When Nintendo launched "Paper Mario: Color Splash" during E3 2016, not a few were surprised by the sudden departure from the typical RPG format of previous games in the series.

In fact, the demo play that Nintendo uploaded on YouTube generated more dislikes than likes. That's a first for the gaming company, and speaks a lot about what fans think about "Paper Mario: Color Splash."

The game was so widely disliked that there's actually a petition uploaded on Change.org calling on Nintendo to cancel "Paper Mario: Color Splash."

"Fans have been waiting for a new Paper Mario for a while now," the petition said. "After 'Sticker Star,' we hoped Nintendo would have learned from their mistakes and make a better Paper Mario for the Wii U along the lines of 'The Thousand Year Door.'"

It would have been easy to dismiss the petition as a product of one disgruntled fan, but people took it seriously. So far, the petition has gathered 1,568 signatures.

But producer Risa Tabasa said in an interview with Kotaku that it was a conscious decision to drop the RPG format in favor of just pure fun, just to differentiate it from its predecessors.

"This game is an action-adventure," she said.

"And so since we already have that established Mario & Luigi RPG series, in order to differentiate these two series that we have running concurrently, we've tried to focus more on the non-RPG elements for the Paper Mario games," she added.

The "Paper Mario: Color Splash" will be released in October this year, and it will be interesting to see how fans will react once they recover from the immediate shock.