Paper Mario: The Origami King Review

When you look at the stable of Nintendo first-party titles, especially anything with the mustache-wielding plumber on the cover, it’s hard to come up with anything that’s anything less than great. I don’t know what’s in the water over there at Nintendo HQ, but when they make a game they make a game. Even when they aren’t necessarily at the helm as we see with Origami King, they know how to pick the lead just as well.

Intelligent Systems, perhaps most notably the folks behind Fire Emblem, have also helmed Paper Mario from its inception and take up the task once again with Origami King. With Paper Mario being a popular franchise, and with Sticker Star and Color Splash being a bit more tepid than people perhaps would have wanted, there was a lot of hope that the first Paper Mario on the Switch would raise the bar again. While Origami King does do just that in a number of ways, it drops the ball in others that you may not have expected.

Normally I’d wait until later to talk about this but let’s just get it out of the way now: Paper Mario: The Origami King is an absolute beauty for the eyes and ears. The art direction is without question top-shelf stuff. The same can be said about the soundtrack and sound design. There are few if any games that have come out in recent memory that have the level of audiovisual polish that Origami King enjoys. Characters are all wonderful and have great personalities, zones are all well differentiated and feature individualized visuals and music, and the detail put into just about every nook and cranny is unbelievable. To be honest, the concept of origami in the realm of Paper Mario is so perfect that I’m not sure where they even go from here but that’s why I’m not paid Nintendo money.

The most impressive part of the whole presentation, however, is the writing. I don’t know who was in charge of making nearly every line of dialogue in this game hilarious, but it stands above every other aspect of Origami King as a highlight. This won’t play to those not seeing the video, but somewhere our wonderful video editor Mark is trying to find a way to squeeze several badges into this one segment. I’m so sorry, Mark. Now, let’s get back to our usual order of things, shall we?

There’s never a dull moment in the Mushroom Kingdom, and this time is no different. Mario and Luigi are set to attend what I would only assume to be an absolute banger of a turn-up party on a Tuesday at Peach’s castle, but upon arriving they discover there is in fact nobody to be found, and perhaps more sadly no bass to be dropped. Entering the castle, the brothers are met by a particularly zombie-brained Princess Peach. As it turns out, a maniacal origami baddy named Olly has folded nearly every citizen of Paper Mushroom Kingdom including none other than Bowser himself.

His grandiose plan? Turn everyone from a boring sheet of paper into a far superior folded evolution that would obey his every word to crown himself king of his would-be origami kingdom. Distraught with what has become of her brother, and freshly pulled from the interdimensional rift that is the space between the wallpaper and the drywall, Olivia joins forces with Mario to aid him in his quest to thwart Olly’s master plan and return the kingdom to its preferably flat self. So off we go then, hammer in hand and boots on feet as we start our journey.

You’ll soon discover the main overworld mechanic that ties everything together. Hidden in just about every tree, rock, flower, and enemy is confetti. Scattered around the world you’ll find holes in the ground, mountains, and buildings. You can fall into these holes taking damage if you do and so you’ll want to fix these scars left behind from Olly’s rampage more often than not. All of the confetti you’ll pick up is what you’ll use to do the repairing, and while you don’t need to repair them all to progress through the story, you are always rewarded in some way. Since it’s rare for you to not have enough confetti, there’s little reason not to take the time to play construction worker. You’ll also interact with the world with your hammer, as well as using the various Vellumental powers you’ll acquire on your journey. Before we talk about the Vellumentals and the dungeons that come with them, let’s talk about what is likely to be the most divisive part of Origami King – the combat.

The original Paper Mario is mostly viewed as having a turn-based RPG combat system not too dissimilar to those found in many JRPGs. It’s what, to my knowledge, helped make the game popular amongst long-time fans. Origami King veers well off of that path into uncharted territory, keeping the turn-based foundation but dramatically changing how the combat system plays out. Instead of just standing across from his enemies, Mario stands in the middle of four concentric circles with enemies populating one of the four segments of twelve pie pieces that make up the combat field.

The concept is simple: you have a limited amount of time and a limited number of moves to rotate the four rings and shift the twelve pie pieces to either lineup enemies in a row of four or block them in a two by two block right in front of Mario. While you don’t necessarily have to do this to attack, successfully solving the puzzle at any stage of combat will result in an attack damage multiplier that goes a long way to making quick work of your enemies while giving you more rewards at the end of combat.

A row is usually attacked with boots as you jump from one enemy to the next, while a block is attacked with your hammer. Enemies with spikes or classically upward-facing mouths need to be attacked with metal boots or a hammer, flying enemies must be jumped on unless using a special hammer, and some enemies are a bit less obvious about what to use. You’ll get your hands on progressively better items to boost combat damage, all of which break with use over time outside of your stock hammer and boots, and you’ll also be able to use things like fire flowers, mushrooms, and more to aid you in your fights. You’ll also come across accessories that, while not all combat-specific, can give you a longer combat timer, more health, or higher defense, among others.

But wait, there’s more! Some battles are “wave battles” that include…more than one wave of enemies, and when this happens and you have access to Vellumental powers (again, we’ll get there soon), you’ll have a chance at using that power for the second wave if you play your cards right. Taking it a step further and helping give you a reason to pay a bit more attention when you’re out there running around, is the Toad crowd.

Scattered all over the world are Toads that have been stuck, folded, or crumpled in all manner of ways by Olly. Find them, and they’ll join the Toad crowd that you’ll see in your battles. In combat, if you pay the Toads a tidy sum of coins, they’ll help you out with the help getting better based on how many Toads you’ve found and how many coins you’re dishing out. They’ll partially or completely solve the combat puzzles for you, do some minor damage to enemies, heal you with mushrooms, give you combat items, and more. You can, more or less, pay to win nearly every battle in the game or at the very least make it substantially easier for yourself. This is partially your first clue that the devs may not have had a lot of faith in all players being able to consistently beat the clock in combat.

With that being said, I am without a doubt one of those players. Origami King’s combat combines the two puzzle types my brain simply has never done well with and asks it to do them at the same time with a timer. While I could hack my way through the battles easily enough and never really got in any real trouble even in boss battles, I struggled to consistently get enemies lined up within the given time limit. About halfway through the game, however, between the wealth of coins I had and the combat items at my disposal, I just paid the toads to do a bit of work and cleaned up all the same. Truth be told, you can skip a not-insignificant number of battles without really missing out on anything since there’s no leveling to be done here. Your health and power mostly come from your items, the latter of which increases with finding special hearts around the world. This is even more possible if you’re good at the puzzling, so I suspect speed runners will have a field day here – though that’s not to say they may get through the game in a particularly short amount of time.

Boss fights, both big and small, follow slightly different rules. Instead of Mario being in the middle, it’s the boss, and Mario has to navigate the rings and segments to collect items and land on action panels to get the job done. Doing so requires you to pay attention to and use arrows on certain segments which allow you to move in the direction the arrows are facing. You’ll keep going in that direction until you hit another arrow, a final action panel, or hit a panel with no action on it at all. For example, you may want or need to hit the boss from the back so you’d rotate the panels and slide the segments to get an attack action in place while also setting a route to get there with the arrows available.  You still have a time limit and a set number of ring moves, but otherwise, your goal is now to figure out what makes a boss tick, and then what makes the boss stop ticking.

These battles are a bit hit or miss, and I would argue that they’re more often a miss than a hit. While the concept is quite good, many bosses have annoying mechanics that slow down a fight for no real benefit gameplay-wise. One boss in particular actually requires you to sit around and wait for it to be ready for an attack before you can do any real damage while you take damage yourself. As mentioned before, the combat isn’t super punishing, but some bosses will absolutely crush you if you aren’t careful or at least have stocked up on those extra hearts. Like the standard combat instances, I think there’s some promise here if they had another shot at working on it for another game. Whether or not that will ever happen, however, is debatable. Ultimately the combat is nothing if not unique.

As for what happens in between these boss battles is pretty standard stuff, and very Legend of Zelda formulaic. You’ll go to a zone, find the mini-dungeon that leads to a Vellumental fight so Olivia can learn a new trick you need to get to, and complete the main dungeon in the area with a boss at the end – then rinse and repeat. Vellumentals are essentially origami gods of certain elements like fire or water that were corrupted by Olly, and hold the powers that Olivia can use to aid you. It’s honestly fine for the first half of the game or so and doesn’t feel stale, but for me, the magic started to fade after the halfway point. Mechanically the game doesn’t progress substantially from beginning to end and neither does the level design which led to some fatigue.

The back third of the game does make an effort to mix up the formula but does so in ways that end up feeling more like padding than anything. For example, at some point, you’ll be playing a Windwaker clone instead of clearing a mini-dungeon, and if you don’t sort out the direct path to continuing the story it is a fairly substantial time sink. You’ll also go through a tropey tower dungeon that has you using all of your previously acquired powers in identical ways, and in general, there’s a reasonable amount of backtracking throughout. In my opinion, Origami King is a 15-20 hour game that’s been stretched to make for a 30-40 hour experience. It’s a shame, because it absolutely changed my feelings about the game, though I could appreciate why this wouldn’t bother everyone. For those who love collecting things in their games, a Museum in town is happy to be a reminder that one could spend a lot longer looking under every rock and mastering every mini-game to add to their collection.

Another oddity I found was in the design decisions behind a few encounters in the game that don’t seem to be appropriate for the target demographic of the game – which would seemingly be children. I know I’m often as sharp as a beachball and as fast as a sloth, but some of what the game asks in spots is likely beyond what most younger children would be able to pull off. How about counting characters entering and leaving a hot tub that’s obscured with steam to know how many remain in the tub at the end of the timer? Easy enough. How about doing some basic math with available numbers to give the said number of characters in the hot tub? Not super hard but perhaps an unnecessary step. How about rotating randomized numbers and addition/subtraction signs to get them in the right order in four specific segments of the battle circles to create the mathematical phrase that provides the number of the characters remaining in the hot tub? Ok, now do all of that but with a 30-second timer and you’ve got yourself a small part of one of the most asinine segments of Origami King.

I say one of the most asinine because the worst offender is unfortunately the final boss of the game. I won’t spoil specifics, of course, but I can at least try to describe what I mean. While the combat in the game does not dramatically evolve during your time in Origami King, you wouldn’t expect the game to throw the whole system out in the end game but that’s exactly what they do. I won’t be much more specific than that, but not only do they toss everything out the window, but they manage to cram in quick time events, controller shaking, a horribly restrictive timer, and an unskippable cutscene. It’s unfun, uneventful, counter to everything you’ve done in the entire game up to that point, and for me, a sour note to end on after already battling with the end game padding.

That’s sort of how it goes with Origami King. The presentation is out of this world and the level of polish on everything from the art style to writing is likely to be some of the best you’ll see this year. The impression it leaves you within the opening 8-12 hours is spectacular and you’ll likely be completely in love with it. Depending on how well you withstand the padding and lack of mechanical growth throughout the following ten or more hours will likely determine how you feel about the game come the credits. The quality of the writing, the attention to detail, and phenomenal music does not change from beginning to end, but the padding and awkward design choices hold back Paper Mario: The Origami King from being a recommendation for everyone.