Topic: Paper Mario: The Origami King

@Tendo64 I love your avatar so much!

@damien33ad I'm currently playing through it, and I like it a lot. I'm not sure what else can be said that hasn't about the battle system. If you want more like TTYD, you will not get it here. I like it because every battle is like a puzzle. If you solve it, you can win without taking any damage. If you don't, you're going to get hurt. The only slight negative that I didn't know before playing is that the rings on the boss battles don't really change, so if you figure out the ideal path once, it's always the same path and so the boss battles can be a little on the easy side. Occasionally they throw a few wrinkles, and I'm only about halfway through so maybe they get tougher later, but that would be my only complaint.

Exactly. Stop expecting Paper Mario Origami to be like Thousand Year Door or whatever.

Once you understand the newer battle gameplay for Origami then you will breeze right through the frikkin game anyway.

only annoying thing is that the game respawns with way too many enemies when you leave and reenter any world area in the Paper Mario Origami game.

@Xyphon22
Is there any incentive to battle enemies if you don’t get experience points?

@Don You get coins, which you need a lot of in this game if you are going to get all the badges and upgrades and things. And you get confetti, which is easy to run out of if there are a lot of big holes around. So I have found battling more important than it may seem even without experience. But again, I like it because it makes this as much of a puzzle game as an adventure or RPG, and I like puzzle games. So I like to do it just because I think it's fun.

This game left me very conflicted, and reading this thread made me realize that I am not alone. I had not played a Paper Mario came before and tried this entry out of curiosity. I found the game instantly charming and a visual delight, and the first few hours, in particular, were magic. I initially enjoyed the puzzle-based battle system, but soon found enemy encounters to be quite grating. While the worlds and colorscapes were consistently eye-pleasing, and there were some great moments when the gameplay was changed up in novel ways, I still found myself wanting to finish and move on to something else. The last third of the game was an absolute slog that added nothing new to the formula. The strength of the gameplay just did not justify the game's length, I thought. There are some pacing issues too, with dialogue and story hooks progressing too slowly too often. When I finally beat it, I felt relieved to put the cartridge back in the box. I can't recall playing a game that began so pleasantly but managed to leave me so fatigued by the end. I managed to clock around 35 hours in total, 10+ more than I did with Super Mario Odyssey and Luigi's Mansion 3, both exceedingly better games. I agree with many of the critiques of the game discussed in this thread, there are clearly some baked-in problems that prevented this from being a landmark entry. It's a shame because the game has a lot going for it. But in retrospect, I think it fell short, coming in at around 7/10.

This is why I'm thinking of renting this on gamefly bc I don't think its very worth my money I would rather spend that money on mario maker 2 (Yes I have not gotten this game yet)

@damien33ad Missed your post somehow.

TOK was a solid 8/10 for me. Some really imaginative boss fights, great environments, beautiful visuals, nice music, engaging plot, etc. I thought it was quite lacking in the character customization department, though, and the lack of original characters compared to something like TTYD brought it down a bit for me. Drop another point or two if you have issues with the ring battle system, I guess.

@damien33ad Great! Look forward to hearing your impressions on it.

For what it's worth, I played TOK a half-year after my first playthrough of TTYD, and I walked away impressed with both games. TTYD's writing, characters, customization, and combat are undoubtedly better, but TOK's environments blow away the boring hallways of TTYD, and I quite preferred its soundtrack and boss fights. Dungeons are pretty decent in both games, so I could go either way on that.

I think the Ring Battle system works well if you don't grind. It starts out almost stupidly simple (then again, so is pressing the "A" button to hit a goomba on the head with a hammer), but the puzzles become reasonably complex as the game goes on, and I was into it.

The good thing about Nintendo games is that, even if you don't like it, physical copies usually maintain their value. I bought Color Splash just this year and still paid $34 for it on Ebay.

So I beat this the other day and then beat it 100% a couple days later because I was already somewhat close and it's fairly easy with all the alert accessories. I really liked it. I don't really remember the end dragging on like people on here are complaining about, but I did think it was rather unremarkable. The end boss was fairly easy. Overall, I think 8/10 is a good grade for it.

Honestly I'd give this at least an 8/10 for me, maaaaybe a 9/10. It's one of my favorite games on the Switch.

I just replayed Luigi's Mansion 3 and got all the Boos and gems, and although that's a great game, I think that gameplay gets way more stale than Origami King. I'll be honest and admit that I was finding some of the battle puzzles tough to solve on my own even after like 30+ hours of practice, and although the desert area was not my cup of tea, the game picked right back up for me once I got to the ocean with all the cool islands and mini puzzles and stuff. I loved the penultimate spa area, but not the final castle itself.

The dialogue and general quirkiness really kept me glued the whole time. You're never gonna hit the mark 100% of the time especially when you're going for that kind of silly-but-somewhat serious story, but I think overall this was one of the more entertaining and shockingly nuanced narratives I've seen in a Nintendo game.

(My only other Paper Mario game was Paper Mario on the Wii U virtual console)

Due to the divided fan reaction I definitely think this is going to be one of the more overlooked first party offerings on Switch (especially those with a certain plumber in them), which is a shame as although it's not absolute top tier, it's a solid adventure with quite a bit to it (certainly large enough to be worth a look for those who feel Switch hasn't had many brand new large scale adventure games since BotW, Odyssey, & XC2 in the first year).

In fact I just had a conversation with someone on Pure Xbox's Switch thread a couple days ago who seemed convinced Switch hasn't had any really good or exciting exclusives since 2017, and said ToK doesn't really count due to the complaints of the older series fans.

@damien33ad
You may think the amount of coins in early game is over the top, I certainly did - but as you get deeper you'll find plenty of uses for them, both in battles and out. I don't want to spoil anything, though.

There are lots of "Gransappy moments," for sure. For me, those moments are frequent in the first couple worlds, drop off a bit in the mid game, return again for 4-5, and then drop at the very end. I hope you stick with it. I will admit I'm very biased and love the game whereas others weren't really into it lol

From the perspective of someone who has finished the game, the best things to spend your coins on are the upgraded boots and hammers that allow you to one shot enemies that'd otherwise take a couple of rounds to defeat, and throwing just enough of them to the crowd to give you the first step of a puzzle that you otherwise can't see the solution to.

There are other things to spend them on though, so try to keep a decent amount in reserve.

@damien33ad My main problem with the battle system, outside the boss fights which manage to stay pretty fresh throughout, is that it just gets repetitive.

At least if you develop a strategy where you can get through fights without taking too much time or losing health - for the price of a few coins that you're unlikely to ever be short of - you might as well adopt it.

I don't think I ever spent coins in battle. It might be worth it early on, but if you are wanting to 100% it, some of the collectibles and things later on get really expensive. And the best hammers and boots are definitely the place to spend them because also later on even getting perfect on the puzzle part of the battle won't take the enemies out in one hit like it does in the early battles unless you have better weapons. And if you use the accessories to bump up your health and defense in battle, that ups your HP when you leave and enter battles, too, so even taking damage isn't as bad as it could be.

Yea the non-boss battle system doesn't exactly leave much room for nuance after you've seen most of the enemy types. I don't know, I enjoyed it regardless for a few reasons:

• I thought Nintendo struck a fair balance in letting you avoid battles against weaker enemies by hitting them with the hammer in the overworld as you "leveled" up; that let me avoid probably the majority of random battles in the latter half of the game that I just didn't feel like engaging in.
• I do think there is an ok amount of enemies and combinations and variations of the lineups as the game progresses to keep a non-puzzle-brained person like me somewhat engaged. I'm not a very good spatial puzzle person, so honestly I still couldn't quite get solutions to some of the battles even after 30+ hours with the system.
• I found that, even aside from the hammer, the further into the game I got the fewer normal battles I was forced to do. Probably from the ocean onward I felt like there were more world puzzles/fights than battle system battles to progress the story. Just my feeling and technically speaking that's not accurate, but I think they did a good job of letting off the gas a bit.

I mostly used the coins in battle later in the game where three-stage puzzles became the norm, there wasn't so much free healing around and there were enemies that can do a lot of damage if you couldn't solve the puzzle and take all of them out in the first round. The key is to use just enough to give you the first step in the puzzle - only when you can't work it out yourself - and no more; you probably would find yourself running short if you used them to solve every puzzle entirely.

Obviously if you know there's free healing nearby, or the enemies are weak, there's no great harm in having to tank a few hits.

@damien33ad
Dude you haven't even gotten to a boss yet? You gotta get a bit further in the game before judging it, man! I'm not saying you're gonna suddenly think it's the best Paper Mario ever, but you really need to give it more time before throwing it under other games, certainly at least the first boss lol

@damien33ad
Relax, man. I never said you threw it under the bus lol I said you threw it "under other games," which you did, right? You said "it isn't fun like TTYD" (referencing the battle system I think).

I'm just saying that, in my opinion, I generally wait to start ranking games in a franchise until I've progressed in the game a bit, certainly until after the first boss and preferably until I've played the entire game or most of it.

But it's all good. I hope you enjoy it!