Not Every Paper Mario RPG is Thousand Year Door, and That's OK

Greetings, Disciples of the Blood God!

Last week, we got a reveal trailer for the next entry in the Paper Mario series. Paper Mario: The Origami King will arrive on July 17, conveniently three days before my birthday. Many people are happy about the announcement. A handful are mad. Very mad.

Some RPG series are just controversial, and weird as it is to say, the Paper Mario series is one. How does something as harmless as an RPG about Mario and his friends turn into a social media battleground? Simple: You make a game as great as Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, then make subsequent games that never really match up.

I've gone on about how much I love The Thousand Year Door. I talk about it at length in the Blood God RPG Console Quest for the GameCube. It's my favourite Mario RPG; it beats the original SNES title hollow if you ask me. I admit the follow-ups never reached Thousand Year Door's lofty heights, either. Thousand Year Door just has a free spirit wheeling around in its innards. It's a rare project, a unicorn.

But I still liked Super Paper Mario well enough. I liked Sticker Star despite its lack of story (the game's gravest sin, according to some critics), and I really liked Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam on the 3DS. I didn't play Colour Splash for the Wii U (I doubt many people did, because—well, the Wii U), but I watched part of it being played and it seemed fun and well-written.

But some Paper Mario fans are stuck on the idea of getting another Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door—another globe-trotting adventure where Mario makes friends with distinctive sidekicks and fights for experience and gold. Everything else is ruled as trash, including The Origami King (even though most of what we know about the game came from a two-minute trailer).

On one hand, I think part of the criticism is valid. Thousand Year Door was probably the least Paper Mario came to give us a "true" RPG battle system. Sticker Star's battle system requires you to collect and use stickers, which some people understandably disliked. Colour Splash's battles yield no experience points, and ergo feel useless. That's a bummer when you're playing an RPG. You want to grow when you fight enemies. You want that return on your time investment. It's uncomfortably Pavlovian, it is what it is.

On the other hand, I've seen criticisms of "no effort" from Nintendo with Origami King, and that's just not true. You might not like the game's battle system (as little as we know about it at this point) and you might not like the direction Nintendo's gone in with NPC character designs, but I can't look at that creepily folded-up origami Peach at the start of the trailer and say to myself, "This game lacks effort. Nintendo's really dropped the ball."

I think signs point to Origami King being a fun and maybe slightly dark action RPG—or at least an action RPG-like. Maybe it'll be as special as Thousand Year Door. Maybe it won't be. But I don't doubt it'll be good. If I shunned all Final Fantasy games because none of them matched up to the awesome experience I had with Final Fantasy 6, I'd be denying myself a whole lot of great RPGs. I don't plan to take that route with Paper Mario, either.

Stay Safe and Happy Adventuring,

Nadia

This Week on Axe of the Blood God
There's lots to talk about in the news, so Nadia and Kat take some time to talk through the recent PS5 tech demo, the Ghost of Tsushima gameplay reveal, and the surprising controversy around Paper Mario. Then Kat shares her thoughts on Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, and listeners get to weigh in on the failed RPGs they want to make a comeback! [Listen here]