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Paper Mario: The Origami King Review |
I’ve been a fan of the Paper Mario series since its humble origins on the Nintendo 64 with the original Paper Mario. Although some might say it started on the SNES with SquareSoft and Nintendo’s joint venture, Super Mario RPG. Most people would also say that the series has been slowly casting aside its RPG roots as it progresses. For better or worse, Paper Mario: The Origami King continues this trend.
The game opens with an Origami festival being held by the Princess.
I’ll start with Origami King’s main strength: its world. The paper world that it “crafts” (sorry) defies its two-dimensional literal lack of depth (sorry again). Let me rephrase that. The world of Paper Mario games is extremely well fleshed out and exposes you to a lot of areas of the world that a normal Mario game would not. You’ll chat with a Dry Bones who run a coffee shop. Academic toads will take you on archaeological adventures. You attend canned food parties with a Spike, Shy Guy and Bone Goomba. It’s a real living breathing world where you can explore every nook and cranny and talk to all its weird inhabitants. The translation is also outstanding for a game of its size with as much text as it has. It shows that a lot of work has been put into the translation even including puns and wordplay. This is a refreshing change from the dark days of the ’80s and 90’s RPGs where translations ranged from mediocre to awful. I can genuinely say that the last few Paper Mario games have been some of the funniest scripts I’ve seen with clever humour that plays off the world, cliches of games and nuances of the world of Mario.
Banter with NPCs especially Bowsers minions is always great.
Sadly it’s not all good news and once we get to the gameplay itself things take a bit of a downturn. As mentioned before, there aren’t a lot of RPG mechanics to be seen. Almost none at all. No EXP, no levelling, no equipment. Instead of levels you are periodically given hit point upgrades at key points in the story. These also boost your attack power allowing you to one-shot lower level enemies. Instead of equipment and weapons, you collect increasingly powerful boots and hammers. But these degrade and break over time necessitating the need to keep collecting or buying more. You can also equip Mario with accessories bought from stores that give you buffs like more health, less damage, hidden block finders, etc. The story is the usual affair to save the Princess. But instead of just being stolen, this time she has been folded into origami along with most of the kingdom by your main antagonist, the Origami King.
The only character configuration to speak of is with accessories and two weapon types to collect.
Battles start once you touch an enemy in the field and consist of two phases: rings and attacks. The first stage is a mini-puzzle where you must align the enemies in lines or groups by rotating and sliding rings in the arena. Doing so gives you additional attacks and higher attack power. Once you have lined up the rings you attack using your boots or hammers or use extra items such as fire flowers and mushrooms. While this battle system is novel for a time, the charm soon wears off. And since battles give no rewards other than coins, which are already fairly plentiful, there is little need to do much battling. Several hours in I found myself actively avoiding the battles because they felt like a waste of time. Boss fights are a slightly more prolonged and complex variation of this where you must line up arrows on the combat rings to get within attack range of the boss or trigger other special moves and events. All of these factors combined make the battles get old fairly quickly. The boss battles are more interesting but there are only a couple of these per chapter.
The ring battle system is interesting at first but doesn’t hold up in the long run.
Overall the world of The Origami King is the most interesting part. Exploring the world and progressing through it while encountering all its interesting characters was the most appealing aspect to me. And seeing as you’ll be spending a solid 25 hours getting through just the main story, it’s a good thing the world is a nice place to be. The battle system is fairly lacklustre and except for the boss fights starts to get tiresome fairly quickly. Most Paper Mario games have a unique battle system of their own but this one is sadly not as good as it’s predecessors. Fans of the Paper Mario and/or Mario series will still get plenty out of this. But those after a proper RPG and deep battle mechanics with a Mario theme might have to look elsewhere. Alternative recommendations I could make for those looking for a more tactical RPG would be the first two games in this series. The original Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. Both retain the charm and character of the world but keep RPG mechanics like levels, experience, equipment and a bigger party.
Final Score: 3/5
A good game fantastically and fairly reviewed.
The interactions with Bowser’s minions are a definite highlight. My partner works in translation and can vouch for your comments on the character dialogue. it’s always amusing and you can tell a lot of love went into making the English work as well as the Japanese.
It is a shame about the combat. Seemed clever to begin with but now it’s annoying. Literally my only gripe with it. It was painful to watch play throughs online where simple battles could have been skipped because the gamer liked coin farming. There’s so many coins already!
Anyways went off on a tangent. 3/5 seems fair.
Yeah I did learn later that there’s an ability of some kid you can get in the Battle Arena that pretty much automatically solves the ring puzzle section of the battles for you….would have been handy to know about at the time!