Paper Mario: The Origami King Reviews
The Origami King suffers from one-note combat and few real choices, but its personality and visual design are a joy.
Nintendo sketches another warm and colourful Paper Mario adventure, though never traces its full potential.
One of the most relentlessly charming video games ever made and the best Paper Mario since The Thousand-Year Door.
Paper Mario: The Origami King is fun, light-hearted and a celebration of Super Mario with a strong story, great humour and brilliant characters.
As usual, Nintendo's quirky writing is full of laugh-out-loud moments, but your quest is full of tiresome backtracking
I want to share it with my nieces and nephews, as well as my grown friends. But I hesitate due to the frustration of the combat and those imposing boss battles — those moments where I wish I had someone else to take over on the controller.
The Origami King keeps its RPG systems and character work light, but revamped combat and solid gags throughout are the course-correction Paper Mario needed.
Origami King might not be the successor to Thousand-Year Door for which fans have been clamoring, but this time the formula works, allowing the series’ great writing and worlds to shine through.
If you're OK with Paper Mario's turn to action, you'll find an enjoyable game packed with humor, secrets, and unique boss battles.
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.
Paper Mario: The Origami King is the best installment of the saga since The Thousand-Year Door: it is not an RPG in use, nor does it seek to be.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
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.
The best thing I can say about Paper Mario: The Origami King is that it has some major problems, but the story is great enough and so worth experiencing that it's worth trudging through the negatives to experience it at least once. Like a lot of first-time origami projects, it starts rough, but it's worth seeing through to the end.
New first-party from Nintendo, new great game for Switch. Despite the fact that being announced just two months ago, the new installment of Mario's RPG saga is brilliant, even if its combat puzzles mechanics end up getting too repetitive.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
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.
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.
A creative triumph, with new ideas that last the entire game, some of the best boss battles in ages, and praiseworthy presentation. Paper Mario: The Origami King is only let down by some of the general combat being a bit skippable.
So don’t sit this one out. Pick it up, play through it, complain about it with me, but then stick around for all of its joys.
It’s smart, creative, and rarely less than lovely to look at, but its combination of odd combat mechanics and sporadically subversive wit are bound to reinforce the franchise’s status as distinctively niche within the Marioverse.