Is ‘Paper Mario: The Origami King’ Worth Playing?
It’s Ben’s recommendation that you listen to Yoshito Sekigawa, Shoh Murakami, Yoshiaki Kimura, Hiroki Morishita, and Fumihiro Isobe’s score of Paper Mario: The Origami King while reading the review.
With every new iteration of Paper Mario, Nintendo has the option to rest upon the shoulders of its previous creations. In a lot of ways, Paper Mario: The Origami King is an ode to the games that came before it: the writing is charming, the music is whimsical, and its settings are robust. Still, while Origami King shares the same DNA as the acclaimed Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, it’s more like a distant cousin than a sister or brother. The combat system ditches any kind of progression mechanics in favor of a rotational board that requires timed puzzle solving. At no point does it feel like Mario is becoming more powerful or versatile, and his moveset is largely the same throughout the game’s 30 or so hours. Origami King is also painfully devoid of stakes. For every mistake I made, the game was quick to offer a helping hand that prevented even a scare of losing in combat. Still, the combat system offers something new and inventive – and in a lot of cases, it’s quite fun. The Origami King is worth playing, especially since I’m not sure I’ll play something like it anytime soon.
It’s amazing Origami King gets as much out of the puzzle board as it does, given that its form never really changes. There are a total of 48 slots on the board, all of which can be moved in groups of 12 (horizontal shifts) or 8 (vertical shifts). The concept is simple: Mario stands at the center of the board, and has to align the enemies in stacks of four or two by two’s. If the foes are aligned in groups where Mario can hit them all at once, he’s given a damage bonus with his hammer or boots. Outside of a couple of special items, such as a fireball that can hit four enemies in a turn and is functionally a more powerful jump attack, there’s little variety in the way Mario can take down enemies.
What makes the combat interesting is how these enemies are aligned. The puzzles range from embarrassingly easy to strikingly difficult – sometimes with no rhyme or reason as to the change in difficulty. What separates the harder puzzles from the easier ones is almost solely dependent on how the enemies are laid out. Sometimes they involve just horizontal or vertical slides, sometimes they involve both, and other times they involve doing both in a specific order.
The difficult puzzles were where I had the most fun. One of the compelling parts of the combat is that everything is timed, and as soon as the clock runs dry, Mario is forced to make his attack. Thankfully, Mario can also purchase more time with coins (which I found in abundance) when needed. Especially on these difficult puzzles, I found myself buying more time whenever I needed it. The enemy layouts always have a solution for a perfect fit, so it was hard to accept a loss on the rare occasions that even more time wasn’t helpful.
Unfortunately, even dropping the ball on a puzzle is unlikely to put Mario in any real danger. The enemies simply don’t do enough damage, especially because their attacks are so easy to block. Even when things aren’t looking great, there are consumable mushrooms for a health bump. Origami King also offers limited equipment options, like a necklace that gives Mario some extra defense. The real fun lies in perfecting the puzzle sequences, but the ticking clock would have made for a perfect shot of adrenaline had there been a true threat of being defeated.
Origami King does offer a fun change of pace during its dozen or so boss fights. The boss fights serve as almost an inverse of the traditional combat. Instead of Mario being at the center of the puzzle board, the bosses are. The board remains the same, with both horizontal and vertical movement needed to shuffle the slots, but they are now riddled with buttons and obstacles. The goal is to get Mario from the exterior of the board to closer to the center, usually ending on a combat button or something else useful, like a treasure chest that expels more helpful action buttons across the board.
The boss fights usually involve a puzzle within a puzzle, and all of them felt unique in an appreciable way. A turtle boss required knocking all of its feet back into its shell before Mario could do any real damage. Another required Mario to get in for an attack on a box of colored pencils before they could group together for a devastating rainbow shot. While I never died as a result of any of the boss fights, they did take a long time to finish off. Some of the puzzles stumped me until I picked up an envelope on the board – which always involved a tip on how to take the boss down effectively. Finally knocking them out felt gratifying, making these fights the pinnacle of the combat system.
Origami King occasionally strays from the puzzle board in favor of real-time action sequences, too. Some of it is uninteresting, and often involves Mario bopping an enemy with the hammer, running to safety, and then running in for another swing. There are, however, quite a few fun moments of gameplay variety. One of my favorites involves guiding a boat down a river that’s filled with obstacles. There are also a solid amount of minigames along the way, like a shuriken contest that involves Mario running back and forth to time throws and hit targets. A lot of these moments can be found in my favorite area of the game: Shogun Studios.
Shogun Studios is emblematic of everything I like about Origami King. The music is fun and boppy, there’s a lot to explore, and it feels like there is a problem worth correcting. When Origami King has stakes, it provides them almost exclusively through environment and world design. Shogun Studios doubles as an amusement park, most of which is free to explore even though the park is suspiciously quiet. To get to where he needs to go, Mario must first pass a rogue Chain Chomp named ‘Princess.’
What ensues is a Link’s Awakening style sidequest. You need a bone to pass Princess, but to get the bone you need a baseball, to get the baseball you need a Shuirken, and the list of objectives goes on from there. Involved in all of this are moments like finding hidden “employee only” areas of the theme park, some fun mini-games, and decent sleuthing.
There’s nothing like this the rest of the game, which is what Origami King really excels at: it creates all kinds of absurd scenarios to experiment with. The experiments don’t always land well, but I found that most of them did. And that’s part of what makes the core puzzle mechanic so frustrating. The ideas in Origami King are plentiful, but the one mechanic I spent the most time with, the puzzle board combat, felt stale after just a few hours. Luckily, much of the combat can be avoided by avoiding encounters with enemies, especially since there is no XP mechanic and the only thing that can be gained from a fight is more coins.
Coins are Origami King’s universal currency. You can spend them on things like upgraded hammers or boots, additional lives, special collectable items, and calling Toads for help in the midst of combat. With so many things to spend coins on, it was amazing that I never felt short on the currency. There was little incentive to seek it out – even if one of the most gratifying mechanics in the game was popping open a bag of confetti to help fix broken environments (which, in a lot of ways, felt similar to Sunshine’s F.L.U.D.D. and Goop mechanic), which would then earn Mario some coins.
The exploration works precisely because the environments and the resulting dialogue from finding folded-up Toads were so charming. It always felt worth checking the corner of a room, or knocking around with Mario’s hammer to try and jar a hidden location loose. There’s an attention to detail that exists within Origami King that’s easy to appreciate and enjoy, like a hidden coffee shop with a few characters down on their luck. It’s not part of the larger plot, but fits right into Origami King’s expansive world.
The larger environments are just as wonderful, and each feature a unique color palette that pops off the screen. One of my favorite areas, the Scorching Sandpaper Desert, features dark blues, gold, and purple. As Mario scoots around the desert in a boot-kart, it’s easy to see why this is a world the characters want to save. Contrast the Sandpaper Desert to the radiating Whispering Woods, an early game area filled with camping Toads, folded Goombas and a vast array of greens, and it’s really amazing to see just how visually diverse Origami King is.
Unfortunately, the central story feels mostly like an excuse to employ the devastatingly cute art style. Not for the first time in the Paper Mario franchise, a brainwashed Peach serves as one of Origami King’s central antagonists, alongside her brainwasher, King Olly. Olly’s sister, Olivia, tags along with Mario for the duration of the quest as the two discover that Olly is folding up whatever living creature he can find, turning them into an origami army. Olivia’s role as a guide and tag-a-long never hits the emotional highs of previous characters in the Paper Mario franchise, but her presence never felt irritating.
Origami King also features a handful of companion characters – all of which only stick around for a few hours. The story is at its best when focused on these characters, all of whom feature punchy dialogue and tighter arcs. My favorite is Professor Toad, a historian who delivers pretentious lines about academia and study. Their presence in combat is next to useless, however, as they will occasionally help Mario clean up the board if a stray enemy or two is left alive. The series has set such a high bar when it comes to companion characters that even a solid effort falls short of expectations.
Ultimately, it feels unfair to compare Origami King to games it seems to have no interest in competing with. Almost everything it delivers feels experimental, even if a lot of its strengths are core to what has made the franchise so popular. The music, dialogue and environments are all so good that it feels like some of the risks taken on the puzzle-board combat were well worth taking. It’s just a shame that the same kind of variety that existed in Origami King’s environments didn’t exist in its central combat mechanic.
Thank you for reading. Your Patreon support keeps our community entirely Ad free.
