Why Paper Mario: The Origami King is Not an RPG.

Bad news, roleplaying game fans: it turns out that Paper Mario: The Origami King is not an RPG. The game contains no experience points, no levelling, and no character progression. Combat involves sliding tiles around within a circular area, creating something more akin to a puzzle game than a roleplaying game.

While this may disappoint fans of older Paper Mario games, it’s not that surprising. The series has been moving in this direction for quite a while. Producer Kensuke Tanabe even once stated, quote, “I had actually been thinking for a long time that I wanted to get rid of the RPG experience points.” The design for Paper Mario: The Origami King was decided on thanks to two unusual influences: Rubik’s Cubes, and Tingle from the Legend of Zelda series.

No, really. In an Iwata Asks interview leading up to the release of Paper Mario: Sticker Star, Kensuke explains how he and designer Taro Kudo worked together on the DS game, Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, which was for some reason never released in North America.

During development, it was decided that the player character wouldn’t level up or develop over time. Instead, they’d simply accrue more and more money, which could be used to solve larger and larger challenges. When the pair started work on Sticker Star, they both agreed that they wanted to carry this mechanic across to Paper Mario.

Hence, the game’s focus on single-use sticker items instead of giving Mario traditional RPG character progression. Changes in the way the game played were also inspired by fans feedback. A Club Nintendo survey focusing on Super Paper Mario discovered that only 1% of players reported genuinely enjoying the game’s story.

Fan more popular, according to this survey, was the mechanic of flipping Mario to switch between a 2D and 3D view. Hence, as the series has evolved, Paper Mario has focused increasingly on paper-related gimmicks, such as origami. Indeed, at one point, Shigeru Miyamoto became obsessed with stripping all of the story out of Paper Mario games entirely, saying “It's fine without a story, so do we really need one?” It seems that cooler heads prevailed on this one point, at least.

Going into Paper Mario: The Origami King, the team knew that they wanted some new kind of battle mechanic that didn’t involve traditional RPG stats. Naohiko Aoyama, who directed Paper Mario: Color Splash, said that he wanted, quote, “a battle system in which the enemies surround Mario to attack from all sides”.

The development team for The Origami King had no idea what to do with this request. They spent a lot of time thinking about how best to implement this in a way that would create an engaging, interesting game. Finally, Kensuke Tanabe had a eureka moment while he was in the shower.

He said: “The idea was based on a Rubik’s Cube. It inspired me to add vertical rotations to the horizontal rotations, so we got the slide mechanic added to the program, and it worked well. That is the moment I was convinced we’d be able to build our battle system.” This Rubik’s Cube-inspired design involved Mario lining up his enemies in order to beat them all up at the same time.

Initially, the plan was to use this same mechanic for boss battles…until the team actually started trying to build a boss fight. Then, they realised: when Mario fights a single, large enemy, there’s nothing to line up. So, the formula was flipped, with the boss in the middle, and Mario working his way through a puzzle before he can fight his opponent.

According to Kensuke, the team started out by creating their battle puzzles physically, drawing rings on a whiteboard, and eventually creating mock-ups with moveable panels and arrows that almost looked like a board game. This feels awfully fitting for a game set in a papercraft world: when it came time to actually build this battle system in-game, they could use their physical mock-ups as reference.

It remains to be seen how fans will respond to Paper Mario: The Origami King. No doubt fans of Mario roleplaying games, already disillusioned thanks to the demise of the Mario and Luigi series, will find this a bitter pill to swallow. That said, there’s nothing wrong with trying new things.