 With Paper Mario the Origami King, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems are shaking up the Paper Mario formula yet again. Gone are the stickers and paint of previous games, with paper folding and confetti now taking centre stage. The Paper Mario series is constantly evolving. Sometimes Mario can flip between a 2D and 3D plane. Sometimes he's using stickers or paint to defeat enemies, and now his world is being invaded by Origami monsters. It seems that, for better or worse, with every new Paper Mario game, the gameplay is entirely different. So why does the series change its formula so often? Well, according to long-time series producer Kensuke Tanabe, all of this constant change is inspired by a desire to prevent things getting boring. In a recent interview, Kensuke said, I've already spent over 30 years in this industry. It's sometimes hard to keep motivated if you're producing titles in the same series back to back. What we do to get around this is, for example, to shift the staff around or make a major change to a core system with the aim to create both a fresh team to tackle the title's production, and to bring innovation to the series. According to assistant producer Risa Tabata, the team working on Paper Mario games have the aim of constantly surprising the player. The design philosophy for the series involves relying heavily on big shock moments in order to keep things fresh and prevent the games from growing stale. She said, I want the people who play our games to say, wow, my understanding is that if we want to give players these positive surprises, we can't exactly do the same thing that's been done before. There is another element to this, though. Kensuke has said that he makes a point of seeking out fan opinions on a game and trying to better understand what people enjoy, and what they don't enjoy. From doing this, he's discovered the inalienable truth. You can't please everyone. However, the team does attempt to take fan feedback into account, so when an element of one of these games proves unpopular, the team will throw it out and try something new, rather than keep laboring on a mechanic that clearly doesn't work. The team also hopes that by filling the Paper Mario games with as many new ideas as possible, they'll be able to please as many of their fans as possible. With all of this evolution, though, the team are desperate to make sure that their games never get too complex. The goal is to come up with fun new mechanics that won't alienate casual players to help the Paper Mario games appeal to the widest possible audience. The big change for the series happened during development on Paper Mario Sticker Star, which was turbulent to say the least. Initially, the team began work on a new Paper Mario game for the 3DS, developing a prototype that played very similarly to previous games in the series. They showed the prototype to Shigeru Miyamoto, who was...unimpressed. He accused the team of simply making a direct port of the GameCube game Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door. So, the team scrapped much of what they'd done and started again. This time, they built a completely new gameplay mechanic revolving around stickers. After much effort, they showed a new prototype to Shigeru, confident that this was much better than the previous one. Shigeru said, This is boring. He liked it even less than the previous prototype. So, the team started yet again. And it seems that it was at this point that they started really throwing in as many surprising or shocking gameplay elements as possible in an effort to keep the whole experience feeling novel. Kensuke later said, We'd draw the basic landforms on a whiteboard and imagine what someone actually playing it would feel at certain points. Like, if we put this here, wouldn't that be surprising? And everyone will find this suspicious. So, let's put something there for those who check it out, and packed in as many concrete ideas as we could. It was at this point that the team started focusing on weird ways to interact with paper. With Kensuke yelling, Use as many paper ideas as you can. This idea of random surprises and paper-themed gameplay has become the driving force for the series ever since. For the latest game, representatives from Nintendo and Intelligent Systems sat down together to come up with ways of using paper they hadn't already thought of. Someone from Intelligent Systems suggested Confetti. Risa Tabata from Nintendo suggested Origami. That was all it took to decide the game's focus. Of course, the development team are well aware of the fact that many fans of the older Paper Mario games missed the gameplay from earlier entries in the series. To them, Kensuke says, I do think it's difficult to satisfy certain fans with the adventure game direction if they think of Paper Mario games as simply being RPGs. I hope that everyone will play this game with an open mind. Perhaps that's a good moral for this story. Have an open mind. Just as the team behind Paper Mario games like to try different things and embrace weird and wacky ideas, we also should try to be open to new experiences. You never know. Try something new, and you might end up loving it.