I’ll touch more on the elephant in the room later, but the fact remains: the interesting thing about linking these three games together – SMRPG, TTYD, and TOK, is that, on the surface, their A-plots are not that dissimilar, as in all three games, the Mushroom Kingdom is put to the test by the arrival of an otherworldly villain seeking to dominate the world, and Bowser himself plays a secondary role of varying degrees of being helpful. So, after turning Princess Peach into origami in the game’s prologue, he absconds with her castle and retreats to the top of a mountain, with the castle itself protected by multi-colored streamers that make it impenetrable until Mario finds and destroys these streamers.Īlong Mario’s journey, he is aided by Olivia ( below), King Olly’s sister who unlike her brother is optimistic, good-natured, yet also impeccably naive, and this creates a central underlying question in the game of: how does someone as good-natured and sweet as Olivia be the sister of a would-be-dictator who wants to rebirth the world in his image?

When I later wrote my post specifically on Super Paper Mario, I also realized that I was yearning for a game that did all of these things, but that also tapped into a sense of deeper, lived-in worldbuilding the way the original Paper Mario (PM64) did, and a game that at least had mechanics that, while maybe not perfect, at least didn’t feel broken in places, which unfortunately SPM did.Ī game had yet to exist that captured all of these elements in one package – a game that told an interconnected, evolving story with a complex villain and complex female deuteragonist, that at least had Mario react more the way a genuine person would, and which was supported by its mechanics enough to not feel genuinely imbalanced.Īnd I know this is going to be a controversial opinion, but the truth of the matter is that Paper Mario: The Origami King (TOK), the newest game in the series, comes oh-so-tantalizingly-close to achieving all of these elements – the first one since TTYD itself, and only the second since Super Mario RPG (SMRPG) that preceded all other Mario RPGs.įor more details about these older games, please read my two original posts on TTYD and its successors.įor anyone who hasn’t caught on to the great Paper Mario debate of 2020, The Origami King’s main storyline involves a piece of origami whom has been brought to life, named King Olly ( below), who becomes genocidal and decides that he wants to turn the entire Mushroom Kingdom population into origami like himself. When I first wrote my post on Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (TTYD) almost two years ago, I posited that it was the best interconnected Mario narrative amongst all canon – that from a beat-by-beat perspective, it told an interweaving story that changed and grew, whilst all-the-while touching on its central theme of overcoming darkness.Īs part of this conclusion, I compared it to its potential successors, and discussed that, indeed, some other games had better individual storytelling elements: that TTYD’s immediate successor, Super Paper Mario (SPM), held the series’ deepest villain (Count Bleck), that Super Mario Galaxy introduced the series’ most complex female character (Rosalina), and that the Mario + Luigi series as a whole came the closest of imbuing our titular protagonist with genuine personality.įrom left to right: Count Bleck speaking in Super Paper Mario, Mario meeting Rosalina in Super Mario Galaxy, Mario getting annoyed in Mario + Luigi: Superstar Saga, and the world map from Paper Mario In the past seven months, I have worked on two separate job projects that ironically transitioned seamlessly from one to the other, and I have spent a lot of energy towards both understanding and trying to help society at large in its current state.Īs such, there has been less time I’ve been able to devote to my favorite pastime, but during a particular restful period a few months ago, I was able to sit down with the game everyone has a complicated opinion about these days – Paper Mario: The Origami King.Īs we usher in what will hopefully be a better year than the last, I am reminded of the nostalgia and history that goes with a game series as long-running as Paper Mario.

It has been some time since I’ve sat down to write another post, partly because of my efforts needed both for my own career and the state of the world.

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