There is NO Core Paper Mario

I have been a Paper Mario fan for a long time. When many people say that they mean they played Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door on Gamecube and have been bitching about Paper Mario games ever since. When I say it I mean I’ve played every home console Paper Mario game since the original installment on N64 back in 2001 and I’ve enjoyed all of them. Currently I’m playing Paper Mario: The Origami King, and absolutely loving it. Every time a Paper Mario game releases you get the same complaints about the game not sticking to the core model and how it doesn’t live up to The Thousand Year Door. Really though this claim is inaccurate. Because there is no core Paper Mario experience.

There are six Paper Mario games to date. Of those six, five have been home console titles and all five of them are extremely different. While it is true that The Thousand Year Door is the closest in mechanical features to the original N64 game, it is fairly inaccurate to say that they’re the same game in nature. What the Paper Mario games actually are is collection of games that have little in common save for core visual style.

If you took each Paper Mario game and took the paper aspect out of them you would have five home console games that share almost no consistent combat mechanics across all five games. Most of them have action command timing and battle items, but even that is not true across the board. Nothing about the combat is truly consistent from game to game. Each one has vastly different and wild mechanics from the other titles. The same thing goes for the non-combat aspects of the game. They are all exploration games with a collection of areas you can back track and explore for hidden items. But all of them have a completely different main mechanic. Color Splash uses paint. The Origami King uses confetti. And so on. Currently people read these things as gimmicks. They wrongfully read each game as being exactly the same as the original Paper Mario with a gimmick such as paint in Color Splash. But really those “gimmicks” are not gimmicks at all. They are the core concept for each game.

Instead of looking at all the games as derivative of the same game with added gimmicks, we should look at these gimmicks as the foundational idea of their respective game. Color Splash is a Mario game about paint. The Origami King is a Mario game about paper folding and assembling. Super Paper Mario is a game about Mario’s familiars taking control of the narrative. These are all completely different games that focus on a specific concept and happen to feature Mario who happens to be in his paper form. That’s how we should be looking at the franchise. There is no core gameplay because there are no core titles. It’s basically a collection of works by people who need a break from doing the same things over and over with the other Nintendo franchises year after year. It’s meant to be different and feel totally separate from the past games in the series.

When you accept this design philosophy for the Paper Mario games you come to realize that The Thousand Year Door was actually the least creative and dare I say most disappointing installment in the series because while it’s a great game it does the least different from the original game. But even it introduced new concepts that differentiated it from the original Paper Mario in fundamental ways. That’s the feature of the series rather than a flaw. The Thousand Year Door is not the best game in the series precisely because it doesn’t go off the beaten path as much as later games.

I’m loving The Origami King. It’s unlike any other Mario game I’ve ever played. I can’t think of another game, in any franchise, that makes every battle both an actual RPG style turn based battle and also a puzzle to be solved at the same time. And boss battles are even more of a puzzle for added effect. The writing is hilarious and riddled with puns, as is true for every game in the series. The graphics are beautiful and narratively relevant. I was shocked at how good the game is after hearing so many complaints. But then I realized that the complaints always come back to the same tired argument of it not feeling like The Thousand Year Door. The problem with Paper Mario games is not that they don’t all feel like the second game in the series. It’s that they share the same series name so people got the idea in their head that they should all play and feel the same. The reality is that the series is better for having decided early on that each game won’t feel like any of the other ones.

I’m enjoying this latest installment of the series so much and I hope Nintendo continues to make them and surprise me with each new entry by doing something completely different and unexpected. It will be a shame if they ever go backwards and start rehashing old gameplay concepts. This post isn’t meant to be a review but if you have a Switch, I highly recommend Paper Mario: The Origami King.

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