Let's Talk About Paper Mario: The Origami King

If you've read my review of Bug Fables you'd know I'm a big fan of the Paper Mario series. Those first two games were so good, great battle systems, memorable and interesting characters, great witty writing, they had everything I look for in an RPG. Paper Mario the Thousand Year door remains my favourite game of all time and the original Paper Mario isn't too far behind it. They're games I hold near and dear to my heart. So why does Nintendo and Intelligent Systems keep finding ways to screw it up? Super Paper Mario attempted to mix RPG elements with Mario's trademark 2D platforming and, while it had the same level of charm as the original and a great story, the mix of the two styles felt ill-conceived and the gameplay was a massive step down as a result. But that was just one game where they tried something new, surely they'd go back to the original formula next time, right?

Well that's we all thought, and then Sticker Star happened which preceded to destroy everything that made Paper Mario what it was. Interesting characters? Gone. The story? Bland and forgettable. The battle system? Rendered worthless. I would argue Sticker Star is one of the most hated Nintendo games of all time perhaps topped only by Metroid Other M. So guess what they did for the next game? They did Sticker Star, again. Colour Splash was an attempt to redo the Sticker Star formula and improve upon it, which it admittedly did do. The writing was a lot better at least and it does have it's fans, but I can't say I'm one of them. The battle system still wasn't fun and the level based structure didn't really work for me. Don't get me wrong, Colour Splash isn't a bad game, it's just not a particularly good one.

It hasn't been easy being a Paper Mario fan. All we want is for them to go back to that original formula that worked so well but they just keep experimenting and trying to fix what wasn't broken. There's nothing wrong with experimenting if what you create is good in it's own right but the recent Paper Mario games have been very underwhelming so their experimental nature falls flat, pun intended. Which brings us, at last, to Paper Mario: The Origami King, another attempt to shake up the Paper Mario formula. Is this the one where they finally get it right, or is it another example of how far this series has fallen? This intro's gone on long enough so let's get to it.

Normally I would start with the story in these reviews but I'm going to start with presentation for a change. Origami King, is a very nice looking game. The game has just the right amount of detail. The whole premise of this series is that the world is made of paper so it's important the world looks like it's made of some kind of material. Origami King nails this while also pulling off the typical Mario art style, which is usually very cartoony. The game is very bright and colourful and there's a healthy amount of visual variety in the locations you visit.

While it does still use typical Mario level themes, it doesn't rely on them as heavily and actually adds in unique locations of it's own. I'll get more into that when we get to the gameplay but suffice to say you won't get bored with how the game looks. The game also runs very well in both docked and handheld modes, I did notice some dropped frames at certain points but nothing that affected gameplay. Plus the slowdown happens during big moments or when you use a big attack so I don't know if it was intentional or not, it actually helps with the effect honestly

My only complaint with the game visually is the lack of unique races or visually interesting characters. Now this was a problem with the last two Paper Mario games too and to Origami King's credit, it does take steps to improve on this to a certain extent. While you still run into the same generic Mario characters throughout the game there are quite a few that are visually distinct. It just doesn't go far enough in my opinion and I would have liked to see some other species thrown in other than the toads. Mario Odyssey introduced a bunch of new races to the Mario Universe and I'd like to see them take advantage of that.

In terms of music, it's pretty damn spectacular. In some ways this is the best soundtrack in the series. Heresy I know but this is some good shit. The battle theme is great, and has multiple different variations depending on where you are which is a nice touch, the boss themes are great, it's a really good soundtrack with a good variety of styles and tones from western to disco.

Alright now that we've got presentation out of the way let's talk about the game proper. For this adventure, Mario is invited to an origami festival held by Princess Peach. When they get there, they discover that Peach has been turned into origami along with Bowser's minions by Olly, the titular Origami King. Now Mario must team up with Olly's sister Olivia to stop the king from turning the whole of the Mushroom Kingdom. The story is fairly simple, as is expected from the series at this point, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Origami King puts more emphasis on the humour and it succeeds in that regard. The jokes are constant and there's a decent amount of variety in the types of jokes they use ranging from physical slap-stick to a good old fashioned pun, and I love me a good pun.

That was true for Colour Splash as well. That game also put more emphasis on the comedy but Origami King is a much better story. For one thing, the partners are a lot better. Olivia is the main partner you have throughout the game and she's a total sweetheart. She's so nice to everyone she meets it's hard not to love her. And, for the first time in forever, you get other characters to join your party, kind of. They're only temporary and they aren't as interesting as the partners in the older games, but their still fun characters in their own right. There's a bob-omb who's lost his memory that Olivia nicknames Bobby, there's Professor Toad who is studying old desert ruins, even Kamek joins up at some point and actually gets a little character development. I would have liked it if they had more unique designs and weren't temporary, I'm also not certain why they used Kamek and not Kammy, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

Speaking of steps in the right direction, let's talk the villains because, dear lord, what breath of fresh air these guys are. You don't know how refreshing it is to have a main villain that isn't Bowser. Oh, Bowser is in the game but he's more of a side character here and is back to being the loveable goof he was in Thousand Year Door. That's where Bowser is at his best. As for the villains themselves, they're ok. I do like Olly but he doesn't show up much, he never gets any real character development until the very end of the game, and his Legion of Stationary are pretty one note. There is something funny about Mario fighting office equipment though I will say that. The villains aren't as interesting as the villains in the older games but it's nice to have something, anything different.

The best way to describe Paper Mario: The Origami King is that it's a game made up of various moments. This was true of Thousand Year Door and was one of the things I loved most about that game. Every chapter felt like it's own mini adventure that was more unique than the last. Origami King follows in the same spirit. The game is constantly shaking things up, one moment your sneaking through a Ninja theme park the next your exploring an abandoned cruise ship before being attacked by a giant papier-mâché Gooper Blooper. While the game has ditched the chapter based progression it does make sure to make each main area you explore unique.

As I have said in past reviews the core pillars of any RPG are exploration, customization and combat. Origami King is somewhat difficult to judge as an RPG because it doesn't really feel like one. There aren't any stats to upgrade outside of your health and there's no experience points gained from battle. It has elements of RPG's like turn-based battles but it feels more like an adventure game with RPG elements. Judging it as I have other RPG's seems somewhat unfair. That being said, it is still being marketed and sold as an RPG and does have exploration, customization and combat so we should still judge it based on those aspects.

Exploration is what you'll be doing for the majority of the game. Like a lot of RPG's the bulk of the games exploration is based on solving puzzles, talking to NPC's and visiting various town. Mario is still rocking the same jumping and hammering skills he's always had but he's been given some new tools to play with in the form of the Thousand Fold Arms. By standing on a magic circle Mario can use these arms to interact with the environment. It's a nice addition but they feel underdeveloped. Most of the puzzles that require them are a little too simple and don't get interesting until the final areas of the game. They use motion controls by default but you can turn these off which is appreciated. Mario can also unlock various Velumental forms but these are even more situational than the Thousand Fold Arms and don't require any input. Just stand on circle, press button, watch things happen.

That sucks but the game makes up for it in the set pieces and minigames. And it's in these moments where the game truly shines. There's a lot of cool moments throughout the game and almost all of them are fun. There's a lot of them but here are some highlights. Traveling through a fake ninja house, taking part in a quiz show hosted by Shy-Guys, traveling the desert in a car shaped like a boot, boating down river rapids, shooting down paper planes with a canon and many, many more. These set-pieces give the game a great sense of variety, I usually hate minigames in RPG's but I really liked them here and some of them offer additional challenges for rewards. A lot of the games content is optional, beating the game normally should take roughly 12 hours but expect to add an extra 5 hours if going for 100%. Not that long for an RPG but still a pretty decent length.

But what do you do for 100% completion? Well that's where the collectibles come in. Origami King is split between various different interconnected areas, thankfully it ditches the level based structure of the last two games, and within these areas you'll find a variety of collectibles. Most of these go towards unlocking items in the Toad Town Museum which acts like a sort of checklist for 100% completion. You'll find not-bottomless holes throughout each area that can be filled up using confetti you find all over the place. I'm not kidding, you'll find it in trees, in rocks, by beating enemies, in grass, it's impossible to run out you'll have so much of it. Anyway, filling up one hole only gets you some coins but if you fill every hole in that area you'll unlock that areas music in the museums soundtrack room. Since the soundtrack is excellent this is worth doing. It isn't that hard to do either unless you miss one and have to backtrack through the level only to keep missing it and spend 30 minutes wandering around to find the damn thing. Anyone who's played a collectathon will know that pain.

The other collectibles include ? Blocks. These only give you the items in the blocks so they aren't too exciting. Some of them are invisible and sometimes the cues of where they are can be easily missed. Keep your eyes open for them. Then there are the collectible treasures which are basically just in game models in trophy form, kind of like Super Smash Bros trophies. These are found in a variety of places. Most of them are found in treasure chests but you can also find them by playing minigames, talking to certain NPC's, buying them in stores or even in ? Blocks. Some of them are easy to get but others will require you to scour every nook and cranny to find them.

Then there's the most substantial collectible, the hidden Toads. Toads are all over the place folded into various origami shapes. There's a lot of them too. The areas you explore in Origami King are much larger than previous entries and there are Toads in every corner of them. So what do the Toads do? A couple of things. Some will give you items like special hearts that increase your health and others unlock things in the overworld. But the main thing they do is add additional Toads in audience during battles, more on that in a bit. Finding Toads will also unlock points you can use to purchase concept art in the museum.

There is one last collectible in the form of trophies. These act as a sort of in-game achievements except they actually go towards 100% completion. But I know what you're thinking “is it actually worth going for 100%”? kind of. Getting 100% does get you an extra post-credits scene so you are rewarded for doing so and I thought it was fun to do so I did it anyway. Not all of it is fun though, some of it can be annoying or even tedious but the majority of it is enjoyable. Really my only complaint with going for 100% is having to fight all the bosses a second time. I don't mind this in other games because most of the time the rematches are more challenging but here they're the exact same fight just with a timer to see how long you take to beat them slapped on.

Speaking of bosses, you've probably noticed that I've been taking a really long time to get to the damn battle system. Well that's because it's here where most of the games problems arise and I wanted to talk about the good stuff first. Origami King's battle system is, unique. Rather than go for the traditional turn based battles of the older games, Origami King instead goes for a ring puzzle based battle system. Here's how it works. Mario stands in the middle of a large ring that can be rotated and slid in various different ways. The goal is to align enemies in either a straight line or in a square formation to deal extra damage. After this you can then attack the enemies either by jumping on them or using your hammer depending on which formation the enemies are in.

Now this isn't a bad idea on paper, pun very much intended, but in practice there are several problems that keep it from being truly great. The first issue is the puzzles themselves. They range from so brain dead even a baby could solve them to “oh my god how the fuck do I solve this” and never quite finds a happy middle ground between the two. Even if you can't solve it you can just ask the audience to help solve the puzzles. Yeah those Toads you were rescuing aren't there for decoration, by throwing out some coins they can actually assist you in battle. It isn't as in depth as the stage gimmick in Thousand Year Door but it's nice to see the audience mechanic return even in a toned down form.

The puzzles are the root cause of the issues regarding the battle system because, once you've solved them, the battles pretty much over. The power boost you gain from solving the puzzles guarantees that the enemies will die in one attack. Sure some might require use of a stronger weapon but that doesn't change the fact that most battles end in one turn. This also means that the game has very weak enemy variety. Well maybe that's not the right way to describe it. It's not like the game doesn't offer varied enemy types because it does. Some enemies are in the air and are unaffected by hammer attacks and spiky enemies can't be jumped on, so there are enemies that require different strategies. The problem is that very few of them take advantage of the ring gimmick, only the Boo's and another enemy I won't spoil change the way you handle the ring puzzles which makes every fight feel exactly the same.

I wouldn't mind this so much if the weapons system picked up the slack. Remember all the different attacks you could unlock in the original games, well Origami King attempts to do that but it botches it due to the lack of variety. You only really have two types of boots and hammers, for boots you have your normal boots and iron boots while hammers have regular mallets and hurl hammers. You do have fire and ice hammer as well but those are just regular hammers with elemental properties that aren't that useful. I should also mention that weapons do break after continuous use but thankfully your standard boots and hammers don't. I honestly don't mind the weapons breaking too much because they don't break that easily and the game gives you plenty of them so you should never run out. My big issue is the lack of variety because it never felt like I was allowed to experiment with my weapon loadouts. There isn't even that much variety in the action commands this time, both the hammers and the jumps just require you to hit the A button at the right time.

You can also use items in battles too but I very rarely used these. Outside of healing mushrooms I almost never used any of them and even the healing mushrooms I never really needed that much. Origami King is not a difficult game. Granted the Paper Mario games were never that challenging but this one is especially easy. I don't mind it personally but if your after a decent challenge then look elsewhere.

Let's address the elephant in the room though, the lack of experience points. All you get from battles are coins which you can also get in the overworld. Some would argue this makes the battles worthless but I disagree with that notion. Coins are used frequently throughout the game and not just for buying items. I mean, you do buy a lot of items, including accessories and treasures which can be very expensive, but that's not all they're used for. You can also use them in combat. I already mentioned you can spend them to get the audience to give you a hand but you can also use them to give yourself more time to solve the puzzles. Yeah you can literally buy time in the game. Even then there are times when coins are used for progression or to aid in progression, so you need a lot of coins in the game, especially when going for 100%.

Second, battles are framed a little differently this time around. In the older games you only ever fought enemies to get stronger. In Origami King, while there are still fights that are avoidable, most are obstacles obstructing your progress. It changes them from a means to get stronger to an obstacle that needs to be overcome. I think that's a good way of handling it if you don't have experience points.

So the battle system is, a mixed bag to put it lightly. It isn't a bad concept but it needed to be a lot more fleshed out. You would think then that the combat portion of the game would be a failure, and then you get to the boss fights. These play out very differently. Instead of being in the centre of the ring, the boss is in the centre and Mario starts at the edge of it. The goal is to guide Mario using arrows on the rings so he can attack the boss. The bosses are a much better implementation of the puzzle based system, mainly because they feel like a puzzle.

There's more to the fights than just, “get to attack spot and use attack”, there's a bit more to it than that. Not only do you need to hit specific points on the bosses, but you remember the Thousand Fold Arms and Velumental abilities? You need to make use of those abilities to properly defeat them and it isn't always made clear how to do it but the fights aren't too frustrating that this becomes a problem. Except in the Fire Velumental fight, that one was very frustrating until I figured out a good pattern for it.

The bosses are the saving grace for the battle system. If they do more of this I can see this winning people over but the main battles are simply too undercooked that I didn't enjoy them too much. I didn't hate them, I was just underwhelmed. There is one last type of battle to quickly go over and that's the Paper Mach battles. These are battles between giant papier-mâché versions of classic Mario enemies that take place entirely in the overworld There isn't too many of them and they're a nice change of pace when they show up.

The last thing I want to go over is the customization. Remember the badges from the first game and how you could mix and match various types to customise your play styles. Well what if you took that, whittled it down to it's most basic elements and removed any and all experimentation? You would get the accessory system in Origami King. I value customization in RPG's so I was particularly disappointed by this aspect. There's almost no variety in these. You have those that increase your health, those that give you more time for puzzles and those that increase your guard with three different levels of each. There's no room to experiment with these. The game tells you that you can only equip so many accessories but that just means you can only equip one accessory from each category. The only category that gives you any leeway is what I can only call the miscellaneous section, and those don't really help you in combat.

There just isn't anything to the customization in the game. There aren't any stats so you can't mess around there. The only stat you have is your HP which increases when you collect special hearts which also increases your attack power. I'm glad they've made some strides to reintroduce elements of customisation to the series but it's so wafer thin they might as well not even have bothered.

So, overall, what do I think about Paper Mario: The Origami King? Well despite my issues with the battle system and the lack of customisation, I still enjoyed my time with it. This isn't close to matching the originals but it did feel like this is the closest we've gotten to them. When it's at it's best it's a blast and while it has it's low points, they aren't that bad compared to the low points in the other games. Let me put it to you this way, I gave up on Sticker Star and Colour Splash after the first chapter, I finished Origami King to 100% , not because I was reviewing it but because I legitimately wanted to. Yeah some moments dragged and the battle system is going to be very divisive, but Paper Mario and the Origami King is a fun little adventure worth having.

We may never get a Paper Mario game in that classic style again. Intelligent Systems just isn't interested in doing that. But at least we have a Paper Mario game that's actually somewhat decent now. If you want a game in that classic style may I suggest giving Bug Fables a shot. I don't know what's in the future for Mario RPG's, especially given that the Mario & Luigi series is most likely dead, but whatever happens I can at least say this. Nothing could ever be as bad as Sticker Star. Until next time, remember to stay safe and have fun.