I mean it wasn't as good as the old ones, but it managed to make me feel things and I liked finding the toads. Of course it would have been way better without all these random rules no one asked for. It's a good game in spite of its flaws, I guess.
Paper Mario Series -
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I mean it wasn't as good as the old ones, but it managed to make me feel things and I liked finding the toads. Of course it would have been way better without all these random rules no one asked for. It's a good game in spite of its flaws, I guess.
On its own merits, I'm inclined to call TOK a "good game," but the problem's always going to stem from comparing what came before. The truth of the matter though, is that every game after Super has been largely penned consistently by a different writing team, so naturally the direction will be different. The Sticker Star trilogy tends to be a lot more absurdist and sporadic in terms of humor, and tone than dry and consistent as in the first three, though it does lack the unpredictability and interesting story beats the former develops as well; a lot of TOK hinges on momentary-conflict driven narrative mixed with a tinge of humor, so when something serious does happen like Bobby's death, it's hard to take the intended effect in since the story itself is only comedy when everything else about it screams comedy for the rest of the game and no real stakes have been raised at all.
Though personally considering how Color Splash ended out and the article @NerdShamer linked, I honestly think in my own humble opinion that this is legitimately the best IntSys can do with this current creative and writing team as well as managerial direction. Don't get your hopes up on the next Paper Mario in 4-5~ years to be leaps and miles ahead of this one. Regardless the thing I hate about the most is that this is the direction the series is guaranteed to go in; it happened with Mario vs. Donkey Kong too, another series supervised and produced by Tanabe, and that series pretty much ended up as Lemmings shovelware no one bought.
Yes, I agree. Although I thought the point of Bobby's death was to make you feel horror late in the game when Bowser forces you to shoot Bom-omb's from the cannons in the airship and see how little he values their lives. Was that not on purpose?
Honestly, the battle system could be worse. Like revolving around a game of rock-paper-scissors. But the next entry would probably rely on the power of glitter or something, considering that each entry has to be unique.
...he does that in legitimately every other mainline Mario game. Considering that this game picks off a lot more of those cues than any pre-Wii game, you'd have to have picked up on the context sooner or later. Also consider that Bowser's specific writing and character despite the mandates fluctuates wildly depending on the writer, and you end up with a payoff that doesn't really... well, pay off.
Origami King is the kind of game that's very fine on paper, but the experience doesn't really mean much if you've played a lot of what the series has already had to offer. It caters to a very specific audience; namely, an audience otherwise unfamiliar with Mario games as a whole, and while that's perfectly acceptable, it also means it's less and less enjoyable on subsequent playthroughs and thus lacks the replay value prior games had going for it.
It could be worse, true. But I doubt it's ever going to get to the point where the battle system will ever feel "integrated" fully into the game's trappings. For all the talk of origami, the ring battle system has absolutely nothing definitively linking it to that core concept. Even Sticker Star and Color Splash went to town on their themes respectively.
This is also the reason why I think Tanabe and co. are genuinely running out of ideas. Sooner or later they'll ditch the formalities and make PM straight action-adventure i.e. Zelda, and it's very obvious from the dungeon design and Tanabe's prior experience on Tingle and LttP that he's very much for leaning heavily on that option. I don't have a strict objection to that per se, but again my focus is on how well each PM adds to the Mario universe without coming in with a whiteboard marker drawing crude mustaches on all the Toads and calling it a day. After all, there's only so much you can do with a Mushroom Kingdom-or-like setting without crossing over the usual level trope offenders at least once or twice.
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ah yes, paper mario, the gimmick game ...
Vapewizard
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I've been watching a streamer play the game and that's the impression he's been having so far and I'm inclined to agree. There's funny moments in there and on its own merits it doesn't seem like a bad game to play, but you can't help but wonder what it would've been like if they didn't have all these weird restrictions going on. In his video on the subject Arlo also mentioned how backwards it is that Odyssey can put in a whole new race of creatures like hat ghosts and talking forks with googly eyes but apparently the paper mario team isn't even allowed to make old toads or koopas with ponytails anymore. Not saying that alone would make the game better but it would help in making the world feel more natural.
I know he does it in other Mario games, but I never really considered the average Bom-omb as sentient before. I've played a lot of Mario games in my time, but I haven't played all of them and a lot were as a kid. Googling Bom-omb characters and remembering them, I think my biggest roadblock is unironically all those Bom-ombs looked distinctly like characters and Bobby looking generic is what I'm hung up on.
Also I think I interpreted it that way because the alternative is that Paper Mario makes you feel sad for the death of a Bom-omb but then doesn't consider the implications of making you indirectly kill hundreds and that is, uh, pretty bad.
The Mario games were originally made to have as little worldbuilding as possible to avoid the level of autism that Zelda games have with their timeline. And the origami bits bleeds into the princess transforming into an elemental animal, but that's only for bosses. Why they didn't keep it as an rechargeable special move is anyone's guess.
Historically speaking, Nintendo has several teams of programmers, along with several smaller companies to develop the games. The difference here is that Odyssey is made by Nintendo, which is easier to copyright and personalize the characters. Games like Paper Mario have an rep breathing down a company's neck to ensure that everything is kosher.
That really only mostly took off for every game after the original SMB1’s started flying off the shelves in terms of success. When Mario was still considered Mr. Nintendo internally, there wasn’t really any need to have Mario’s world on a leash since Nintendo’s big focus then was making “games” in the purest, toy-like sense. Donkey Kong and its original sequels, Mario Bros. Wrecking Crew was being worked on around the same time SMB1 was and the general plan was to have Mario work all sorts of fantastic jobs before Super Mario was spun off into its own coherent series.
A lot of the continuity and worldbuilding issues stem from Nintendo continually trying to play the nostalgia card and keep Mario’s old adventures (Donkey Kong included) relevant. What should be more accurate to say then is that Super Mario specifically was initially kept as fantastically varied as possible to open the room for series growth and creativity (following DDP/SMB2, characters started “leaking” between titles like SMB3, SMW, and Yoshi’s Island) and the actual character focuses and development were kept to a minimum. This is also why it’s difficult to work Super Mario around any sort of complex RPG plot, because you can’t really do much with Mario as a character, or other series mainstays, Peach and Bowser in particular.
A lot of the 00’s era Mario games were flexible enough to have elements of spinoffs appear in other spinoff titles like Wario getting continued spotlight after being introduced in SML2, NSMB overworld course tiles just being Mario Party coin spaces, Donkey Kong continuing to be relevant in spinoffs despite not being in a mainline game since. This is all worldbuilding. What you actually mean is that there isn’t any sort of continuity between the titles, to which I partially agree, if it weren’t for the fact that Origami King goes hard on the Bob-omb death thing, which should not only be a given in mainline Mario, but should be completely glossed over anyways if you’ve actually played a full mainline Mario game long enough.
My problem is this. Replace the Bob-omb with a Goomba. What changes? Nothing, right? By the game’s logic, Goombas are throwaway foot soldiers and they’re only good for stacking on top of each other in tower formation. Which is perfectly valid logic for a Mario game with zero stake or consequence, but if it were to play out, we’d get an overly long melodrama about Goombas being born to get stomped on, and they have a family and whatnot. I’m definitely sure this whole interpretation isn’t parodied and mocked relentlessly by “game humor funnies” on the Internet or anything, because it’s definitely A-class writing.
As for Olivia, I believe Tanabe reiterated it himself before, but he and Kudo were able to create OCs that were completely alien to the Mario world; what’s more, there’s not really any in-universe justification for the battle system either. Olivia only helps out if you ask her for advice (she’s a standby character akin to Navi) or if you land on a Vellumental Circle (the Vellumentals themselves depicted as fantastical beasts that will also probably not appear in any future capacity in the series, nor help justify the battle system further).
PM64 and TTYD were plays (TTYD’s being an in-universe theatre production). SPM was a Mario platformer (even though it should rightfully be a spinoff). Sticker Star used stickers, Color Splash used paint. Going off of this pattern and watching trailers I was expecting confetti to be used to craft weapons as well, but that’s just wrong. Equipment is just equipment, and play no role into the actual ring-turning. Though the ring battles do facilitate interesting scenarios, there’s nothing in the story that facilitates the ring battles themselves. There’s a ring battle puzzle simulator you can access, but there’s nothing else apart from that. It’s very “gamey” when it comes to its own logic. It’s what other people have said before; it’s a half-hearted attempt to implement what long-time series fans have been asking for, and it ends up feeling like an insult that doesn’t understand why these specific creative decisions were made.
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Thinking about that, Luigi mansion 3 was done by a foreign team yet they were able to add their own ghostly unique cast
Luigi’s Mansion is typically handled by Next Level, and the first game was a very experimental Gamecube tech demo that was never intended to grow into a full series.
Similarly, Donkey Kong Country and Metroid Prime were never initially meant to be runaway successes but ended up securing their own franchises due to how competent the foreign developers were. These series also had their own constraints imposed by Nintendo creative staff; Donkey Kong couldn’t be the arcade original and the use of Mario characters was forbidden, for Metroid Prime, the games couldn’t be set in any other time period other than between 1 and 2 (due to Sakamoto having other plans for the franchise).
In Luigi’s Mansion’s case, it’s simply that the setting needs to be as convincingly divorced from Mario’s usual shenanigans as possible, and for this reason alone the creative staff has come up with a lot of interesting ghost designs that usually never makes any appearance in any other Mario spin-off; Luigi can appear with a Poltergust and King Boo, but the designs and artstyle of the Luigi’s Mansion games, apart from the original mansions themselves, aren’t allowed to really be depicted outside the series proper.
Contrast Star Fox, which was born due to Miyamoto providing excessive feedback to Argonaut and ended up with only 64 as the series’ defining title developed in-house under the EAD branch only to have its future squandered by a floundering streak of Adventures (developed by Rare after getting Dinosaur Planet hijacked), Assault (by Bandai Namco’s Klonoa team), and Command (developed by Q-Games, founded by former Argonaut dev Dylan Cuthbert) before taking a complete hiatus due to the series performing poorly and also writing itself into a corner.
F-Zero might be the only one of all these that hasn’t gotten a western developer licensed. The last game developed in that series was Climax on the GBA (developed by Suzak, now defunct) and the last mainline console F-Zero was GX (developed by SEGA’s Amusement Vision department, also responsible for Monkey Ball, dissolved and reformed as Ryu ga Gotoku Studio).
At this point I think it’s safe to say that Nintendo has most of their money riding on Mario and not their other neglected IPs; even Yoshi’s Island has been pawned off to other developers to create questionable sequels (until Good-Feel got ahold of it, but now they’re all arts-and-crafts games).
They’re much more interested in developing new IPs and experiences in-house instead of fostering true sequels; the only real counterpoint to Nintendo’s company philosophy of “unique experiences no matter what” would probably be Mario, Zelda, and now Animal Crossing, who all get disproportionate amounts of series additions and spinoffs without much in the way of iteration.
Pikmin’s almost getting there, too.
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Just beat this game and I still don't understand why old Paper Mario fans are warming up to this game. There are so many design choices in this game that just boggle my mind:
-Spreading confetti over open holes in the overworld has very little to do with origami, and outside of one instance before the Red Streamer boss I never found myself short on confetti. The game upgrades your confetti capacity after every boss, but why? It's not like the additional confetti capacity unlocks the way forward. As soon as you clear one streamer, the path to the next one is made exceedingly obvious.
-It dawned on me suddenly, as I was in the last area, that I had not rescued any Toads in quite awhile. At first the game makes a big point of finding and rescuing these Toads who are hidden everywhere in the first few sections of the game, but by the end of the fourth boss they kind of vanished. Not that I really missed them.
-Battles have no point. They were novel to solve at first, but your only reward is more coins. You can get coins easily enough through the overworld (which will respawn if you leave and come back through the nearest warp pipe). Towards the end I was just paying the Toads I had rescued to solve every puzzle because I had too much money, and the money you get from the battles ensures that you only really end up losing 200-300 coins per battle anyways.
-Saving your Legendary equipment for the bosses feels pointless because the strategy for beating the bosses is to use some Vellumental power to stun the boss, then use the 1,000-fold arms technique. The bosses frustrate me because the first few rounds are just me trying to figure out the bosses wacky gimmick.
The only part of the game I liked was the Shogun Disneyland and the character arc of the amnesiac Bob-omb. Shogun Studios had some real creativity on display, and Bobby was the only character who got any real development. On its own this game is kind of boring, without much in terms of replay value. What is it that I'm missing that so many other fans of the old Paper Mario are seeing? Because I'm a fan of the first three games and I'm not feeling this one.
-Spreading confetti over open holes in the overworld has very little to do with origami, and outside of one instance before the Red Streamer boss I never found myself short on confetti. The game upgrades your confetti capacity after every boss, but why? It's not like the additional confetti capacity unlocks the way forward. As soon as you clear one streamer, the path to the next one is made exceedingly obvious.
-It dawned on me suddenly, as I was in the last area, that I had not rescued any Toads in quite awhile. At first the game makes a big point of finding and rescuing these Toads who are hidden everywhere in the first few sections of the game, but by the end of the fourth boss they kind of vanished. Not that I really missed them.
-Battles have no point. They were novel to solve at first, but your only reward is more coins. You can get coins easily enough through the overworld (which will respawn if you leave and come back through the nearest warp pipe). Towards the end I was just paying the Toads I had rescued to solve every puzzle because I had too much money, and the money you get from the battles ensures that you only really end up losing 200-300 coins per battle anyways.
-Saving your Legendary equipment for the bosses feels pointless because the strategy for beating the bosses is to use some Vellumental power to stun the boss, then use the 1,000-fold arms technique. The bosses frustrate me because the first few rounds are just me trying to figure out the bosses wacky gimmick.
The only part of the game I liked was the Shogun Disneyland and the character arc of the amnesiac Bob-omb. Shogun Studios had some real creativity on display, and Bobby was the only character who got any real development. On its own this game is kind of boring, without much in terms of replay value. What is it that I'm missing that so many other fans of the old Paper Mario are seeing? Because I'm a fan of the first three games and I'm not feeling this one.
The first game I've had so many good memories with it, but if I where to compare between the two games, A Thousand Year Door was the better of the two. I ended up getting Super Paper Mario as well, I didn't really mind that one, but defiantly didn't enjoy it as much as the first two. After the Wii my Nintendo phase of my life ended though, so I am not familiar with any of the new games on the newer systems. Paper Mario on the N64 I will have to say though, I defiantly have put hundreds of hours into over the years. I haven't played the games in years , but maybe I'll dig them out, and give them a play in my adult years.
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^It better than nothing
Is a Hammer only run (or as close to one as possible) of Thousand Year Door worth it? Excuse the necro-bump.
You'll need the Hammer Throw badge, which is something you can get halfway through the game; along with that Hammerman badge.
Jimmy Durante's Ballsack
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- #558
I am seeing opinion slowly turn to suggest this newest Paper Mario game (origami king) is better than expected and worthy of being called a Paper Mario game. This is typical internet revisionist history.
Origami King is not a good game and it is shit compared to real Paper Mario.
Origami King is not a good game and it is shit compared to real Paper Mario.
I see, so early game might pose a slight threat since goombella starts off somewhat weak.
Piercing Blow works better than it looks...Along with Quake Hammer.
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