Paper Mario: The Origami King Reviews
Check out Paper Mario: The Origami King Review Scores from trusted Critics below. With 26 reviews on CriticDB, Paper Mario: The Origami King has a score of:
“Paper Mario: The Origami King is a charming Mario adventure marred by a difficult and tedious battle system.”
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Our series providing audio-visual versions of our written content continues with Anna Marie Privitere’s review of Paper Mario: The Origami King on Nintendo Switch. Though the series has strayed from its more classic roots, there’s enough of a solid base to crease out a niche between action-platformer and RPG.
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The saving grace is that combat isn’t all that frequent in Paper Mario: The Origami King, so it doesn’t bring the experience down all that much. You’ll have so much fun exploring its papercraft world and devouring every line of its sumptuous dialogue that you’ll just grit your teeth and persist through the battles you encounter, knowing full well that in a minute or so you’ll be back at the good stuff. It isn’t perfect, but Paper Mario: The Origami King has a huge amount of charm, and those with a keen sense of humour and adventure will find themselves...
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While it may not return to the heights of The Thousand-Year Door, Paper Mario: The Origami King is by far the best entry in the series in over a decade and gives us hope for the future of the series for the first time in awhile.
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Paper Mario: The Origami King is a delightful debut for the arts and crafts world of the Mushroom Kingdom on Switch by having the sharpest execution of the series’ endearing presentation and writing to date. However, developer Intelligent Systems continues to enable Paper Mario’s decade long identity crisis by failing to commit to RPG systems in addition to the inclusion of a half-baked battle system that feels irrelevant to the overall experience.
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A new approach to combat transforms the series' combat from its glaring weakness into one of its biggest strengths.
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If you’re a fan of the series then you can’t go wrong, but it’s not the strongest game in the franchise with its plain bad battle system, regardless of how charming and beautiful it is.
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Despite a combat system that gets old quickly, Paper Mario: The Origami King's writing, puzzles, and worldbuilding make it the best entry since The Thousand-Year Door.
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Origami King places a heavy bet on its fiddly fighting system, and it just doesn't pay off. Like so much else in the game, the boss designs are consistently whimsical and creative, but it's awfully easy to lose sight of that when you just want to get back to finding Toads and chuckling at mushroom puns.
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This sixth entry into the Paper Mario series is not an RPG, and although some issues linger, it's the best adventure game entry yet.
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Paper Mario: The Origami King is an absolutely phenomenal game. It simultaneously makes a return to what made the original games so great, namely the exploration and humor, while still progressing forward with new, creative battle systems and ideas. I had a blast playing through the game, finding collectibles, rescuing Toads, and saving the Mushroom Kingdom in a beautiful, paper world that always kept me laughing.
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Paper Mario may have shed its RPG trappings fully by this point, but that doesn't stop The Origami King from being one of the best and most memorable outings in the series' long history.
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Paper Mario: The Origami King is far from a bad game; it’s just not one that meets its potential. This feels like a solid first step from Intelligent Systems to finally find a new groove for the franchise. Hopefully the team continues to iterate on the design and deliver a follow-up that finally mixes that classic Paper Mario tone and feel with quality gameplay that fans love. It can, and arguably should, be different from the original games, but it needs to be more than this.
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While Paper Mario: The Origami King makes excellent strides in terms of humor and adventure game design, it’s still sorely lacking aesthetically and features a horrendous battle system that only gets more frustrating as you play. I’ve given up on the series returning to the style of my childhood’s classics, but if the series ditches battles entirely it could make for some extremely fun adventure games.
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I didn't have any frame issues or crashes during my playthrough. The soundtrack for the game is fantastic, the characters are amusing, and the art direction is spot-on. The game is so close to being a game of the year contender, it hurts.
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Paper Mario: The Origami King is a wonderful new entry that helps sell the idea that trying new things was the right move. While the series has had some ups and downs, Origami King nails the mix of enjoyable combat and fun gameplay. It would be nice if there was a little bit more depth to the story, but there's enough to make everything fun and lighthearted while occasionally having dynamic story moments that bring the characters together. The combat could potentially be more difficult for younger players, but it's hard not to recommend picking up Paper Mario: The Origami...
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There’s room in my heart for both styles of Paper Mario. The old games still exist and this newer, sometimes thinner formula is fine too. That said, it’s possible Nintendo and Intelligent Systems have folded this subseries every which way they can at this point. I hope the next one is a little more fresh.
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It’s no secret that Paper Mario has fallen on harsh times over the past ten years. Sticker Star and Paper Jam failed to capture the magic that Nintendo found with the series in the early 2000s. And while Colour Splash was more in-tune with Paper Mario’s roots, players didn’t entirely take to it like Nintendo had hoped they would. In fact, those games were generally so disliked, that many had considered the series dead and buried.
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This is not Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. This is not an RPG, and it's certainly not the most interesting adventure we've seen Mario's wafer-thin doppelganger appear in. But despite that, I have a lot of love for Paper Mario: The Origami King. While my fellow RPG fans will undoubtedly be disappointed that this isn't a grand return to the classic style of Paper Mario, everyone else will be happy to hear that this is still the best Paper Mario game I've played in a long time.
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That simplicity is overridden by originality and vigor, then - but I also know all too well that some fans of the older Paper Mario games will once again walk away a little disappointed. This is still undoubtedly no Thousand Year Door. Perhaps the next outing can bring back a little of that RPG depth - but regardless of that, this is still the best Paper Mario game in years.
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Paper Mario closed the book on its original role-playing formula that evoked childhood dreams of picture books coming to life after the brilliant The Thousand-Year Door. Paper Mario The Origami King continues the franchise’s attempt to redefine itself in a genre-hopping search that’s followed ever since. It is not the return to the N64/GameCube blueprint I had hoped for, but nor does it retread the shared path of Sticker Star and Color Splash. With a new open world focused on exploration...
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It's time for another great Switch exclusive so let's get folded and jump into the paper craft world of Paper Mario: The Origami King.
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Paper Mario: The Origami King is a solid, but unremarkable sequel. It's like a table of snack food at a party, where you'll happily nibble away just because you're stood next to it or feeling a bit peckish, but it's not exactly going to fill you up. The new battle puzzles and the boss fights in particular stand out, but the world and endless Toads fail to spark the same delight. This feels like a missed opportunity.
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When Paper Mario debuted on the N64, it took the turn-based RPG battles from Square’s Super Mario RPG and wrapped them around a clever papercraft aesthetic to create a wildly humorous adventure. Over the years, the Paper Mario series has moved away from traditional stat-based RPG leveling and tried various new mechanics with mixed success, but its lighthearted antics rarely disappoint. In Paper Mario: The Origami King, Nintendo’s humor remains on point, but much like an actual origami figure, the rest of the experience is a bit hollow.
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Paper Mario: The Origami King is fun, light-hearted and a celebration of Super Mario with a strong story, great humour and brilliant characters.
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The Origami King is a truly likeable game despite the shallowness of its new spin on gameplay. Its characters are winsome, its visual design is gorgeous, its world is fun to explore, and its storytelling is outside the box and playful. At the same time, however, it could be so much more. Combat is largely unfulfilling, and your journey as a whole lacks meaningful choices. For a series with RPG roots, that’s a real shame.
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