PAPER MARIO: THE ORIGAMI KING
The battle between traditional and experimental Mario begins
FOOL ME ONCE, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me! Fool me three times? Four!? Well, shame on an entire fandom, perhaps, but I think Paper Mario fans at this point are just tired of feeling like fools.
We’ve just run through a retrospective of every Paper Mario installment up to this point, but let’s distill that down to a few paragraphs here. Super Mario RPG laid the foundation for what playing as Mario would feel like in the context of a role-playing game, establishing key gameplay mechanics liked times hits in battle and making sure that the exploration sequences between battle scenes felt sufficiently Mario-ish by retaining a focus on platforming. The first official Paper Mario then took those two elements and added the all-new paper-themed art style that would define the series thereafter. It also refined the combat to put the spotlight squarely on Mario himself, pairing him with a squad of partner characters who’d assist him in fights one at a time. When Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door replicated that same style in combat, it was canonized in the minds of nearly every early series fan as “the way Paper Mario ought to be.”
Then, in the next game the changed it. Plenty of Nintendo’s brands had presented experimental game designs in the past, so when Super Paper Mario arrived on the Wii and did a lot of things totally differently than its two predecessors, no one raised the alarm immediately. It seemed like the fans took it to be a one-time goofy off-shoot of the “real” Paper Mario series, and that things would go back to “normal” with whatever the next installment would be. And, honestly, that assumption wasn’t a misguided one - plenty of Nintendo’s ongoing series did weird, gimmicky things just to take advantage of the uniqueness of the Wii hardware in particular.
But while other series did return to their relative home bases after the era of motion control came to an end, Paper Mario never did Super Paper Mario’s rejection of turn-based battles in favor of side-scrolling hopping and bopping led next to Sticker Star’s reliance on consumable stickers to fuel its combat, which then led after that to Color Splash’s card-battling system that was also based entirely around gathering up attacks that you could run out of. The partner characters fell away when the new battle system ideas no longer needed them to be present, and somehow 16 years have now gone by since the last time fans have been sold a game with the “Paper Mario” name that truly feels like it belongs in this brand.
And that’s where we find ourselves now, on the verge of the launch of Nintendo’s next attempt. Not wanting to fool ourselves into thinking The Origami King would be a true return to form, long-time Paper Mario players approached its reveal with caution. We’ve been burned before! We know better than to let ourselves get too hyped too early, because then we’ll just end up kicking ourselves when the final product turns out not to be what we imagined.
...However. Cautiously, I’m here to report that Paper Mario: The Origami King does indeed look like it’s taking some steps back toward some design ideas that were so beloved in the first and second games in the series. It’s not a total break away from the trajectory that the experimental sequels put the series on throughout the past 13 years, but traditional values do seem to be creeping back into the mix. Let’s assess things on one topic at a time.
We’ve just run through a retrospective of every Paper Mario installment up to this point, but let’s distill that down to a few paragraphs here. Super Mario RPG laid the foundation for what playing as Mario would feel like in the context of a role-playing game, establishing key gameplay mechanics liked times hits in battle and making sure that the exploration sequences between battle scenes felt sufficiently Mario-ish by retaining a focus on platforming. The first official Paper Mario then took those two elements and added the all-new paper-themed art style that would define the series thereafter. It also refined the combat to put the spotlight squarely on Mario himself, pairing him with a squad of partner characters who’d assist him in fights one at a time. When Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door replicated that same style in combat, it was canonized in the minds of nearly every early series fan as “the way Paper Mario ought to be.”
Then, in the next game the changed it. Plenty of Nintendo’s brands had presented experimental game designs in the past, so when Super Paper Mario arrived on the Wii and did a lot of things totally differently than its two predecessors, no one raised the alarm immediately. It seemed like the fans took it to be a one-time goofy off-shoot of the “real” Paper Mario series, and that things would go back to “normal” with whatever the next installment would be. And, honestly, that assumption wasn’t a misguided one - plenty of Nintendo’s ongoing series did weird, gimmicky things just to take advantage of the uniqueness of the Wii hardware in particular.
But while other series did return to their relative home bases after the era of motion control came to an end, Paper Mario never did Super Paper Mario’s rejection of turn-based battles in favor of side-scrolling hopping and bopping led next to Sticker Star’s reliance on consumable stickers to fuel its combat, which then led after that to Color Splash’s card-battling system that was also based entirely around gathering up attacks that you could run out of. The partner characters fell away when the new battle system ideas no longer needed them to be present, and somehow 16 years have now gone by since the last time fans have been sold a game with the “Paper Mario” name that truly feels like it belongs in this brand.
And that’s where we find ourselves now, on the verge of the launch of Nintendo’s next attempt. Not wanting to fool ourselves into thinking The Origami King would be a true return to form, long-time Paper Mario players approached its reveal with caution. We’ve been burned before! We know better than to let ourselves get too hyped too early, because then we’ll just end up kicking ourselves when the final product turns out not to be what we imagined.
...However. Cautiously, I’m here to report that Paper Mario: The Origami King does indeed look like it’s taking some steps back toward some design ideas that were so beloved in the first and second games in the series. It’s not a total break away from the trajectory that the experimental sequels put the series on throughout the past 13 years, but traditional values do seem to be creeping back into the mix. Let’s assess things on one topic at a time.