Card Collecting

If you’re really of the obsessive-compulsive school, then you may find the game’s card collecting scheme to be up your alley. You’ll find a few cards here and there as you play through the game, and that’s a good thing; every time you collect a card for a monster, you’ll deal double damage to it when you hit it for the rest of the game. Finding two cards for a specific monster will let you quadruple the damage you deal, and so on. These are per monster type, now; a Goomba card won’t let you deal double damage to a Spiked Goomba or a Headbonk Goomba, for instance, only the very specific Goomba enemy.

There are 256 cards to collect in all, although only around 190 or so will be related to enemies or bosses (and you’ll rarely find a boss card before you fight the actual boss). The rest are cards for characters and Pixls, for the most part, with some cards for characters from past Paper Mario games. These cards aren’t required for anything except to complete your set, and can be sold to the Flipside card shop for large amounts of money if you don’t want them.

Note also that, even of the 190 or so cards that are usable when you attack enemies, a lot of these will be cards for "Dark" versions of your foes. E.g. there will be a card for a Goomba, and a card for Dark Goomba. Dark variants of your enemies will only be found in the Flopside Pit of 100 Trials. Having a card for Goomba will only increase your attack power against normal Goombas, not Dark Goombas, in other words.

Obtaining Cards

Cards are going to be hidden all over the game world.

You can obtain cards in a few different manners. One is to use Catch Cards on your enemies. Catch Cards are items that, when used, will attempt to convert the nearest enemy on the screen into the corresponding card. Catch Cards only work on relatively weak enemies, while Catch Card SPs will work on most non-boss foes that you face.

Many cards can be found in obscured or hidden treasure chests around the land, as well. For instance, every 10th level of the Flipside or Flopside Pit of 100 Trials will net you a new, rare creature card, mostly for Pixls and other characters. You can also find plenty of cards by engaging in Treasure Map Hunting (as described in another section of this chapter).

Card Shops

There are a few shops that cater to card freaks. The two main ones are on the 1st Floors of Flipside and Flopside, but the former will only be available to you after you obtain the Boomer Pixl. The Flipside card shop will sell you random cards at a bargain price of ten coins, as well as Catch Cards for 20 coins, and will also buy back cards from you for a fair price.

The Flopside card shop, on the other hand, will sell you specific cards at a price determined by the card’s rarity. They’ll also sell you Catch Card SPs at a hefty price of 100 coins per.

Lastly, Flimm in Flipside B1 will occasionally offer up rare cards for sell, but the selection is random.

Rewards

Besides multiplying your attack bonuses, there aren’t any confirmed rewards for collecting all of the cards in the game. Between buying the cards in the shops and playing the treasure hunt minigame to collect the cards, though, you’re going to have to spend thousands of coins and complete both Pits of 100 Trials to get anywhere close to a complete collection. This one’s for the diehards only.

Arcade Games

You can find the Gamer’s Arcade in Flipside B1, in the rear of the little bar there. Flip to 3D mode to find a golden pipe and head on down for fun and games!

In order to play games in the arcade, you’ll have to trade some coins for tokens, at a 3:1 ratio. You need to pay tokens in order to play the games here, and each game will cost at least 10 tokens, so that’s a good amount to start with. You will earn more tokens as you play the games themselves; for each 10,000 points you score, you’ll earn one token when you finally wind up dying in it. So you need to score at least 100,000 points to break even in most of the games; anything above that will net you extra tokens that are added to your total. You can trade in tokens to the cashier outside the arcade for rewards, including some very expensive HP Plus and Power Plus items that will permanently raise your attack power or health. At 2,500 tokens apiece, they’ll either cost you 7,500 coins apiece or will require you to play a hell of a lot of arcade games.

There are four arcade games in all.

Forget Me Not

Your preview will only last a second, so try to get at least a couple matches out of the way as soon as possible.

A basic game of Memory, played by pointing the Wiimote at the screen and attempting to match up pairs of cards. Except for the fact that the cards move. And more and more of them appear as you proceed through the rounds. Very difficult unless you’re really, really good at quickly memorizing large groups of objects. (You’ll get a glimpse of all the cards at the beginning of each round.)

Mansion Patrol

A frenetic lightgun-esque game that has you pointing your Wiimote at the screen and attempting to shoot at Boos before they reach you and zap you. This gets difficult quickly, so try to get in a really comfortable position for aiming before taking on the ghosts here.

Tilt Island

Arguably the easiest of the games, but also probably the most time-consuming to get a high score in. You have to hold the Wiimote sideways and tilt the ground under Mario’s feet to have him pick up fruits and fruit drinks that fall from the sky while avoiding the falling enemies that will hurt you. You’ll get points for each piece of fruit you nab, with less-common items (like pink shakes) being worth more. You can also get a bonus score if you manage to fill up your bar with all of the same type of fruit, although this is increasingly less realistic the farther along you go in the game.

Hammer Whacker

This is a hidden minigame. To play it, you have to head to the bar in Flopside B1 and go through the rear of it in 3D mode to find the Golden Ticket. Return that to the arcade, and you’ll unlock the new game, which costs 20 tokens to play.

Hammer Whacker requires you to hold the control towards the screen and sharply bring it downward as a Koopa kicks shells at you. You want to wait until the shell gets close to you before whacking it back at the Koopa; the closer it gets, the more points you get for the return. This is a twitch game to end all twitch games, and you’re going to need some great reflexes to make a lot of tokens at it, especially since it costs double the normal token fees.