Paper Mario: The Origami King is a Crafted Compromise

And I am a hypocrite

A hypocrite, obviously, is someone whose behavior does not match up with their personal philosophy. A climate activist who drives a Hummer. A lazy person who chides others for a lack of work ethic. A personal trainer who eats cake for dinner.

I am a hypocrite because I believe the two Paper Mario trilogies are wholly separate and distinct entities that should not be compared with one another. Yes, they share a title and an art style. Yes, they’re made by the same game developer. But I insist that they are not the same series.

And yet, I physically cannot bring up any of the new games without stacking them up against the old ones.

You don’t need me to explain the dark turn that Paper Mario made with 2012’s Sticker Star, so I won’t. If you’re out of the loop, look up one of the hundreds of YouTube videos about the subject. I see no reason to add to the chorus.

Paper Mario: The Origami King is the third in the new trilogy of Paper Mario games, a complete reboot that began with Sticker Star and continued in 2016 with Color Splash. It’s a trilogy of humorous action-adventure games themed around arts & crafts. Incidentally, it has absolutely nothing to do with Paper Mario, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and Super Paper Mario, which were RPGs with strange characters and high-stakes stories that didn’t actually take place in a paper world.

Despite this, I will be bringing those games up constantly during this review. Although I’ve tried and failed to consolidate this with my opinion that the two trilogies are utterly irreconcilable and not worth comparing, I can’t. I’m a fraud.

The Origami King is in a very awkward position. In some ways, it tries to appeal to the core fanbase that wants the old games back — but it’s also still woefully beholden to the newer style. It knows that it can’t truly live up to what people want it to be, so it simultaneously brings back a few core features of the originals, heavily watered down of course, while also tripling down on the strange game design philosophies of the last two. With that comes a series of questionable decisions that ultimately result in a Frankenstein’s mess of a game.

A pretty good Frankenstein’s mess, I concede.

Let’s start from the top. People criticized Sticker Star and Color Splash for many reasons, but two rise to the surface as the primary ones. The first reason is that the games inexplicably include turn-based battles that superficially seem similar to the ones we had in the first two Paper Mario games, but come with a litany of problems that completely ruin the experience. For one thing, every single one of your attacks exists only in the form of a consumable item that you lose immediately after using it. It’s like if you could only attack in Pokémon by throwing your held item. If you manage to win a battle, you’ll be rewarded with coins and other generic resources that you can obtain anywhere else in the game. In the end, battling is pointless and is best avoided whenever possible. They are fundamentally broken games that discourage you from engaging with a huge part of them.

The Origami King is in a very awkward position. In some ways, it tries to appeal to the core fanbase that wants the old games back — but it’s also still woefully beholden to the newer style.

The second issue, and in my view the bigger one (which is saying a lot), is that the new trilogy is not allowed to flesh out the Mario universe the way the old one did. This isn’t an exaggeration or an assumption; series producer Kensuke Tanabe has confirmed in multiple interviews that his team is no longer allowed to create new characters out of previously-established Mario races. You can’t have a Toad named Dr. Lorenzo with a giant mustache and a beer belly, or a Goomba with long flowing hair and an ascot named Goomples. Every Toad in the game must be named “Toad” and look like a generic member of the species with at the very most a small amount of clothing on to identify their role in the story. Every friendly NPC in these games must either be one of these Toads with no specific defining features or a completely generic enemy species.

Both of these problems have been addressed by The Origami King, but neither has come even close to being completely solved. The third installment in the new Paper Mario series wants desperately to stand toe-to-toe with its ancestors, and it absolutely shows the potential to do that…but the sins of its immediate predecessors clip its wings far too much for it to meet that potential.

Let’s start with the battling, which was in many ways the most miserable part of Paper Mario: Color Splash. In this new game, the combat is virtually identical except for two major additions: you now have infinite weak Boot and Hammer attacks that don’t disappear upon use, and the enemies are now arranged in ring formations that you have to fiddle with and line up in each fight before attacking. These changes are great because now you’ll always have a means of attacking regardless of what you’ve collected, plus the rings add a layer of challenge and strategy that did not exist in the previous games. Boss fights flip the script by putting you at the outer edge of the rings instead of inside them, and they’re all great fun. The boss battles in The Origami King are the greatest that combat has ever been in the modern trilogy.

…that’s not saying a lot, but I promise, they’re good.

Unfortunately, they did not fix the other major flaw of battling: a lack of incentive. Coins are more useful in this game than before, but again, you can find them anywhere. There are coins coming out of the walls, quite literally. Without experience points or a progression system of any kind, you’ll inevitably stop caring about battles. One small comfort is that this game has achievements, so you’ll be rewarded with a collectible doodad once you win 200 fights. If you’re a completionist, I suppose that alone could fix the incentive problem for you!

Now, did they fix the other problem — does Origami King have actual characters again? Well, sort of. Every game since Super has had a floating Navi-like companion to guide you along and give exposition, so Olivia was nothing truly new. Other than her, you can tell that the designers and writers did their absolute best to bend the rules as much as possible, but it could only get them so far. We still only have Toads and generic enemy species as NPCs, but now the Toads can actually have names — their names just all happen to include the word “Toad”. Professor Toad, Sea Captain Toad, Captain T. Ode (two captains? Where’s Lieutenant Toad?). One very critical character to the plot is Origami Craftsman, a Toad who doesn’t even get a boring name.

Strangely, there are random exceptions to this alleged rule. Grand Sappy is a talking tree who looks like he came right out of the N64 game (in a good way!). The Vellumentals are ancient deities that control the elements. The Legion of Stationery is a band of realistic office supplies with captivating personalities. Even the main villain of the game, Olly, is a fresh face not resembling any pre-established Mario character designs. It seems the modern Paper Mario team is allowed to create new characters, but only if they are vital to the plot — no eccentric weirdos pacing around Toad Town anymore, I’m afraid.

So is Origami King an improvement? Absolutely. In fact, it’s a pretty damn good game. I just wish it was allowed to be truly excellent.

Let’s look at an example: Bobby, the first partner you meet in the game. Oh yeah, this game brings back Partners — except no, it doesn’t, not at all. They’re more like traveling companions who join you for a while and then leave when they stop being plot-relevant. They’re more comparable to Flavio than Goombella. Most of them don’t have useful abilities in the overworld, and you can’t control them during battle. Yes, they’re “partners”, but they’re not Partners.

Anyway, Bobby is a completely generic Bob-omb (in fact, his real name is just Bob-omb) who has lost his memory and joins up with Mario and Olivia during the autumnal Japan chapter. His character arc is fantastic and nothing like we’ve ever seen in a Mario game of any kind. His story almost serves as a deconstruction of past Paper Mario partners — in this scenario, Olivia plays the role of a nostalgic Paper Mario fan who wants the good old days of Partners back and so encourages Bobby to join up with Mario. However, as much as Bobby wants to be your traveling buddy forever and ever, life keeps getting in the way, and he ultimately proves to be more of a liability for Mario than you might expect. In the end, he leaves you after the chapter he is introduced, but it’s for an insanely compelling reason that I will never spoil for you. Somehow, even with the limitation of using only generic character designs, the writers proved that they could weave a heartbreaking story that absolutely matches the highs of the originals.

And then they never did it again.

I’m still coming down from the whiplash of storytelling quality that hits you immediately after Bobby’s story ends. The next chapter is a decent venture through the Egypt-inspired Scorching Sandpaper Desert, during which you meet up with Professor Toad, the second traveling companion of the game. He’s a fun enough character, but he lacks the sort of significant arc or personal growth that Bobby had set the standard for. All of the rest of the companions are exactly the same: funny characters who join you for a bit, but don’t leave any lasting impact and depart as soon as they possibly can. Nothing in the game ever even attempts to match the emotional gravitas of Bobby’s story, let alone surpass it.

So is Origami King an improvement? Absolutely. In fact, it’s a pretty damn good game. I just wish it was allowed to be truly excellent.

I can’t help but feel that the higher-ups at Nintendo can’t be blamed for this drop-off in storytelling. The developers proved that they were capable of telling a grand tale regardless of the limitations placed upon them, and yet for the majority of the game they just…didn’t. Instead you’re combing through repetitive islands in a Wind Waker clone with no characters or story to speak of; you’re giving Bowser Jr. five baths in a jungle spa. We barely get any true narrative at all in any of the areas after Scorching Sandpaper Desert. Where are the stakes in these later chapters? Where is the pathos that we saw with Bobby?

Origami King isn’t a total wash, though — in fact, far from it. As far as pure gameplay goes, it’s great fun to travel around these beautifully-crafted lands collecting treasures, saving Toads, and filling in parts of the world that have been torn out by Olly’s minions. There are so many collectibles in this game that you’ll probably end up spending more time searching for them than participating in the story. And that’s awesome.

I’m only being harsh because as far as I can see, critics and fans have been incredibly nice to The Origami King, generally praising it as a beautiful and fun game. Although I don’t disagree with this conclusion, I wanted to provide a differing perspective rather than simply echo their statements.

The music throughout this adventure is absolutely magnificent and worthy of a listen even if you decide not to purchase the game itself. I’m of the possibly-controversial opinion that new Paper Mario has always had the superior soundtrack to old Paper Mario, and Origami King is no slouch in that area. Some of my favorite songs include the main theme, “Picnic Road”, “Overlook Mountain”, and “Thrills at Night”. They’re delightfully playful orchestrations that fill the game’s world with life and character.

I guess if I want anything out of modern Paper Mario that didn’t involve just going back to how things used to be, I would like for it to truly come into its own. Intelligent Systems has made it clear that they will never make another game like The Thousand-Year Door. That’s fine. But don’t bring back old game mechanics just to dumb them down like you did with partners and badges; introduce new concepts that give the game its own identity. Do away with the aspects that have been grandfathered in like turn-based battling, and stop reusing art from the GameCube game. Make something truly new, not something that is hopelessly torn between innovating for the sake of innovation and stubbornly sticking to old habits. With that conflicting mindset, the end result can’t help but compromise everything it wants to be.

I’m only being harsh because as far as I can see, critics and fans have been incredibly nice to The Origami King, generally praising it as a beautiful and fun game. Although I don’t disagree with this conclusion, I wanted to provide a differing perspective rather than simply echo their statements.

I give Paper Mario: The Origami King a rating of BUY because, truly, it is a good game. If you have any interest in it, you’ll probably enjoy it. I can’t help but go hard on it, though, because it’s just so needlessly held back by its own design. It’s difficult not to ache for what we could have had instead, and I can easily envision a version of The Origami King that abandons all expectations and does whatever weird nonsense it wants without caring about brand recognition or throwing hollow bones to the starving fans of the classic trilogy. But I don’t see that here.

Love what they did with Luigi, though. Make him playable next time.