Bad news, roleplaying game fans: it turns
out that Paper Mario: The Origami King is
not an RPG.
The game contains no experience points, no
levelling, and no character progression.
Combat involves sliding tiles around within
a circular area, creating something more akin
to a puzzle game than a roleplaying game.
While this may disappoint fans of older Paper
Mario games, it’s not that surprising.
The series has been moving in this direction
for quite a while.
Producer Kensuke Tanabe even once stated,
quote, “I had actually been thinking for
a long time that I wanted to get rid of the
RPG experience points.”
The design for Paper Mario: The Origami King
was decided on thanks to two unusual influences:
Rubik’s Cubes, and Tingle from the Legend
of Zelda series.
No, really.
In an Iwata Asks interview leading up to the
release of Paper Mario: Sticker Star, Kensuke
explains how he and designer Taro Kudo worked
together on the DS game, Freshly-Picked Tingle’s
Rosy Rupeeland, which was for some reason
never released in North America.
During development, it was decided that the
player character wouldn’t level up or develop
over time.
Instead, they’d simply accrue more and more
money, which could be used to solve larger
and larger challenges.
When the pair started work on Sticker Star,
they both agreed that they wanted to carry
this mechanic across to Paper Mario.
Hence, the game’s focus on single-use sticker
items instead of giving Mario traditional
RPG character progression.
Changes in the way the game played were also
inspired by fans feedback.
A Club Nintendo survey focusing on Super Paper
Mario discovered that only 1% of players reported
genuinely enjoying the game’s story.
Fan more popular, according to this survey,
was the mechanic of flipping Mario to switch
between a 2D and 3D view.
Hence, as the series has evolved, Paper Mario
has focused increasingly on paper-related
gimmicks, such as origami.
Indeed, at one point, Shigeru Miyamoto became
obsessed with stripping all of the story out
of Paper Mario games entirely, saying “It's
fine without a story, so do we really need
one?”
It seems that cooler heads prevailed on this
one point, at least.
Going into Paper Mario: The Origami King,
the team knew that they wanted some new kind
of battle mechanic that didn’t involve traditional
RPG stats.
Naohiko Aoyama, who directed Paper Mario:
Color Splash, said that he wanted, quote,
“a battle system in which the enemies surround
Mario to attack from all sides”.
The development team for The Origami King
had no idea what to do with this request.
They spent a lot of time thinking about how
best to implement this in a way that would
create an engaging, interesting game.
Finally, Kensuke Tanabe had a eureka moment
while he was in the shower.
He said:
“The idea was based on a Rubik’s Cube.
It inspired me to add vertical rotations to
the horizontal rotations, so we got the slide
mechanic added to the program, and it worked
well.
That is the moment I was convinced we’d
be able to build our battle system.”
This Rubik’s Cube-inspired design involved
Mario lining up his enemies in order to beat
them all up at the same time.
Initially, the plan was to use this same mechanic
for boss battles…until the team actually
started trying to build a boss fight.
Then, they realised: when Mario fights a single,
large enemy, there’s nothing to line up.
So, the formula was flipped, with the boss
in the middle, and Mario working his way through
a puzzle before he can fight his opponent.
According to Kensuke, the team started out
by creating their battle puzzles physically,
drawing rings on a whiteboard, and eventually
creating mock-ups with moveable panels and
arrows that almost looked like a board game.
This feels awfully fitting for a game set
in a papercraft world: when it came time to
actually build this battle system in-game,
they could use their physical mock-ups as
reference.
It remains to be seen how fans will respond
to Paper Mario: The Origami King.
No doubt fans of Mario roleplaying games,
already disillusioned thanks to the demise
of the Mario and Luigi series, will find this
a bitter pill to swallow.
That said, there’s nothing wrong with trying
new things.
Sometimes, you’ve got to strike out on your
own and do something risky in order to grow.
That’s as good a moral as any for this particular
story.
And, hey, if The Origami King isn’t really
your thing…there’s always Bug Fables.
It’s better than nothing, right?
