Paper Mario: The Origami King is a rare kind of Mario game that suffers from both bland aesthetics and frustratingly unfun game design. Playing through this game has been a chore all the way through and I hope I never have to touch it ever again.
Origami King is structured in such a way that it always makes the player feel like they are just about to achieve whatever goal they may have in mind, before immediately ripping it away from them. Due to this game's extremely boring gameplay I would always be somewhat excited when I thought I was at the end of one of the game's chapters because I thought it would finally be over with. Instead I would always be presented one of the following:
A) Several rooms with pointless loading screens over and over and over and over and over with no story to make it interesting.
B) A string of tedious, monotonous, and poorly designed battles with no story to make it interesting.
C) A super easy but annoying puzzle with no story to keep it interesting.
D) A cutscene filled with extremely slow unskippable textboxes with no story to make it interesting.
C) The knowledge that I would have to travel to the opposite end of the map with an extremely slow fast travel system and no story to make it interesting.
E) All of the Above. (With no story to make ANY of it interesting)
Every single time I thought I was about to feel the sweet relief of never having to play this game again, it would switch things up and make me play for another 20 days (about 1 to 2 hours a day of this mess was all I could really handle).
Anyways let's talk about the fact that there is no story to make anything in this game interesting. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY ZERO STORY TO MAKE ANYTHING IN THIS GAME INTERESTING. This game feels like if you took the plot from a generic kids cartoon, stripped it down to its most basic, simplified, and boring form possible, and then shat 20 trillion completely irrelevant, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, SLOW unskippable text boxes all over it. None of this is helped by the fact that this game is completely bankrupt of any creativity at all. Do you like characters in your stories? Because TOO BAD, this daring game takes the bold new approach of simply not having them at all. And for this complete lack of creativity, what do you get in return? Some origami… and nothing else. It's worth noting as well that most origami characters in this game are completely incapable of emoting or expressing personality in any way at all, which is even less than I can say about the copy and pasted toads.
Everybody knows that the only thing better than a mediocre story is incredibly infuriating and unfun gameplay! So let's take a look at how Intelligent Systems decided to ruin their Paper Mario battle system for literally no reason at all, again, this time around. If you took the action commands from the battles of previous paper mario entries and removed everything else from them, then voila! You have the battle system in paper Mario the origami king! Because it is so boring, the developers added on a completely unrelated and annoying ring minigame to every match. So now you get to waste your time playing an annoying timed puzzle game that literally has nothing to do with anything else in the game. But now because this puzzle game is complete ass, the developers added a button that exchanges in game currency for not having to play the game. Aso, battles are literally worthless and don't give you XP or anything valuable, so they are literally just a setback to this already bad game.
If there is one somewhat positive aspect to this game's gameplay, it's the boss fights. They are kind of tense in a fun way until the last 3 or so expect you to predict the bosses weakness in 1 turn and if you don't do it right immediately it softlocks you until you die. Also I am speaking solely about gameplay here because why the hell are this game's bosses generic office supplies. Like why??? Do the developers of this series get dragged straight to hell if they come up with anything new and original or even, god forbid, SLIGHTLY INTERESTING?
If There is one somewhat positive aspect to this game’s story, it's NOTHING. Everything about this game's narrative is literally paper thin.
Don’t waste your time on this game.
Origami King is structured in such a way that it always makes the player feel like they are just about to achieve whatever goal they may have in mind, before immediately ripping it away from them. Due to this game's extremely boring gameplay I would always be somewhat excited when I thought I was at the end of one of the game's chapters because I thought it would finally be over with. Instead I would always be presented one of the following:
A) Several rooms with pointless loading screens over and over and over and over and over with no story to make it interesting.
B) A string of tedious, monotonous, and poorly designed battles with no story to make it interesting.
C) A super easy but annoying puzzle with no story to keep it interesting.
D) A cutscene filled with extremely slow unskippable textboxes with no story to make it interesting.
C) The knowledge that I would have to travel to the opposite end of the map with an extremely slow fast travel system and no story to make it interesting.
E) All of the Above. (With no story to make ANY of it interesting)
Every single time I thought I was about to feel the sweet relief of never having to play this game again, it would switch things up and make me play for another 20 days (about 1 to 2 hours a day of this mess was all I could really handle).
Anyways let's talk about the fact that there is no story to make anything in this game interesting. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY ZERO STORY TO MAKE ANYTHING IN THIS GAME INTERESTING. This game feels like if you took the plot from a generic kids cartoon, stripped it down to its most basic, simplified, and boring form possible, and then shat 20 trillion completely irrelevant, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, SLOW unskippable text boxes all over it. None of this is helped by the fact that this game is completely bankrupt of any creativity at all. Do you like characters in your stories? Because TOO BAD, this daring game takes the bold new approach of simply not having them at all. And for this complete lack of creativity, what do you get in return? Some origami… and nothing else. It's worth noting as well that most origami characters in this game are completely incapable of emoting or expressing personality in any way at all, which is even less than I can say about the copy and pasted toads.
Everybody knows that the only thing better than a mediocre story is incredibly infuriating and unfun gameplay! So let's take a look at how Intelligent Systems decided to ruin their Paper Mario battle system for literally no reason at all, again, this time around. If you took the action commands from the battles of previous paper mario entries and removed everything else from them, then voila! You have the battle system in paper Mario the origami king! Because it is so boring, the developers added on a completely unrelated and annoying ring minigame to every match. So now you get to waste your time playing an annoying timed puzzle game that literally has nothing to do with anything else in the game. But now because this puzzle game is complete ass, the developers added a button that exchanges in game currency for not having to play the game. Aso, battles are literally worthless and don't give you XP or anything valuable, so they are literally just a setback to this already bad game.
If there is one somewhat positive aspect to this game's gameplay, it's the boss fights. They are kind of tense in a fun way until the last 3 or so expect you to predict the bosses weakness in 1 turn and if you don't do it right immediately it softlocks you until you die. Also I am speaking solely about gameplay here because why the hell are this game's bosses generic office supplies. Like why??? Do the developers of this series get dragged straight to hell if they come up with anything new and original or even, god forbid, SLIGHTLY INTERESTING?
If There is one somewhat positive aspect to this game’s story, it's NOTHING. Everything about this game's narrative is literally paper thin.
Don’t waste your time on this game.
7 Comments
Dang, disappointed to hear this Serious as I had heard it was an improvement on Sticker Star and Color Splash, yet everything you say seems to indicate it just doubled down on everything whilst having a marginally-better combat system.
I won't agree about the aesthetics as, based on gameplay footage, it does look gorgeous. I also wouldn't blame Intelligent Systems for the decline from previous games as Iwata (Rest in Peace) outright said that Miyamoto was the reason the Paper Mario games stripped back their RPGness.
I won't agree about the aesthetics as, based on gameplay footage, it does look gorgeous. I also wouldn't blame Intelligent Systems for the decline from previous games as Iwata (Rest in Peace) outright said that Miyamoto was the reason the Paper Mario games stripped back their RPGness.
@Honest_Gamer Honestly same. it just made it all the more frustrating however every time the game ripped me away from it.
@RedBackLoggd. While the lighting is certainly impressive for the switch and everything does look fairly realistic, its all just paper. I think the graphics are pretty good but the paper aesthetic is what got really old for me.
.....but it's called Paper Mario lol
@RedBackLoggd. True, but being made out of paper still doesn't make generic Mario grass land number 3000 any more interesting. Also the Paper Mario games before sticker star used to have actual unique art styles that were more than just paper and cardboard. The paper stuff in the new titles (TTYD remake aside) kinda feels like an excuse by Nintendo for their lack of creativity.
oh okay
Honest_Gamer
2 days ago
The gameplay itself was a chore to get though, however exploring the worlds and some bosses here and there made the experience less worse.