Paper Mario: The Origami King Review

Paper Mario is such an odd franchise. This feels like a series of games where Nintendo does whatever the hell it wants. You can’t even say they are consistently turn-based RPGs, because Super Paper Mario on Wii changed that up. And Origami King is only partially turn-based. Smaller enemies and boss battles are still turn-based, but there are several medium-sized enemies that you fight in real-time. I wish they’d just ditch the turn-based battles altogether, because this series has stopped doing them well since the Gamecube. The gimmick this time around is that you have to line up the battle field before you attack. Against smaller enemies, this becomes a tedious chore that I’d rather flee from (if fleeing didn’t have such a high failure rate).

The boss battles are actually pretty fun, though. Instead of lining up the enemies, you need to create a path for Mario to follow that will stop at useful power-ups along the way. Bosses also have different gotchas that make each encounter feel fresh, as opposed to the repetitive minion battles that boil down to “use hammer or jump.” I did appreciate that you could smash and kill an enemy in the overworld to prevent a turn-based battle, but it was never clear which enemies were susceptible to this trick. It’s supposed to be tied to how strong you are, but the only indicator of your strength is how much max HP you have. And since battles reward no experience points—hell, there are no experience points in this game—the only way to increase your health/power is to stumble across explicit upgrades in the overworld.

For me, the best thing about Paper Mario games now is simply exploring the world. Uncovering hidden Toads in Origami King was a fun side goal, and the environments were always fairly clever and visually stunning. I didn’t care for the “flat paper vs origami” storyline, but I will admit that the origami art style is cool. In typical Nintendo fashion, though, they hit you over the head with the story. Yeah, Paper Mario games are always on the wordy side, but didn’t they recently trim down the dialogue in Skyward Sword? Nintendo hasn’t learned its lesson here. Your travel companion will not shut up and has to comment on everything. This is when we need voice acting. It would have been great to listen to Olivia talk while you’re moving about. But being forced to stop and read her dialogue turns this into more of a slog than it needs to be.

Reviewer

Clark
I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.

Published by

Clark

I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.