Paper Mario The Origami King Final Thoughts
I really wanted to like this game. I really did. I loved Thousand Year Door and Super Paper Mario. Origami King, like Sticker Star and Color Splash fail to live up to the legacy of the first three installments in the Paper Mario series.
But even judged on its own merits, independent of its predecessors, Origami King is simply a bad game.
As I said in my first impressions article, the game lacks any reason for the player to engage with it. There is no intrinsic motivation to keep playing the game. Combat is not engaging in the slightest as there is no threat from the enemy. The game is incredibly lenient in giving you the power to eliminate all the monsters in a single round and powerful weapons are widely available either as prizes from blocks or from the store since money is incredibly plentiful. And if you don’t win the battle before the enemies can attack, the damage they do is insignificant, especially as you find health increases and supportive accessories.
Exploring the world is not engaging because what you find more often than not is just more coins. Coins which you can use to buy more items that make you even stronger than you already are. Coins which you can spend to have the game solve the combat puzzles for you instead of doing it yourself. Coins which are so easy to acquire that spending six thousand of them in a single battle is the equivalent of throwing a dime in a wishing well.
There are collectible secrets that you can find, but the only reason to do that is an extrinsic one. You were already the kind of player who wanted to collect 100% of the items and secrets in a game.
I had an extrinsic motivation for completing the game: I spent sixty-five dollars on the game and I didn’t want that to go to waste.
In addition to the game’s struggles to offer reasons to keep playing it, it has a problem that plagues many games: the guide character is extremely irritating. Olivia, the origami princess who follows Mario around for the whole game, chatters incessantly. She never lets an opportunity pass her by to make a comment. And since the text crawls incredibly slowly and there is no way to make all of the text in a text box appear at once, as is common in rpgs, her constant commentary wasted my time and served only to irritate me. It would be one thing if what she said was helpful, but the hints she gave me were nothing more than observations that should be readily apparent to anyone playing the game, no matter their level of game literacy. For example, in the volcano area near the end of the game, Olivia tells you not to fall in the lava. Which is a no brainer. Lava hurts, I’m not gonna jump in lava. Olivia has just wasted my time giving me information I already know. And her tip could be explained as helpful if it were actually possible for Mario to fall into the lava. However, there are invisible walls that prevent Mario from even falling into the lava in the first place. So Olivia just wasted everyone’s time by telling the player information that doesn’t even help.
Origami King also suffers from a major tone problem. The confrontations with Olly and the Legion of Stationery try to evoke a tone similar to horror movies. They attempt to create tension and fear within the player. This is very clear in Peach’s Castle, where the background music is gone, there are no Toads wandering the grounds, and Princess Peach walks slowly and speaks in a strange voice. However, this horror aesthetic is constantly undercut by the jokes the game makes at nearly every turn. It cannot even maintain the dark tone within the confrontations with the Legion of Stationery. They are presented as cartoonish caricatures of villains. Tape speaks with a stereotypical New York gangster accent, Rubber Band is an annoying theatre kid, and Colored Pencils is a haughty artist. These villains not only fail to serve the tone that the game is trying to create but actively work against the game itself. It is possible to balance comedy and horror, but they overcorrect far too hard and neither the comedy nor the horror manage to land.
In short, Paper Mario The Origami King is a terrible game that wasted my time and money. The most important thing for a game is to be fun. I can excuse a lot of flaws if the game is enjoyable, but Origami King was an exercise in masochism. Under no circumstances would I recommend this game. Save your money. Save your time.
Final Score: 10%