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.
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.