balancing, the way they sometimes "nerf" characters either make characters feel LESS fun or feel like said nerfs never existed. Take Yoshi as an example of a character who isn't as fun as he could be. He's a combination of Peach and Daisy, achieving great distance and height from his flutterkick, but he can't use it during backflips, sideflips or wallkicks. Now when you play as Yoshi, it'll feel like a part of his kit is just missing, all because the creators had to make the flutterkick way too overpowered. It hurts the amount of fun I had with the character, and makes playing with him very frustrating when I can't use his flutterkick in crucial situations.
Spike doesn't even have a moveset yet, so I can't include him in this. But the creators really need to rack their brains and think of something new instead of leaving him as is.
But while covering this, I feel like an overarching issue with these movesets are that the underpowered characters follow their source material too faithfully. Peach and Yoshi don't play like their source material. They do take inspiration from then, but ultimately, Peach can't refresh her float on wallkicks and Yoshi has always had fluctuating speeds when flutterkicking.
Rosalina and Pauline are the opposite of this. Other than very minor differences to their source material, they play just as you'd expect from a direct translation of their game's respective playstyles. Rosalina only has one non-refreshable spin and Pauline just has the GPD. No insane buffs like with the earlier characters.
Why? Beats me.
SUGGESTIONS TO CONSIDER
Gonna start off with mentioned suggestions here for all aspects of the mod:
- re-balance characters to either fit the potential of the older characters OR fit the potential of the new characters
- nerf Yoshi's flutterkick to allow for a less busted move with all around versatility
- buff Pauline or just give her more moves from Odyssey
- allows Rosalina's spin to refresh on every wallkick (if you can do it for Peach/Daisy, you can do it for her)
- give Spike a creative moveset, don't leave him untouched moveset-wise
- prioritize fluid and fun movesets, not just adhere to canonicity
- redo Peach/Daisy's heads to be more anatomically correct
- increase Pauline's model size
- improve voice direction for all characters and improve voice clips that don't sound great or are inconsistent
And some suggestions for topics I don't have the room to point out in detail (im nearing the character limit):
- let Birdo kick while grounded when holding A
- make Birdo's instant acceleration after using Egg Shot dependent on whether you hold the B button
- revert Toadette's sideflip nerf (it does nothing when her triple jump is just like Mario's
- rework color mapping for some characters or use fewer colorable body parts (Toadette, Yoshi/Birdo)
- increase the quality of future characters in regards to the criticisms above
CONCLUSION
Despite the mountain of critiques for EC, I really do enjoy this mod and what it has to offer. You don't really see mods for these characters come up publicly, so when it does its a pretty big event for the community. I can't deny how fun it is to play with most of these characters, nor can I deny how people have received EC as a whole. I do hope they clean up these issues I've pointed out, or at the very least consider them, but overall this is a great mod for people to try out for their first time on CoopDX. It just didn't meet my standards of a great moveset mod. Regardless, if you want to just have fun playing as different characters, try EC out. It's still worth giving your attention towards.
Rating: 3.8/5
However we will completely disregard the parts about the models and voices.
We are not being paid to work on these. We are amateur VAs who just love Mario and wanted to take a crack at it on a character. Not everyone is gonna have a top working sound mic. They were worked in as much as possible with SM64's crappy sound system.
We are also modelers who just wanted to make characters translated to 64 within the limitations of the game's engine. And unfortunately, it is what you get within the possibility of what we can do. Also if we were to follow the source material strictly, then this project would just be a job rather than a hobby and at that point, why try.
Unless the models and voices break the game and hinders the game experience, or there's plans to redesign a character, it'll be left as is.
Thank you for the feedback.
May you have a good day.