The Origami King is the latest title in the Paper Mario saga, in which the RPG is abandoned for the first time but the combat and exploration are maintained. Do not miss it!
Paper Mario has always been the saga of the mythical Nintendo plumber to go to if you wanted something different. The pictographic style, the playability and the sensations represented a break with what Mario games supposed and that essence made him succeed. And that precisely intensifies even more in this latest instalment on Nintendo Switch, Paper Mario: The Origami King , where the commitment to the RPG is abandoned despite continuing with the combat and exploration mechanics and where the dialogues continue to play an important role. .
The central pillar of the game is the fight against monotony. Because in each world or place on the map that we discover, we find mechanics that are new and that practically do not appear again. The minigames precisely help a lot to break that uniformity. Its approximately 30 hours are full of adventures that purify freshness and fun in abundance, without it becoming tiresome.
And getting rid of the purity of the RPG has an immediate consequence: approaching the sandbox (open world), where there are no overlapping levels but rather large maps, with a large number of collectibles within them, which adjoin each other and to which we can go in the order we want, breaking with the typical linearity of Mario games.
A different combat system
The complicated part of it all was how Nintendo intended to congeniality a title that abandons the role but still had the fighting as the central point of the plot. The answer lies in a system where puzzles become a central element of all battles: each enemy is in a different position ring and we have to eat our heads moving them so that they all line up and we can attack them at once.
In this way, eliminating the enemies becomes a real puzzle where we will have to combine the placement of the rivals with the different jumps and weapons that are at our disposal. What’s more, one of the points where the title looks best is with the final bosses of each area: having exclusive attacks, changing forms and the fact that the character uses unique mechanics for each one makes it very entertaining and surprising. And to top it off, it breaks with the common type of combat in which Mario is in the center and the enemies are in the outer rings: the opposite happens here.
And the bad news is that you can’t customize the character to your liking . You cannot acquire weapons or skills, but only a kind of instruments that will help you, among other things, to locate the collectible objects in each scenario.
A Paper Mario with the classic essence
Intelligent Systems -the company that developed the game- had the difficult role of returning the charm of the first editions to the saga. From Super Paper Mario , delivery of the Wii, onwards, the games had lost what had catapulted them to become one of the public’s favorites. And despite the complicated task of doing it by getting even with the role, Paper Mario: The Origami King is a magnificent gaming experience .
To begin with, because despite its apparent simple cartographic style , this one is very well done. It’s nice to see a different Mario than the one we’re used to: carefree, warm, simple… It’s an ode to childhood, even though the title is accessible to any audience.
And another of the elements that shines is the humor that distills from the dialogues and the actions of the game: the script has somewhat absurd twists that hardly won’t make you laugh. The charisma that the story gives off ends up engaging, even knowing that it is not complex at all and does not get anywhere.
With regard to difficulty, this instalment is not a challenge that puts us in a lot of trouble, but it is by no means a walk. There will be puzzles that will give us a hard time, but they are generally quite affordable and designed for all types of players. And it helps a lot to make the excellent cast of characters that appear work quite well, without a doubt a very important ingredient to configure a game that is probably among the best in the saga on the Nintendo Switch.
In short, Paper Mario: The Origami King finally manages to emulate what the first instalments of the title offered. Although the combat system is sometimes a bit heavy, the rest of the elements shine in such a way that it is an obstacle that does not prevent you from enjoying it.