I mentioned in our posts for Super Paper Mario and Paper Mario: Sticker Star that my recent obsession with the Paper Mario series began with the release of Paper Mario: The Origami King.  I thought that Origami King looked like so much fun, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to paying $60 for it when I had heard some less-than-favorable things about the more recent entries in the series. So, I decided to try Sticker Star first, just as the least-expensive way to dip my toe in the water. 

That toe dipping has now led us to play multiple games in the series, including most recently Origami King. (But we’re still struggling with the fact that it seems like a used copy of The Thousand Year Door would cost more than a purebred pony. That’s just not right.) Since Origami King’s first birthday is this Saturday, we thought it was about time we talked about why this game has won us over.

Plots and Lots of Angst

Mario and Luigi arrive at Peach’s castle to attend the Origami Festival in Toad Town. But something’s not quite right. Princess Peach is all puffy and talks a bit like a zombie. (Maybe she had early access to the festive “punch,” if you know what I mean.) Bowser’s minions are everywhere, but they’re all puffed up and refolded into sinister, zombie-ish versions of themselves called folded soldiers.

In the dungeon/basement of Peach’s castle, Mario rescues a quirky origami girl named Olivia. Together with a stapled-up Bowser, they make their way to the top of the castle. There, they discover that Olivia’s brother, Olly, is behind the brainwashing and origami-fication of Peach and all of Bowser’s minions. 

Olivia is surprised at this, but I really don’t think she should have been. Olly was clearly no good. Just look at his hair. He looks like a 13-year-old who just discovered My Chemical Romance. 

Anyway, Olly offers them a spot in his new kingdom, a kingdom which will be made entirely of origami. They refuse, since that’s bonkers, and Olly absconds with the Princess and the Castle. He encases the castle inside five brightly colored streamers, making it impossible for our heroes to enter until the streamers are removed.

Now Mario, with the help of Olivia and some other friends he will meet along the way, must destroy each of the streamers, break into the castle, and wad Olly up into an angsty ball of paper in order to save Peach and the rest of the kingdom.

Solid Paper Structure

The game is broken up into five sections, each attached to a different colored streamer.  And the basic progression of each chapter is very similar: You follow a streamer towards its end and arrive at some new location.  But alas, you are unable to access the streamer.  What’s a paper plumber to do?

The answer is always to obtain the power of the local vellumental.  Each vellumental is a massive origami beast who has some elemental power (earth, water, fire, and ice).  (For those of you who are like me and don’t get the brilliance of the name “vellumental” right off the bat, it is actually a great pun because vellum is basically an ancestor to paper, and each vellumental controls a different element. It’s the little things.) Once you have the vellumental’s power, you can unblock the path forward, complete the dungeon for the area, fight the boss, and destroy the streamer.

This pattern could get repetitive.  But it doesn’t.  Each area is completely unique, and the challenges you have to overcome are so much fun that you forget that your basic objective in each area is the same.  One area might have you fighting ninjas or sailing the open sea.  In another, you’ll have to seek out ancient ruins and solve some riddles with a quirky professor. There is actually a ton of variety from section to section, even if you know that the basic objectives will remain constant.

Plus! Each area has so much to do outside of the main quest. There are crumpled up toads to liberate, not-bottomless-pits to fill in, treasures to collect, and minigames to play. One of my favorite things to stumble on are the hidden coffee shops. Each section has at least one. They add pretty much nothing to the game besides an extra spot to heal up (at least as far as I could tell), but I always got a solid chuckle out of the interactions you have with the folks inside.

I will say that some things seem to exist only to pad the game a bit.  For example, in one area I was on my way to the last thing I needed to do to open up the dungeon when suddenly I got swept up into a random game show. These game shows have shown up in previous titles, and they’re usually hilarious.

This one was admittedly fun. But it had nothing to do with the quest I was on, and it basically just acted as a roadblock to prevent me from getting what I wanted. I honestly preferred the one in Sticker Star, where you fall into a dark pit and the game surprises you with a hilarious game show instead of a monster fight. There, the game show was the quest. It felt like a good gag. The one in Origami King just got in my way.  Luckily, the padding problem isn’t all that common. I generally felt like the things I was doing were fun and at least related to my general quest.

Battling for Supremacy

In this vein, I actually appreciate the way Origami King handles battles and progression. Paper Mario has deeply entrenched turn-based RPG roots. After the series took a chainsaw to those roots in Super Paper Mario, the game developers have tried variations on the classic turn-based battle systems. In Sticker Star, you battled with stickers.  In Color Splash, you used cards that you had to fill up with paint.

In Origami King, you fight enemies from the center of the battle screen. Enemies are spread around you in a series of concentric circles, each of which is split into various sections. You have to move the enemies around the ring (either by moving them left and right around the circle or up and down a column) to line them up perfectly. You only have a few moves to do this, and your actions are all timed. If you manage to get all of your foes into the right formation, then your attack power increases, you can smash them in a single hit, and you likely won’t have to take any damage from the fight.

The battle system is pretty fun, and the puzzles for getting the enemies into the right formation gradually get more difficult as the game goes on. Even at the end, I still struggled to get some of the puzzles. (Then again, I struggle to walk through doorways without running into them, so maybe my spatial awareness isn’t a good measuring stick.)

What I truly appreciate about Origami King, though, is that the battles aren’t usually forced on you. Some are, for sure. But outside of a few mandatory battles, you don’t really have to fight if you don’t want to.  Defeating enemies will get you coins and some confetti (which you can use to fill in the not-so-bottomless pits littered throughout the overworld), but there is no EXP system in the game. 

This means that you can fight if you want to, but you don’t have to in order to gain levels to be strong enough to fight the bosses. Some folks think this cheapens the battles and makes them pointless. I can definitely see that, but I think the benefit of not having to grind for levels makes up for that. And I think that the ring battles are fun enough to do on their own most of the time anyway. I just like being able to move on when I don’t want to fight without feeling underprepared and underleveled for everything. (Except for when you bump into an enemy when you didn’t mean to. Trying to run from battles in this game is like getting gum out of your toddler’s hair: it can be done, but only if you’re not afraid to get hit a whole lot in the process.)

Office Supplies and Great Paper Puns

Each area has at least two boss battles: the vellumental and the boss who guards the streamer. In reading early reviews of the game, everybody focused on the streamer guards because they don’t quite seem to fit with the rest of the game. But nobody talked about the vellumentals, which are crazy fun battles! They’re all so unique and challenging. I’m glad nobody ruined these for me (so I guess I won’t ruin them for you, either), but I’m also genuinely surprised that nobody really talked about them at all.

Then again, I can understand why people griped about the streamer guardians. Each streamer guard boss is a different office supply (you know, a hole punch, some rubber bands, colored pencils, etc.). 

I will admit that these bosses are aesthetically and thematically wonky. I don’t really get why they look so photo-realistic, and I definitely don’t understand what they’re doing here. They’re justified in the game as origami tools created by Olly to do his bidding…but I don’t know how much action hole-punchers or rubber bands see in an origami workshop.

On top of being thematically out of place, these office supplies each have their own personality and flare. Some of these personalities make sense. The colored pencil is a snippy artist. The scissors are a posh, aristocratic fencer fellow. The stapler is a rabid beast out for blood. I can get behind all of that. But why is the rubber band ball a snooty actor? Or the hole puncher a music snob…thing? I’m just not following all of the design choices here.

Their oddities notwithstanding, these boss battles are actually really fun. Each fight (whether against office supplies or vellumental) brings something totally unique to the table that switches up the gameplay and makes you think a bit more. I think I lost to pretty much every boss in the game at some point.

Boss battles also flip the script on the ring battles, placing the boss at the center of the rings. Now, you have to make your way to the middle by rearranging the various arrows and commands on the board so that you can attack the boss. These battles are super fun, and each boss brings something totally new (and usually difficult) to the table. Fortunately, even for the difficult bosses, the game provides helpful and completely optional hints on the board to help you figure out the boss’s weak spot and how to best deal with it.

Beyond the main bosses, there are several mini-bosses. If the rings aren’t your thing, you may still enjoy these fights because you tackle the mini-bosses outside of the ring system. These mini-bosses are usually big paper mache monstrosities that you have to tackle with nothing but your hammer and your amazing mustache (okay, maybe just the hammer). These battles are sprinkled throughout the game, and they add a bit of spice and variety to the combat.

Lots to Love

Origami King has to be one of the funniest, silliest games I’ve played in a long time. Take Shogun Studios, for example. It’s a Samurai-themed park that serves as one of the set pieces for the second streamer. You have to find the key to the theatre in order to access the streamer. 

Once you get inside the theatre, you’re caught up in a series of performances where Mario has to dance, have a western showdown, and bash his way through the scenes in order to have a shot at the final boss. The scenes are all parodies of classc stage productions, and it’s just a riot. 

The game’s cast (see what I did there) brings just as much humor to the game. Olivia is bright-eyed and innocent, so a lot of things go way over her head. Luigi has this recurring gag where he is trying to find the key to Peach’s castle in the weirdest places, but always manages to find the exact key that you need next for your journey instead. And, speaking as a parent, Bowser has never been so relatable.

Who to Play With

You can play Origami King with anybody and everybody. The game is clean, and the cartoon fights are very tame—usually just limited to jumping on enemies or hitting them with a hammer. The bosses aren’t scary. They’re either realistic-looking office supplies, or else they are origami animals with special powers.

Origami King has only a single-player campaign, but it is so much fun to play together anyway. Geekling frequently joined us for play sessions. He was just a hoot. We would go into battles and he would say things like, “You need to jump on them!” Or “You need to hit them with the hammer!” He seemed to get it pretty intuitively, which was really fun because then he could participate more. He even had comments in the overworld, and I just loved hearing his little voice chime in with whatever was on his mind.

You can grab a copy of Paper Mario: The Origami King over on Amazon (here), and a Nintendo Switch here.

If you played Paper Mario: The Origami King, let us know what you thought of it in the comments below. And be sure to check out our archives for more games to play together with your family!