I think Paper Mario: The Origami King is a good game. It's absolutely beautiful with such a great aesthetic--- the paper world aspect feels caught best in this game out of all in the series, even if the "everything is paper, literally everything, isn't my preferred/favorite-- and the music is fantastic. The writing is great and really funny, even though I feel they do lean a bit too meta at times (the joke about the Toads at the end, though, is so self-aware and I think it works very well given the series' recent history with Toads). There are really good emotional beats, and it's funny, which I think is hard to do well in a game sometimes!

However, the battle system. I think it's an interesting battle system. I like a fair number of the bosses, as I think they're pretty interesting and they have some pretty interesting solutions. However, I think a number of minibosses, especially towards the tail end of the game (looking at you Sumo Bros. and Handaconda) were just utterly unenjoyable and made it clear to me that I just, do not work well with this battle system. I don't know if it's spatial awareness or pattern recognition or what, but I felt like I never had enough moves in normal battles to get through the puzzles without needing to take 3-4 turns, and I hated it. I absolutely hated the act of a lot of the RPG battles. Everything else is fantastic! I loved it all!

But goddamn, those ring battles, I just cannot stand those ring battles.