I've grown up with the original, Thousand Year Door (which was my favorite game for a while), and Super. And like this sect of people, I was really put off by this game's reveal initially.
But man, I cannot sit here and pretend like this is not the best Paper Mario game by far. Pacing is on point, world design is flawless, the writing is arguably some of the strongest in these games. The battle system might not be to everyone's tastes, but I was really into it once they started increasing in difficulty, and the enemies generally put really unique spins on it. The best advice I got was to go into this like it were an action adventure game, and that really helped me appreciate this game for what it was. With the TTYD Remake coming out, I still beg for people to give this game a chance. It's one of the best first party titles on the Switch, and I would love to see where the series goes from here.

I've loved Paper Mario since I was a kid, and though the series has had its ups and downs, I really loved the Color Splash on the Wii U. When Origami King was announced, I was a big mix of emotions. Happy because there was more Paper Mario coming (as Color Splash being a late Wii U game meant that it didn't exactly sell well, especially being a direct successor to the very fairly unpopular Sticker Star on the 3DS), but also a little sad since it meant that Color Splash was almost certainly not getting a second chance at life on the Switch (and probably still won't). What I was pretty sure of was that I would enjoy it, even if I wasn't too sure what to make of the weird new battle system. I got some Christmas money from my family, so I thought that this was a fine a time as ever to finally pick up Origami King and see what all the fuss was about, and I'm really glad I did! It took me a week to 100% the game, and I'd reckon it took me about 40-ish hours in total to do that with the English version of the game.

Origami King opens with Mario & Luigi headed to Toad Town for the Origami Festival, but they arrive to find the place totally abandoned. Undaunted, they assume everything is actually totally fine and go into Peach's castle only to get kidnapped by a horrifyingly orgami-fied Peach. Mario finds a new friend, Olivia, a fairy folded by origami but who is friendly, and together they escape the castle along with a folded up Bowser, but not before being assaulted by the titular Origami King: Olivia's brother Olly. They narrowly escape the castle with the help of a Shy Guy swooping in with Bowser's clown car as five giant streamers wrap around the castle and take it to a far away mountain. With Olivia's help, Mario must embark on a quest to save the Princess and the Kingdom from the anger of the Origami King.

Origami King is another game in the trend that has been established since Super Paper Mario, where it's Mario with a dedicated companion instead of the series of partners the first two games had. Olivia serves as your constant companion and is written delightfully. She's naïve but kind and silly, and I adored her just as much as I adored Huey in Color Splash (which is to say, a lot). Just like Color Splash, I found the humor and writing in this game as a whole to be very entertaining and funny, and it's easily one of the best localized games I've played. I really wanna play it in Japanese sometime to see just what the original was like, because it's definitely a game where I have a hard time imagining what the original is with just how well the translation is done. Origami King goes for a bit more heavier theming and plot beats than Color Splash did, but to mixed success. There's a pretty heavy plot beat in the middle of the game that I thought they pulled off pretty well, but the ending of the game leaves something to be desired. This isn't a spoiler-ing review, but I'll just say that it's an ending that I felt was a bit of a missed opportunity, since I don't think it would take THAT much to make it work much better. However, shaky ending or no, the writing is still very entertaining and is definitely one of the highlights of the game for me.

While Olivia IS your constant single companion, that isn't to say that side-partners are entirely absent. Throughout the game Mario & Olivia are accompanied by several characters particular to that area of the game, and they provide some narrative and mechanical function. They can even take part in battle (which we'll delve into more later), but you don't control them directly. It's an interesting middle ground to walk between the new style and the old style, but I think they pull it off pretty well. They serve as important and defining elements to the places they're a part of, and then part from you when their necessity to that part of Mario's quest ends. Given that they don't have much mechanical purpose outside of their respective areas, this really isn't much different from how the older games would have characters functionally drop out of the narrative after their respective areas were finished, and this is a clever take on that.

The exploration is more along the lines of Paper Mario & The Thousand Year Door than Color Splash, but Color Splash's influence is certainly there. It's one giant world like TTYD was, so the stages that you went between like Color Splash are gone, but there are still elements of completion that are kept track of for each larger area (which is very handy for if you're someone trying to do all the things like I did). I think the world is laid out well. Between usable items and collectibles, exploration always felt like I had something important I was looking for. Collectibles range from little statues of enemies and characters in the game to holes literally torn in the world that you can repair by throwing confetti at them (much like you would repaint the world in Color Splash). You get more confetti by bashing objects and killing enemies, and holes in the world are a good indicator for where you have and haven't been as well as to indicate important areas. Most importantly, though your supply of confetti at one time has a cap, it isn't used up if you aren't using it to repair holes, so you can fling confetti to your heart's content otherwise~. All of the areas feel very different and special in their own ways, from exploring the great sea in your boat to driving across the sand in your Kuribo's Shoe-like car, the game is really good at making each area feel different to play in as well as being memorable in their presentations.

Now for the main meat of how this game differs from its predecessors: the combat. The weird ring-spinning combat was the big question that everyone was talking about when t he first trailers for this dropped about a year ago, and with good reason. It's very unlike any other turn-based game I've played, but it ultimately IS connected to the lineage of the post-TTYD games in many significant ways.

Normal battles take the form of single-solution puzzles. Enemies are on four rings around Mario, and there are ten segments around him. Your goal is to use the 1 to 3 movements you have to arrange the enemies in either rows of 4 or blocks of 2x2 (adjacent to Mario) so you can attack them with either your jumps (for lines) or your hammer (for blocks), and if you manage to complete the puzzle, you get a 1.5 times attack power boost! An important thing to mention is that this is a successor to Sticker Star in that it is NOT an RPG. There are still no experience points here, and it is still that sort of "turn-based action/adventure game" genre that Paper Mario has dabbled in throughout the last decade, but I think this is definitely the best it's ever been. Though the puzzles in the early game are pretty dead easy, I was surprised at how difficult they got in the mid and late game. Thankfully, there's a training area in Toad Town that you can use if you want a smattering of ring puzzles to test your brain meats against, and there are even items you unlock around a third of the way through the game that just solves them for you or makes them much easier. It'd be really nice if that accessibility stuff was there from the start, but it's really nice to see it there at all.

Now these ring puzzles are also timed, and so your brain is being tested against the clock. If you don't solve the puzzle in time, it's likely gonna be impossible to kill all of the enemies before you get hit (as ideally you should be able to win battles without taking damage if you can solve the puzzles your first try), but if you're in an area where you have a story companion, that companion gets an attack to (that sometimes fails, but it can be the difference between taking damage or not). And when you get hit, you get hit HARD. This isn't a particularly hard game, as health items are plentiful, cheap, and strong, but if you're abstaining from using them you can get the crap beaten out of you really fast. However, if you want more time to think, you can also just hold down the + button to feed coins in to the timer so you have more thinking time.

You get LOTS of coins from battles (like hundreds to even thousands), and 100 coins is one second. You also have a collectible in the game in the form of folded or crumpled up Toads who need rescuing, and they'll sit in an audience around your fights. You can throw them money to have them give aid in the form of mostly solving puzzles for you, healing you, and even taking pot shots at enemies. Money is also used to buy items for combat, as this game has weapon degradation for your non-standard jumps and hammers. I found I rarely needed to buy more weapons with how often I found more just by exploring, but this is one more way that the big piles of cash you get from fighting enemies are your biggest incentive to fight them with the lack of EXP in this game. That money can even go towards accessories you can equip for passive bonuses in combat or even non-combat effects like changing what your confetti looks like or changing your sound effects. The money-combat reinforcement loop isn't perfect, and the weapon system doesn't suuuper justify its inclusion (it honestly feels like it's there just to give money a higher purpose other than buying the expensive accessories), but combat is largely a puzzle game in the first place, so this game's relation to combat is an odd one at best. I'm honestly not sure how they could've tweeked it to make it work any better, but I think what they have works in a fun way despite its flaws.

However, that's just normal battles. You also have boss battles which are significantly different. While it's possible to win normal battles by just solving the one puzzle correctly, boss battles place the boss in the middle of the ring circle and Mario on the outside. You need you use arrange the arrows on the board to lead Mario ChuChu Rocket-style to different icons on the board, from the simple one that just lets you attack in the first place, to ones that double your attack power for a turn or let you attack again, to the big Vellumental Attack spaces. The big reason Olivia is helpful in your quest is that she's your window into the power of origami, and Vellumental attacks are how those manifest. Bosses always have gimmicks in how they manipulate the board to give you obstacles on how you can attack them and how easily, and the boss battles are easily one of the best parts of the game. The bosses (my favorites being the 3rd and 4th streamer guarding bosses) have tons of personality and it's always super fun to see how the next one will need to be tackled. Whittling down their defenses, exploiting an elemental weakness via a Vellumental attack, and then using Mario's own 1000-Fold Arms to give them a pounding serves as a satisfying and fun puzzle game that is finally a well-designed version of what Intelligent Systems has been trying to do via the Things system in the past two games. They've finally nailed it here, and if the normal bosses aren't hard enough for you, there are even accessory-less challenge modes you can fight the bosses in for an extra challenge.

And on top of all that, there are even big Paper Macho 3D origami enemies wandering around the overworld that you fight in real-time, Super Paper Mario-style, to vary up the game's combat just that much more. There are even some bosses you fight this way, and while these parts of the game are definitely not a "Reason To Buy" in and of themselves, they're fun in their own right, and vary up the pacing of the game nicely in how they serve as unconventional mini-boss and proper boss fights.

Finally there's the presentation of the game, which is continuing on the trend that Color Splash started of being absolutely fantastic. This is especially in the music department, as Color Splash and now Origami King have absolutely fantastic music. The game also looks absolutely beautiful, with the paper craft looking more, well, papery than ever before. They've been leaning into the paper gimmick more and more, and this game realizes that not just mechanically but visually as well in a really beautiful way. The visual design of the game is even good down to the way enemies are designed, as anything 2D is always friendly, and anything 3D and origami-looking is always an enemy, so there's never any question.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Though not perfect, Origami King has finally succeeded in making something truly great in the post-TTYD-style of Paper Mario games. Intelligent Systems has finally found a winning formula for their puzzle-focused turn-based action/adventure weirdness they've turned Paper Mario into, and I'm all here for it. Where I had some reservations about putting Color Splash higher than TTYD in my personal rankings (and I still do put Color Splash just barely above TTYD, personally), Origami King is easily the new top of the pile for the series for me. Once again, Nintendo succeeds in making a game on Switch that, despite being relatively quite different from the other games in its franchise, is regardless a "best in series" contender.

God, I want to love this more than I do, but there are two main things that hold it back for me: the combat and the narrative design.

For starters, I don't think the combat is actually bad per se - in fact, I actually found it quite fun for a while. The problem is that, outside of the boss fights, very little is done to expand the system outside of what you experience within the first hour of play, and the game is nearly 30 hours long. I could feel myself actively avoiding combat at a certain point to save myself time and tedium, and that's never a good sign.

When it comes to the narrative design, I feel the need to be more specific: the issue is not in the telling of the narrative, but rather some of the decisions made in the course of that telling. Several of the levels reach points of natural conclusion only to have the game suddenly insist you go on some circuitous side-quest or complete a small dungeon within the current dungeon, and frankly these unnecessary expansions of the story do little beyond making the game feel bloated and repetitive.

To be clear, I actually loved the writing of the game and exploring the world of Paper Mario - there's a specific combination of whimsy and melancholy that feels exclusive to this series, and Origami King is a worthy successor on that front. I just wish the game itself were a bit tighter, a bit more focused than what we ended up getting.