 Once again, Nintendo took one of its most promising Mario series, turned it into a very standard adventure game with no frills, a new way to bore you in battles, and more restrictions on the story than a gluten-free diet. Mario's gluten? Ah, in a shocking twist for Mario games, Princess Peach finds herself in trouble and it's your job as Mario to go and save her. Who would have seen that coming? The overarching theme of these characters being bent, folded and manipulated into origami versions of themselves against their will is quite dark for a Mario game and I enjoyed that, but that's where the story begins and ends in this one. The rest of the 25-hour adventure will have you going through the motion, solving puzzles, jerking your joy-cons across the room and collecting toads. But, you know, as Miyamoto himself told the developers, it's fine without a story, so do we really need one? Yes. What the game does right is the visuals and the world-building, and what it does wrong is just about everything else. What makes you think that? Ohhhh, because my mouse is moving itself and accessing all of my nudes? I mean all of my folders I don't want people to see? Dude, why do you have so many nudes? And why are you holding a pineapple in this one? Wait, you're hacking me? Why? Stop! How do you still not get this? Even from the comfort of your own home, you're still at risk from having all of your personal information and data stolen by filthy dirty hackers like myself. Okay, you proved your point and to be fair, you seeing my nudes really isn't that weird when you think about it. So just how do I stop anyone else from being able to do this? Well, maybe you can go to ExpressVPN. It's beautiful. Get three months free using your own frickin link, expressvpn.com. ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your devices and the internet so your data is protected. It also lets you change your online location from a choice of 94 different countries. Okay, trans. Done. Also, you know how you wanted to watch Ghostbusters the other day but they took it off Netflix? Yeah, I mean, now who am I gonna call? Alright, well go to ExpressVPN and switch it to Canada. Or... There it is! You were right! This is awesome! Yep, now try checking Twitter. Okay, why? Does the VPN change my location on Twitter or... You posted my nude on Twitter. This couldn't have happened if he installed ExpressVPN earlier by going to expressvpn.com forward slash beat em ups and getting three months free. You do realize that was technically your nude as well, right? Yes, but I'm proud of my body. Dine in my areolas. Let's start with the battles. In what has apparently become Paper Mario tradition, they are pointless and best to avoid where and whenever possible. Even with the battles, you can try and skip by just running away. They made the enemies faster than Mario. You gain nothing by attempting the battles as there's no leveling system in Paper Mario Origami King. Are we doing this again? Don't you dare bother trying to use the Flee option because, yeah, that works about as often as McDonald's ice cream machine. That's fine. I was wondering, is your ice cream machine working? No, we're turning it off at 130 and don't turn it back on till fifth. It never works. For those tasty victories, you require what amounts to a smattering of coins that get added to my Elon Musk sized bank account. That begins to amass after the very first world and has no purpose beyond buying the in-game collectibles. Yay. All of this wouldn't be as bad if each battle didn't take so long. It doesn't matter if you're battling one low level Goomba or a whole horde of Koopas. The game has to throw at least four enemies at you so you can play its tedious mini-game before you start attacking. I guess they got sick of all of us complaining about color splash and how you had to pick, paint, and flick all the cards before you attack and they said, oh, we can make it worse. This time around the battles are set in the middle of several rings and before each and every attack phase you need to slide and push sections around hoping to line up the enemies before time runs out. If you get it right, you're rewarded with an attack multiplier, which is often the only way to wipe everything out on the first round so you don't have to solve another freakin' puzzle. If you get it wrong, you're punished in a... oh, in a multitude of ways. To start, failure means you probably used all of your allotted time trying to figure out where the heck that last straggler was supposed to go so now you're frustrated, annoyed at yourself, and the game. Already a minute into the battle with nothing to show for it, underpowered, which means you probably won't wipe out the battlefield, have to sit through the long enemy attack animations, take damage, and then have to go through the entire dance all over again. And don't get me started on when you think the battle's over and then suddenly they throw a whole new wave of fu- Then, at the end of the battle, you'll be punished again with less of the... pointless in the first place coin reward that you would have got. All for failing a basic puzzle in a Mario game. Good job, ya idiot. As you progress through the game, you can buy items that help, like by adding extra time to those mini-game segments of the battles. This does take a lot of the stress away and makes things a lot easier, but it meant I was spending even longer in the battles and made the game as a whole feel like it was dragging its feet even more than it was. Now, yeah, of course, you could tell me to just... get good. And while I don't disagree, that would be nice and all, but I'd still have to do them. And if there was no challenge to them at all, it would just be another mindless phase I'd have to sit through in between each attack, like in Color Splash, with the flicking and coloring of the cards. Sometimes the answer is blaringly obvious, and other times I may as well be trying to sneeze with my eyes open. I just can't do it. But if there was no challenge at all, or if I got good to the point where there was no challenge, it would be even more pointless. So what we end up with is a pre-attack minigame that amounts to does this irrelevant battle take forever? Or even longer than forever? Also, not for nothing, but what is with this ring in the first place? What's its relevance to the story or the world of Origami? It just seems out of place and disjointed to me. You stumble upon a battle out in the world and suddenly the fight and location move to this giant convenient for Mario battle ring? Alright, maybe I am overthinking this, but at least in Color Splash, with painting the cards, it incorporated the whole Color Splash painting element into the battles. This ring mechanic just seems to have come out of nowhere and has no relevance to the story beyond, I don't know, Mario needing to put our ring on Peach's finger. Maybe this is just Nintendo's way of making Mario deal with a ring for 25 hours to kind of take a hint Mario. Okay. Well, I feel like this is going well. Then we find ourselves at the boss battles. This is by far the saddest part of the game for me and a true reminder of how far we've strayed from what actually made a Paper Mario game... fun. Unlike the regular battles, now you find the boss in the middle of the ring and you're on the outside. Yay. Whereas in the other battles, you're lining up enemies to more traditionally attack them. Here, you're tediously lining up arrows, attempting to create a path towards the boss and ultimately land on an action square where you're more than likely to use a motion controlled Quick Time Event-esque attack. Any element of the term-based Paper Mario RPG I may have loved in previous titles is so far removed from whatever this is that I'm beginning to question Thousand Year Door's actual existence or if I just imagine the whole thing like some kind of Mandela effect. There really isn't any strategy or traditional battling to be found here. Just tediously going through the motions and beating your Switch like it owes you money. The bosses are typically always defeated by the motion control so as you can imagine, not very satisfying at all. That said, I also found these by far the most frustrating part of the entire game as each boss needs to be defeated differently whether it's approached from the front, side, or back and with different weapons or tiles but the game doesn't tell you which. Fun is figuring that out on your own which means trial and error which means more of these exhausting ring puzzles that I was more than burnt out on already by the first boss having to sit through any extra than I already needed to felt like torture so trying out different methods just to fail typically led to some less-than-choice words coming out of my mouth on my gaming couch. If you can make it through all of that there are remnants of a fun game to be found here. I do enjoy collectathon searching out all the hidden toads and treasures. Exploring each new area is always a thrill however I did find I had to spend a little too long in each area that that thrill started to creep into desperately needing a change of scenery and dreaming about the next area. Kinda like being isolated in your house for six months wishing you'd go literally anywhere else but here because come on, this is taking forever. That's what this game feels like at times. The dialogue and writing is packed full of hilarious puns and one-liners. I thoroughly enjoyed this for most of the game but much like everything else. It began to wear thin as the game approached the midway points and the end didn't seem to be anywhere near inside. Paper Mario Origami was a game that definitely outstayed its welcome for me. At 25 hours for the story I would have much preferred about 15 hours if nothing else but to spare my psyche from having to go through half of those battles and if I can be even more brutally honest if it wasn't for the fact that I wanted to review this game I definitely wouldn't have finished it and I probably would have gave up due to boredom and round about the third world. It all felt like the game's creators were clutching at straws trying to make something work with the franchise and that brings us sadly to the next part. I feel really bad for the devs that even the story is now suffering in these games. According to the game's producer Nintendo puts heavy restrictions on them when it comes to its characters. Paper Mario creators are no longer allowed to modify characters in the Mario universe. That means we're either stuck with the same Mario bosses we've been battling for years or something completely irrelevant like, you know, a stapler. That also means they can't create new allies among Super Mario characters so what do we get instead? Toads. Hundreds and hundreds of Toads. In varying colors since that's the only thing they're allowed to change they aren't even able to give them personalities or dress them in a way that reflects those personalities or certainly give them individual names anymore. That said, they do manage to get away with some tweaks here and there and when they do it's often the highlight of the entire game like with Bobby literally the best part of the game. I love you Bobby. I wish Nintendo would just ease up and give them the creative freedom that they deserve but instead they're stuck creating a game that so badly wants to be an RPG but it isn't allowed to have a story or interesting characters or fun battle mechanics rather we're left with Paper Mario Origami King and you're left better off taking your money folding it up and throwing it in the trash or buying bug fables.