Paper Mario: The Origami King Needed Harder, Untimed Combat Puzzles

The Paper Mario series can’t seem to get things right in the eyes of longtime fans, and that is especially true with the most recent entry, Paper Mario: The Origami King. It is often praised for its clever, humorous writing and creative incorporation of origami, but its combat system is a point of contention. Many diehard Paper Mario veterans long for the day the series returns to its roots and emulates The Thousand-Year Door‘s more traditional turn-based combat. The problem with The Origami King‘s combat isn’t that it’s inherently bad; its potential just went unrealized.

Paper Mario: The Origami King‘s combat takes place on a radial stage, acting more like a puzzle than an RPG battle. Mario stands in the center, surrounded by enemies. The rings and columns of the arena can be spun, pushed, or pulled to arrange enemies so that they can be dispatched in neat groups. Players are encouraged to situate enemy groups in a line so they can be jumped on or in a two-by-two square so they can be smashed with a hammer.

While certainly different than past Paper Mario combat systems, these puzzles can be pretty entertaining. Unfortunately, the majority of them are incredibly easy, even with a time limit. Each puzzle usually has a perfect solution, where the enemies can be arranged to be knocked out in one round, earning the admiration of the legion of nameless Toads watching from the bleachers. The timer adds some pressure to think quickly, but it easily becomes superfluous, since the game’s abundance of coins can be used to add more time.

Paper Mario Should Ditch The Puzzle-Combat Timer

The continued use of puzzles in place of standard, turn-based combat isn’t a terrible idea – and that will likely happen, considering The Origami King‘s success. Nintendo usually changes things up with each new game release, but littering Paper Mario with brain teasers is a surprisingly good combo. However, a new iteration of the system should see the combat-puzzles get progressively more interesting. Rather than putting the player on a timer for the sake of excitement, there should be increasingly difficult perfect solutions involving more than two or three moves; let the player take their time working through challenging puzzles instead of creating artificial difficulty by rushing them through simple ones.

The Origami King has already proven there is plenty of room for variation in a single puzzle type. Its boss battles put Mario on the outside of the rings, turning the whole encounter into a maze as he tries to reach the center. The series has clearly moved on from the nostalgic format of the original game and The Thousand-Year Door, and even though Paper Mario: The Origami King‘s combat wasn’t quite satisfying for some, it demonstrates the series can still evolve into something interesting.

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