So I get the complaints about partners, combat, story, worldbuilding, settings, characterization, all of that but I’ve never quite understood why people seem to dislike the newer games leaning more into the paper aspects? At least in concept it seems like it could lead to some fun gameplay mechanics — TTYD made paper-based powers cool in the first place, I’d love more stuff like that
Making a Paper Mario game about a paper world is a bit like making a sponge cake out of literal sponges (the dish or the sea variety); sure it follows the letter of the name, but it doesn’t follow the spirit, and the end result isn’t something that a sponge-cake-fan would typically want to eat.
Some fans are quick to point out that Paper Mario was originally called “Mario Story” in Japan and just renamed for its international release, but I feel like a lot of people gloss over why the game was renamed. At the time, the game was something of a technical marvel; it was rare to see a game so expansive and so complex that could still manage to run on commercially available hardware. It’s the game’s presentation, its ability to make 2D characters and a 3D world feel cohesive and purposeful, that made this possible, allowing it to have great combat, and story, and world-building, and settings, and characters. The “paper” look was a means to an end that also happened to carry some aesthetic charm.
Focusing on that look so intently that everything else falls to the wayside is missing the forest for the soil. To remove the world and characters and dialogue and combat of the first two games and replace all of that with paper is- to extend the metaphor- deforestation, it’s cutting down everything that the first two games had grown.
If you were to compare all of the references to paper found in the original games, which could mostly be chalked up to fourth-wall-breaking nods to the aesthetic, and all of the references to paper found from Sticker Star onward, the difference would be astounding. In that fateful year of 2012, Paper Mario games shifted from being primarily about Mario to being primarily about Paper, and more specifically, about arts and crafts items found in the same store as paper.
In TTYD, the “curses” that Mario gets are supernatural; his ability to fold and bend in strange ways is exceptional, not the standard for all of the characters in the world. No one in Paper Mario, TTYD, or Super Paper Mario is physically made of paper in-universe, that’s just how they’re presented to us as the player. This means that the world we’re in could be, and was most likely intended to be, the standard world that any old Mario inhabits, not some other universe with some other Mario. That’s important to me as a Mario fan because those first two games were loaded with information about this world that other Mario games only gave us a glimpse of. To say that all of that’s happening in some other universe, or worse yet, a book [glares at Paper Jam], is doing Mario fans a disservice because it’s saying that everything we’re seeing and doing could easily be non-canonical. It would be dissatisfying in the same way that “it was all a dream” endings are dissatisfying.
After playing TTYD, I also wanted to see more paper abilities in future Paper Mario games, but never at the cost of everything else that fans loved about it; it’s just not a fair trade.
I had another anon ask recently, that I literally can’t answer because Tumblr gives me an error message when I try to reply, asking, “Has your opinion on The Origami King changed at all in the past few weeks?” and I feel that it’s relevant here. The Origami King still appears to be pretty much exactly what I expected it to be from the start, a game about paper, and not only that, but a game more heavily focused on paper than either of the two before it, so my stance has remained the same.
I can get paper anywhere; I can find plenty of games that involve paper, animatics on YouTube that involve paper, commercials on TV that involve paper, images on Shutterstock, paintings on DeviantArt, and of course, just office supplies stores that all involve paper. There’s a lot of paper in this world, with or without Paper Mario games, so when I play a Paper Mario game, I’m not playing for the Paper, I’m playing for the Mario, the world-building, the characters, the dialogue, etc. that can only be found in Paper Mario, the deceased Super Mario RPG series, or the presumably dead Mario & Luigi series.
Maybe I’ll enjoy The Origami King as its own thing, as something that isn’t meant to fill that role, but I have significant doubts about that based on what I’ve seen. If you enjoy it, then good for you, and I mean that sincerely, but please, be mindful of us, of the people who would love to play another Paper Mario game that’s more about Mario than about Paper, because every dollar that The Origami King makes and every positive review it receives decreases the already practically non-existent chances of us getting another true Paper Mario game. If you don’t care, that’s fine, that’s your prerogative, but I, and I’d imagine most other fans, would appreciate some compassion.
