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.

Full disclosure: I had to fail a whole 30 day playthrough of Pikmin to finally understand Pikmin. I just couldn't wrap my head around the controls for some reason, and each new day became strangely stressful and frustrating despite my seeming ability to perform all the necessary tasks on paper. When I saw Olimar's ship explode in fireworks and watched in horror as his corpse was fed to the pikmin machine, I wasn't sure the game was really for me.

Then I started my second playthrough and found God. It was like a lightswitch flicked on in my brain - this was so intuitive, so fun, so carefree. I was shocked at my own incompetence after having nearly written off the whole experience as a failed test run of a weird game idea. The learning curve finally made sense, and the world I'd found so hard to embrace on first pass became this beautiful space I couldn't wait to get back to. To call it a transformative playthrough would be a dishonor to the spiritual enlightenment I felt upon beating the Emperor and seeing the Captain escape home to his family with every single piece of the ship reclaimed.

I've now seen the truth, my faith has been restored, all things are right in the world. Miyamoto was right - Pikmin is the new Mario.

One of my favorite "smooth-brain" games - an experience with a central gameplay loop so satisfying that I can zone out for hours playing it and not get bored. To its credit, the rest is also quite excellent, with the story and visual design deserving plenty of praise all on their own.

I managed to actually complete the epilogue, so I feel comfortable in leveling my one major critique of the game - it starts to get extremely repetitive after your first full run. The unlockable aspects of your weapons are cool, and the side quests do provide some nice motivation for continued play, but I felt my enthusiasm waning as the canvas of the story started retracting with each subsequent success.

Still, this is the best game Supergiant has made thus far (I have real high hopes for Hades II) and absolutely a worthwhile play for any Greek mythology fans or players looking for the next "endless" game to keep them satisfied.