Near the start of the adventure, Mario receives a bag of confetti to aid in his quest, and from then on a simple button press will fill the air around him with dozens of small paper bits.
It gets even better once you learn that Paper Mario doesn’t penalize you for throwing confetti around anytime you damn well please.
Sure, it feels great to rebuild the Mushroom Kingdom in Paper Mario, but its crowning achievement is in giving me a “make the screen pretty†button I can spam every few seconds.