Paper Mario and the Origami King:- Orgimami Orgigami Ogrimagi

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Paper Mario and the Origami King:- Orgimami Orgigami Ogrimagi

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

Al-Saqr posted:

It’s “open world” with toad town being the central hub.

So it's kind of a "world" instead of a bunch of disconnected places on a map a la color splash? Weirdly that was the thing that turned me away the most.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2020 15:19

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 18:54

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

Al-Saqr posted:

Yeah it’s a “world” you can travel freely in with toad town acting as the central hub, you can walk from one end to the other so far where I am.

Spellman posted:

Felt like they wanted to stick a map in everything after Galaxy 2

Hell yea! Thanks.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2020 16:50

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

Are encounters less frequent since they seem longer? One thing that I can see being grating is spending a minute on a same-y puzzle before every encounter. I'm remembering the other thing that burned Color Splash for me; having to scroll through my cards, fill with paint, drag them up, etc each turn. It got old.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2020 19:11

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

My hot take is that I've increasingly been wondering whether a traditional level system is really the necessary or correct choice in a lot of rpg's lately given how linear they tend to be: playing ffvii remake I wondered what the point of levels was beyond throwing off the difficulty balance one way or the other if you deliberately went out of your way to do so.

I've been in the camp that was unhappy paper mario has been moving away from traditional rpg stuff, but since at this point the majority of the series falls into that category I've accepted it and am willing to see if it's a smart decision.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2020 04:33

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

LiefKatano posted:

EXP's main worth is as a constant "reward" for engaging in battle. Money varies in usefulness (in most RPGs I feel like it's not useful at all, as it feels like you have enough excess to get whatever you need without much worry; in this one... it kinda varies?), but EXP as a general rule always gets you ever so much closer to getting bigger numbers.

Just check how many people have been saying that battles don't really feel worthwhile in this game in this thread. It's way worse on Twitter!

Yeah, a constant reward for battles is useful, but it doesn't have to be exp. I already feel like random encounters are a waste of time in other JRPG'S when I am getting exp.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2020 05:17

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

ThisIsACoolGuy posted:

Paper Mario 64 is in this odd place where I keep thinking 'was it really as good as I remember', debating it in my head a good deal, then deciding 'yeah probably.'

I really could use another play through of it because it really does have a lot of charm even in memories, but I'm not sure how much of that is carried by the art style and unique designs.

E: Btw there's a achievement in this game and a special message you get if you beat the entire thing without equipping any accessories. Just wanted to let you know that to drive you crazy.

In my replay a few years ago I kinda felt like each chapter was played too "straight", like until the final one they don't do any of the interesting takes on the chapter structure that TTYD does for most of its chapters. However I've never fully replayed TTYD so I have no idea if the backtracking/gameplay grind is grating enough to cancel that out

# ¿ Jul 20, 2020 23:47

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

Bought this since everyone seems to like it a lot, and I'm still early but the writing is really good. Better than color splash imo. It's genuinely fun and clever without feeling too impressed with itself for being funny.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2020 17:57

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

Araxxor posted:

I can see why people bounce off the ring system, but I don't think it's the mechanics themselves that are bad. There's certainly more potential there that can be realized, not like with SS and CS' systems. Bosses really showcase this and are by far the highlight. They're actually really flexible on how you can manipulate the arena, giving you a ton of room to strategize and not demanding you find this one optimal solution.

I'm still early but I like it as an attempt at making the JRPG random encounter busywork more engaging? I don't know if it quite works but since enemies seem to die more quickly it's more interesting to spin the ring and jump on the goombas than to just jump on the goombas 2-3 times.

As I get further in though I can see this getting really old, especially as they start reusing puzzles.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2020 04:48

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

Nintendo has been traumatized by people demanding Geno in smash and they're never going to let that happen again.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2020 04:49

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

Yep, the world feels good and the environments and music are both fantastic, which is a big draw for me in this kind of JRPG/adventure game adjacent sort of thing where a big part of the appeal is just seeing the next area.

The one thing I'm missing so far (I'm in the blue streamer area) is the lack of real defined characters besides your companions. Not even talking about the character design, but there's not like, the mayor of Toad Town, or someone in charge of that tower at the end of Red Streamer chapter. It's just a bunch of toads who are funny, and some of them have a distinct role, but none have more than one or two lines.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2020 20:17

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

This game is so good. It's hard to put into words exactly why it clicks; the writing, environment design, and puzzles are just really well done and flow at a nice engaging pace.

LiefKatano posted:

Hey, it had EXP, which is the only RPG element that matters ever.

...I'm in the "dislikes Super Paper Mario" camp. Part of it is that it's a platformer and I have the reflexes of a dying sloth, sure (though from what I played a while back I honest to god don't remember the platforming being excessively challenging).

Another part is that I really dislike the "flipping" aspects, because it feels kind of jank since it's referred to and because it's used for a lot of "perspective" puzzles that don't really work. That might just be me.

The main part, honestly, is the kind of... computer-y aesthetic that they go all in on. The Bitlands are fine, Dimentio and Bleck (and Tippi but she barely counts) are fine, Merlon is fine because he's a cool dude. But everything else feels... overly geometric, I guess? I don't like it at all, and a non-negligible amount of that is that it feels like you can take one look at something and immediately tell if it was from an old Mario game or was made specifically for Super.

Yep, I agree with most of this, particularly the aesthetic of SPM feeling really uninspired and tripling down on something that... Isn't really enough of a concept to go all in on like that?

As I play further into Origami King though, I'm kind of taking the opinion that SPM's action-y "no battle screens, just hit them on the main screen" approach might have been the way to go. The combat in this game isn't bad, but it generally doesn't add anything for me either. The boss battles are great though.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2020 05:04

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

SyntheticPolygon posted:

Super Paper Mario wasn't very good but especially in retrospect it was an interesting experiment in putting Mario in like a completely un-Mario rpg. It all takes place in another dimension, outside of generic enemies there's like no recognisable Mario characters or creatures and Bowser marrying Peach causes the apocalypse. Nothing about it really feels like it should involve Mario at all but it does anyway.

I can totally see it being the game that spurred Nintendo to put greater restrictions on future Mario rpgs. Because in Super Paper Mario Luigi's the anti-christ and we can't have that happen again.

In that way isn't it pretty similar to Mario RPG? Been a while since I played it but I remember it being almost entirely new characters. They even had Booster, a one-off not-Wario for some reason.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2020 05:24

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

John Wick of Dogs posted:

The abilities from earlier games were cool, both partner abilities and the paper abilities like rolling up into a tube or power jump, but since color splash I have found I do like the more simple rule set of "You have a hammer. You have a jump". Everything you see is accessible via those moves unless it is locked out by story progress.

...

I like that most of the time in Origami King if there's a reason you can't progress it's a key item and often a literal key that it will be obvious you need.

I do love the partner moves and the Mario paper moves but if they bring something like that back, I hope they bring back the philosophy that you do not need them in areas before you unlock them, unless it's the hub, or there is a really compelling reason to go back there. I love being able to almost 100% an area before leaving on my first pass. Oddly in TOK the one place you couldn't really do this is sort of a pain to go back to.

Or if they give you all your moves early like in Breath of the Wild that would be good too.

The Origami King honestly really felt like a Zelda game a lot of the time. I personally loved the ring combat and I think the in game economy was actually very well balanced. I found myself broke at the start of purple streamer and low on cash again during the green streamer but never ran completely out or had to grind. But I also really loved the fights you did in the overworld. I'd love an adventure game in this style, not necessarily paper Mario, where all these kinds of fights were on the overworld. Those were really fun bosses and the way Mario recoiled back a mile after whacking them with the hammer felt great.

...

I agree with most of this (trimmed out some of your quote so my post wouldn't be too long.) I feel like the maps in this are very well made and engaging, I've never felt that "ugh, how long to the end of this area?" feeling I always feel in rpg's.

And, this might be post-hoc justification, but so far I feel like the lack of exp actually works. When people say "there's no motivation to fight", I feel like they're missing the point that the motivation to fight in most games, including JRPG's, is just to get past the enemy. There's a good pace of encounters that are unavoidable for progression. The reward system means if you want to avoid the ones who can be avoided, or if you're backtracking, you don't feel like you're missing out on anything. If you need more coins just jump back into a fight again.

I do wish there were more outside-of battle abilities, and that your partners had abilities in battle. I feel like they erred too far in simplicity on that one.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2020 16:30

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

Natural 20 posted:

They're misidentifying the problem.

Battles don't feel rewarding and the gameplay itself isn't fun enough to warrant wanting to play it on its own. The combination means that the fights feel like chores to do rather than enjoyable parts of the game.

You can get away with one or the other a lot of the time. People will often spend lots of time doing boring stuff if they think it will lead to something good and equally people will play fun things with no reward happily. But when you've got this combination it's just awful.

I've just finished up with the desert but I really just don't want to play the game any more because I have to get through the gameplay to actually get to the interesting parts like the fun dances or boss fights.

Idk I feel like the majority of the time I'm doing something I enjoy. The proportion of "random" encounters to everything else in the game is quite low. I don't feel like the regular enemies are all that engaging to fight, which is a downside, but it's not any less interesting than how I feel about most JRPG random encounters. Basically I've played games that didn't execute on the story/exploration/world stuff as well, with more annoying random encounters, and still enjoyed those games overall. In terms of the reward structure, I feel it's pretty well tuned. I've run into "big purchases" a few times so far and every time I end up with a cushion of a few thousand coins, which in this game is a handful of enemy encounters; that feels about right.

If you aren't enjoying the dialogue, environments, music, and secrets, I can see why you don't like the game. It's really kind of an adventure-game lite, I can't put my finger on exactly why but smacking the hammer around corners of the environment is still yielding fun and rewarding results for me. The writing and level design is smart and fun.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2020 14:15

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

How tough is the eddy river coin thing, I only did it the one time but it seems like a massive pain?

# ¿ Jul 28, 2020 21:50

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

Thanks, gonna save Eddy till the end if I decide to 100 percent this.

So It Goes posted:

My biggest Mario rpg hot take is not only is Thousand Year Door not the zenith of Mario rpgs, but it isn't even close. I feel like fans of that game only give lip service to how bad the backtracking is but as someone who played that game for the first time a couple years ago, the non-combat gameplay in that game is absolutely abysmal. By the time I was doing Chapter 5 where I was (again!) walking left to right over and over again and fighting literally the same enemy overworld sprites that respawn as you go back and forth I seriously considered just quitting the game. No amount of unique characters can actually save that game in my view. In contrast, the non-combat gameplay of Origami King was genuinely fun for me to play through (besides Mario's walking speed being kind of slow). I would never say Thousand Year Door is better than Origami King (even though it has more interesting characters and more depth to keep battles engaging) when what you're doing outside of the battles is so actively not fun to play in one of them and generally a fun delight in the other. I would roughly put what I've played in the following tiers (haven't played dream team or paper jam):

As someone who loves ttyd but never went back to replay it, I'd guess that a lot of its reception is due to its timing. Nintendo wasn't exactly swimming in rpg's at the time, and that was also before it was pretty common for games to try to be witty or funny like ttyd was. I remember being really surprised that a game made me laugh.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2020 00:25

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

I do think this game would be better with combat being entirely action based aside from bosses. Like the end sequence for the blue streamer area.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2020 01:27

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

YggiDee posted:

In ever boss fight I've been exclusively rotating the panels. It somehow just. Never occurred to me that I could slide them across. Oh my God, I'm at the Ice Vellumental, I've spent so much time making my own life harder.

Omg me too. I'm just in the yellow streamer chapter but still. gently caress. Thank you

# ¿ Jul 29, 2020 12:40

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

The other paper Mario games don't even have timers so they can take even longer. I'm still in a battle from one.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2020 14:15

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

I don't think ttyd is available anywhere other than its initial release. Your best bet legally is probably buying a used Wii and gcn controller (I think the new Smash bros controllers actually work on the gcn/Wii as well) and trying to find a copy for cheap, but it's been marked up a lot by resellers.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2020 15:49

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

So It Goes posted:

The problem with the combat in this game is there is no depth to it at all, which is largely coming from a lack of character/party customization over it involving puzzles.

XP and a sense of progression matters too. I feel like the discussion of XP is often framed in terms of its necessary for battles to be engaging (the answer is no), but it should instead be framed as if it’s actually additive to a rpg game like this one to remove it (the answer is also no).

In this game, after solving a puzzle I often found myself wishing I could just skip the next phase where I jump/hammer as appropriate. The battle was “won” at the puzzle portion and the later felt like a waste after a while. To some extent there was the “strategy” of using the appropriate resource, except this game has terrible feedback on whether a “shiny” or “flashy” move would do enough damage to kill whatever enemy beyond simple trial and error and guesswork. So that “strategy” aspect wasn’t fun and I would just use the strongest appropriate ability to ensure the kill and I found myself just wanting to skip all of it entirely at that point. Especially when they were 3 groups to go through.

I do agree with most of these criticisms. I don't find the combat engaging and wish I could just skip the jump/hammer part. They're not frequent or long enough to drag the excellent rest of the game down imo.

I kind of disagree with the xp criticism though? This game has excellent non-combat sections and I definitely haven't thought that it needs more noise for me to track to determine if I kill the enemies in one hit or two hits, determined by how much xp I've accrued as opposed to the pre-set upgrades already there in the Heart Upgrades. A skill tree or more abilities would be GREAT, but that means an overhaul of this combat system in general; which I'd still be all for. If they weren't going to put that in I do think it's additive to not throw in levels because it's just number noise.

I'm thinking back to games I played earlier this year: Final Fantasy VII Remake, Witcher 3, and God of War. Each had xp and level systems integrated in different ways, and after playing each of them I wondered if the level system was really necessary. It just added noise to the game and either might as well have not been there at all (FFVII) or made my experience worse because the player level interacted with the rest of the game in really obtuse and unfun ways, complicating my interactions with enemies in ways that felt counterintuitive and arbitrary (Witcher 3, God of War). Items, skills, and talent trees, sure, but absent those, xp and levels on their own aren't always satisfying.

Tender Bender fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Jul 29, 2020

# ¿ Jul 29, 2020 19:24

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

To go on a tangent, I'm still in awe of the realization that you can slide rows in boss fights instead of only spinning rings, and the way some of those tiles are placed makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE NOW

# ¿ Jul 30, 2020 00:17

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

I loved that part, I just got to the desert and the spoilered thing was one of my favorite bits so far. It really got to me in a way I would not expect from a Paper Mario game!

# ¿ Jul 30, 2020 18:23

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

How do you sell items in this? My inventory is full but talking to merchants doesn't seem to have a sell option

# ¿ Aug 2, 2020 18:04

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

YggiDee posted:

You can't sell items but you can discard them from the menu.

Gotcha. Oh well!

John Wick of Dogs posted:

I didn't even know you could have a full inventory and I just %100ed it

Maybe it's because I'm a hoarder and never use items... I just got a POW block in yellow streamer chapter and it told me I couldn't pick it up because my inventory was full.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2020 19:39

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

Amppelix posted:

that's because you can only have three pow blocks. i don't think it says your inventory is full, but that you can't have any more of these items specifically.

Ah, that makes sense. I think it said something in the middle, like "you can't carry this item" or something. Thanks.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2020 17:36

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

I'm near the end, right outside peach's castle, and really loving this game. One thing I wish they'd done is having Bowser Jr and Kamek join your party earlier. More characters interacting is nice and I liked their "rally around Olivia" moments and the pseudo sacrifices running up the volcano, and it would've been nice to have them be part of the game before the last few hours. Or the professor toad sticking around, for that matter. They're characters in this game with fleshed out personalities, so I don't think this is a result of the Nintendo Restrictions. I just don't really understand why they seem to want party members to be so disposable (besides Bobby, which I thought was really effective)

# ¿ Aug 8, 2020 20:44

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 18:54

Tender Bender: Sep 17, 2004

SpiderHyphenMan posted:

Holy poo poo Shy Guys Finish Last is absolute garbage.

I went from delighted to full of hatred in record time

# ¿ Aug 11, 2020 01:46

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