Toad-ally Fun

My experience with Paper Mario is a little limited. I first played through and loved Thousand Year Door on Gamecube, and played through about 2/3rds of Super Paper Mario on the Wii before getting bored and dropping it to play a ton of other games. I haven’t played any of the others, though if you want to get technical I did play the original Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars on the SNES and thought that was excellent. These days I haven’t bought much in the way of RPGs on the Switch other than the Dragon Quest games on the eShop, so I thought I’d take a dive back in with the new Paper Mario: The Origami King on Switch and see how it is.

While the easiest thing to start talking about are the graphics, I really want to go over the story first as it starts a little slow but picks up as you get further into the game. Basically Mario and Luigi are driving over to Princess Peach’s castle for an origami festival and wouldn’t you know it but everybody’s in trouble. The grounds totally vacant and upon meeting Peach, Mario finds out that she’s been turned into what’s basically a mindless Origami version of herself, who wants to “unfold” the Mushroom Kingdom and “refold” it into glory. Then she talks about silencing all the Toads permanently. So yeah, this is one of the darker openings to a Mario game that I can remember.

So when she starts with all that, Mario does what every guy does when confronted with his girlfriend letting her crazy out, and he keeps his mouth shut and waits for her to finish and storm off. Instead she drops him into a dungeon – haven’t we all been there – where he meets Olivia, who asks for help stopping her brother Oliver from using his army of Folded Soldiers to take over the world. Once you escape the castle with a semi-folded and severly pissed off Bowser and with Olivia, the castle gets wrapped up in magical streamers like the old 1980’s You Spin Me Right Round video from Dead Or Alive, and you’ll spend the next 30 hours or so unraveling them to free Peach. As a side note you find out that the soldiers are actually characters who’ve been turned into evil origami soldiers. So in a way that’s kind of nice because as you go through the game, you’ll know who your enemies are just by whether they’re made of origami or not.

On Mario’s new adventure he’ll make friends with not only Olivia but a Bob-omb with amnesia, Professor Toad, Bowser and Bowser Jr, and a few others. The story dictates who joins when, so don’t expect to be able to swap out party members or anything like that. That said they all help during battle and have some sort of use when not in combat as well. The writing is as strong as it’s always been and there’s a lot of in jokes and meta references fans of the series and of Mario games in general will really enjoy. There’s also some touching moments in the story that I didn’t expect and that was also a nice surprise.

The graphics are as bright and colorful as they’ve always been and the world felt less like paper to me this time around, and more like the world that Yoshi’s Crafted World takes place in. Like everything in this is still made of paper like always, but the way everything’s been folded and sculpted to create the world is really imaginative and fun to look at. The origami characters are a real treat to see in action and I found myself spending time watching them move to see if they were really folded like actual origami. They provide a nice contract so the standard paper mario character design we’re all used to at this point. I also really enjoyed fighting these really large paper mache versions of some of the enemies, called Paper Macho. Leave it to Nintendo to come up with that. Basically they’re just big paper enemies you smack around with your hammer until they blow up.

There’s a ton of different themed lands you’ll travel through and each has a lot of character. You’ll also go through several temples to pick up powers for Olivia to use, and the temples all had a very Zelda feel to them and it was a nice change of pace from some of the other areas you’ll travel to. The game’s progress feels linear at first, which isn’t really bad, but about halfway through the game you get a ship and that helps open up the game more. You’re still releasing the streamers in a set order but I didn’t think that took away from the experience at all. There’s not really any side quests but there’s lots of collectibles to find and you use confetti you pick up to fill holes that gets you access to other side areas and prizes.

It’s laughable how many Toads you’ll find crumpled up, or stuck in the ground, or folded into bugs that you smack with your hammer, and more. They’re seriously in every orifice of this game.

Personally I’m iffy on the combat this time around. There’s an emphasis on puzzle solving in every battle, because the goal is to line up your enemies in ways where the game rewards you with a damage bonus. Once you do that it’s back to the typical Paper Mario combat where you have to do things like hit the A button at the right moment to deal extra damage. The problem that I had with this is that I suck a puzzles, and I don’t work well under pressure, so for some of the more complex puzzle to solve in a set time limit basically meant I didn’t get the bonus for solving the puzzles very often and just had to attack them at normal damage.

You can use different equipment and items throughout the fight, and you choose between stomping on enemies or using a hammer, each with differing patterns of damage coverage on the field. Some enemies are more susceptible to hammering than jumping for example. Defeating an enemy means they explode in a shower of confetti and coins to collect. It’s much more fun than when I defeat an enemy in real life with a hammer, as they just explode in a shower of blood and brain chunks and the police are called.

One last bit I wanted to mention about the combat are the boss fights, which are a lot more interesting and rewarding to finish than the normal fights. So in the boss fights instead of just lining enemies up, you’ll have to manipulate the arena to set a path to whatever you want to do. That means that if you want to heal up with a heart a few spaces ahead on the way to attacking the boss, you’ll have to mess with the spaces to get the arrows to direct you there, usually in 2 to 3 moves. The bosses always have a gimmick which can range from clever to annoying, but these were always a lot more interesting than any fights leading up to them.

I have to say this as well – this game has more Toads in it than any other Mario game I can remember. You’ll rescue toads in all sorts of ways in this that’ll reward you Toad Points to spend in the museum, and other Toads will open up shops to get equipment or accessories, or there’s one guy that lets you refight bosses and practice battle puzzles if you’re like me and are terrible. But it’s laughable how many Toads you’ll find crumpled up, or stuck in the ground, or folded into bugs that you smack with your hammer, and more. They’re seriously in every orifice of this game. One cool effect of rescuing so many of them is that the more you get, the more are in the stands cheering you on when you get into fights. You can then toss them money to give you powerups or during boss fights they’ll give you a guide that shows where your path leads.

So going forward with my reviews, I’m not assigning a score but instead I’ll focus on the Pros and Cons as I think that’s more important. There’s honestly not much to dislike about Origami King. It follows a pretty standard formula like all the games before it but it’s got charming characters and some great, clever writing. The standard combat is probably my least liked part of the game, but the boss fights are pretty cool and some of the things that happened had me and the family laughing out loud, so even if you’re not actually playing it, it’s fun to watch. If you don’t like Toad though, then maybe stay away from this one because it’ll give you nightmares. But then you need a therapist if you get nightmares from Toad anyway. He’s cute and he picks up vegetables faster than anybody in Super Mario 2.