2020 was a bizarre and potentially depressing year due to numerous happenings, so I can only assume that the gaming community decided to gaslight themselves into thinking that Origami King was a good game just so there was a little more positivity in their lives. Unfortunately, not only is the game not good, I’d say it’s almost as bad as the infamous Sticker Star. It’s not even like I went into the game expecting to hate it. Hell, I went into the game with a pretty positive mindset thinking I’d enjoy myself, but after spinning around that fucking circle for the 10,000th time I wanted to genocide every last Toad in the game as much as the main villain did.

Just like the previous games in the Sticker Star trilogy, this game completely lacks everything that you would expect from an RPG. There is no experience, no leveling up, no real stat growth or anything. All you get from battles are coins. The only real stat you have is your HP, which increases from getting health upgrades at random points in the game. Other than survivability, this also determines whether or not hitting an enemy outside of battle will just instantly kill them instead of initiating a battle much like in games like Earthbound. I guess this is a good thing, but when battles are already pretty pointless, not to mention incredibly boring, you may as well avoid enemies entirely.

All battles involve this ring mechanic that makes them a slog. Every turn you have to line up enemies to group them either in a row or a 2x2 square shape so that your jump or hammer attacks hit all of them. You also get a damage bonus from successfully aligning all the enemies. Having to do this every single turn, on a time limit as well, gets annoying fast. It overcomplicates fights with an obnoxious puzzle, while also simplifying them by basing your damage output almost entirely on whether or not you solved the puzzle. I say almost entirely because you do find equipment throughout the game, which are basically temporary upgrades to your boots and hammer that degrade with each use and eventually break. You may think this makes getting coins in battle more meaningful, since you can buy equipment in shops, but the overworld has a bunch of question mark blocks with equipment in them anyway. I started out buying things in shops, but eventually didn’t even bother because of how many items and equipment the game hands out to you. Most of my money was spent on the game’s useless collectibles.

You can also spend coins in battle to have the Toads in the audience help solve the ring puzzles for you. Coins also can be spent to add time to the timer while you’re trying to solve these ring puzzles. This ended up being the most useful thing coins are for, but again, coins are found pretty easily in the overworld and mandatory fights. If coins are all you get as a reward for battling, and the things you buy coins with are really only for battles, then what incentive do I have to engage in battles outside of the forced ones? You can effectively avoid as many battles as possible and get through the game just as easily as someone who fights every enemy they come across. This is a turn-based RPG with no progression system.

What’s also bad is that there’s no variety to action commands. It’s all just “press A at the right time.” The first two Paper Mario games had a ton of different action commands that made your attacks along with your partners’ attacks feel unique and prevented combat from getting boring. Jumping on four enemies in a row for the hundredth time, in the same exact way, with the same exact inputs, will inevitably get boring. If the developers aren’t going to bother making combat meaningful, the least they could do is make it fun.

Oh also, speaking of partners, this game kind of has them, but not really. You get party members throughout the game that do help in battle, but they’re mostly useless. You have no control over them, their attacks sometimes will randomly fail, and they don’t even appear in battle for the more difficult parts of the game like boss fights where they could potentially be useful. The closest the game ever got to feeling like a real Paper Mario game was the desert area, where a Toad archaeologist follows you throughout most of the chapter. He even has a useful ability outside of battle. Why wasn’t the entire game like this chapter?

Boss fights are also mostly a pain because they’re mostly super gimmicky. They have a different spin (heh) on the circle puzzle thing, where bosses are in the center and you have to make a path to the boss and end on one of three types of attack panels. However, once you figure out exactly what the game wants you to do as an attack, they become complete non-threats. Other than the basic attack panels, there are 1000 fold arms attacks and vellumental attacks, the former of which usually involves mashing the A button and the latter having your sidekick, Olivia, transform into a giant beast and deal a ton of damage herself. It reminds me of Sticker Star’s bosses in which the fights are tedious slogs unless you bring the “Thing” sticker that happens to be the boss’s weakness, typically taking out half of their health. It might actually be worse here because for most of the bosses, there’s really only one way to beat them and it’s always gimmicky. Hell, the final boss even ends up being like this. First phase is just more annoying versions of a few bosses you’ve already fought, second phase is a dumb action minigame, and the final phase is one last obnoxious circle puzzle ending in a very generous QTE sequence. Bosses are supposed to be a test of the player’s skill and knowledge of the game’s mechanics, and here they’re more a test of the player’s patience as they try to trial-and-error their way to the solution the game wants.

Okay, enough bitching about the battle system. What about the other aspects of the game? Well, they’re not much better. Much of the game’s content is finding generic Toads folded into origami. The more you find, the more you benefit from spending money on them in battle. I’ll admit that this part of the game, despite once again being finding generic Toads, isn’t that bad because I do for whatever reason find it fun trying to figure out where they’re hiding. It does get pretty monotonous quickly though, and it didn’t take me long to stop caring. There’s also an aspect of exploration where you cover up holes by throwing confetti on them, filling them up and allowing you in some instances to progress. This honestly just felt like busywork to me more than anything since there’s nothing to it. There’s also the 1000 fold arms gimmick where you stand over a magic circle and have to move around Mario’s now giant arms and find a thing to grab onto. Again, this just feels like more busywork that is essentially pixel hunting. I guess there are a few puzzles here and there that are somewhat interesting in the more dungeon-like areas, but for the most part I don’t recall the game’s exploration to be anything all that noteworthy.

I did like the game’s more action oriented battles more. In fact, these are not only the best parts of the game, but also the parts I wish they focused more on. I don’t get why Intelligent Systems doesn’t just make Paper Mario an action RPG series instead of doing turn-based stuff if they can’t figure out how to make the turn-based stuff fun. Super Paper Mario was more action focused, and while it was easy as hell, it was still fun and kept the spirit of Paper Mario in tact.

One of the biggest aspects of the game I’ve seen people comment positively on is the writing, and I honestly don’t get it. There are some funny jokes here and there, but I’m so done with everyone in this universe being self-aware of the fact that they’re made of paper. Paper Mario originally wasn’t supposed to be a universe where everyone is made of paper, it was just supposed to be an aesthetic. It was supposed to look like a pop-up book. Sure, TTYD played into the paper stuff more by having those transformations, but it was mainly just a gag and was treated as unnatural. It wasn’t until Sticker Star that they really went hard into the meta, self aware paper nonsense. On top of that, the game feels like it’s trying too hard to be funny or wacky at times. There were multiple occasions where the characters would just start dancing or singing, which is the most lazy way to attempt to add wackiness to something. The wacky moments of the past Mario RPGs were always more subtle and few and far between. If everything is wacky, not only does it start to wear off and get annoying, you also can’t take what are supposed to be serious moments seriously.

The actual story itself is a little better I suppose, but the game itself was so tedious and filled with padding that it hurt any attempts to make me care about the characters. Everyone talks about Bobby, and I didn’t really like him much at all. He sucks as a partner, he ends up being a liability more than anything, and his sacrifice had to completely abandon the established lore of how Bob-Ombs work in the Paper Mario universe to even make sense. On top of that, there’s a moment later on where you control Bowser’s airship and shoot literally dozens of Bob-Ombs at enemies, which I guess means Mario is willingly committing Bob-Omb genocide. Definitely doesn’t undermine the sad Bobby death scene at all. It’s not even like the developers forgot about this, Olivia literally refers to the other Bob-Ombs as Bobbys. People can cope and say “oh well it’s only manufactured Bob-Ombs that die when they explode. There are normal Bob-Ombs that can explode as much as they want,” which just sounds like a stupid retcon to me. I’m pretty sure that’s not even consistent with the past games anyway. The writers were trying too hard to have an emotional aspect of the game that ends up feeling more comical than anything due to how out of left field it is. The only part of this that kind of works is Olivia’s reaction to it, which is admittedly sad and sets up a cute moment shortly after. Regardless, it’s nowhere near the same level of quality of the emotional moments that happen in TTYD and Super Paper Mario.

The game does have really good production value. Graphically it looks fantastic, and the music is definitely good stuff. It also controls well I guess. Other than one weird instance where the music randomly stopped playing, it’s bug free, which is commendable in this day and age where games come out with all kinds of issues. With that said, I feel like that’s the bare minimum for these games at this point. All the Paper Mario games look great for the respective platform they’re on. All of them are, as far as I recall, stable and not glitchy. Doesn’t really matter if the game itself isn’t good.

Origami King feels like one step forward and three steps back. The developers seem to have no idea what to do with Paper Mario and seem to just be throwing random crap in a hat and seeing what sticks. The irony is that all people really want is a traditional, simple, turn-based RPG like the original two games in the series. Maybe both the Super Mario RPG and TTYD remakes will be successful and finally open Tanabe’s eyes to the fact that traditional RPGs are what people want instead of all this gimmicky garbage. Or maybe they can focus Paper Mario on being a pure action RPG and expand on that with an actual RPG progression system. Or maybe he’ll once again double down on the Sticker Star shit out of spite and make Sticker Star 4. At least those remakes are coming out and zoomers can finally play an actual good Mario RPG and stop pretending trash like Origami King is good.