While Paper Mario: The Origami King released to both critical and commercial acclaim last month, fans of earlier games in the series have expressed frustration with the game, as it continues to abandon the RPG mechanics that made the original titles so memorable. While Paper Mario: The Origami King has received praise for its clever writing and creative visuals, even the game’s biggest fans have criticized it for featuring a battle system that, while at first unique, quickly begins to feel repetitive as the game lacks even the basics of RPG mechanics.
While series developer Intelligent Systems has remained mostly quiet on the situation, in an interview with Eurogamer Germany (which has been translated by Nintendo Everything), series producer Kensuke Tanabe opened up about the decision to move away from more traditional RPG mechanics, which he claims started with the development of Paper Mario: Sticker Star. “When developing Paper Mario: Sticker Star, one of our goals was to move away a bit from the traditional RPG style.”
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“Nintendo has another RPG series starring Mario and we wanted to distance ourselves from it by making an adventure game with a focus on solving puzzles.” Tanabe is referring to AlphaDream’s Mario & Luigi series, which is strange considering the developer’s closure due to bankruptcy in late 2019. Tanabe could be implying that Nintendo still has plans for the series as a Mario RPG series. Continuing, Tanabe claims, “Even though we’ve stuck to that decision so far, we haven’t decided yet whether or not we will keep doing so in the future. Personally speaking, I want to keep developing Paper Mario games that are both innovative and unique.”
This implies that Intelligent Systems has not yet decided where it will take the Paper Mario series following The Origami King, which could mean that the team is planning to return to the series’ RPG roots. It is unlikely, however, as Tanabe finally states “The game development philosophy I’ve adopted from Mr. Miyamoto is developing innovative and unique gameplay systems. I’m not opposed to the fans’ opinions. However, I view my game development philosophy as separate from that. If we used the same gameplay system wanted by the fans again and again, we wouldn’t be able to surprise them or deliver new gameplay experiences. We always try our best to exceed expectations in surprising ways. At the same time, there’s no guarantee that we’ll always succeed in doing that – so it’s a real challenge.”
Taking Tanabe’s development philosophy into account, it seems unlikely that Intelligent Systems has plans to return to the RPG style as the team is more interested in experimenting with new gameplay styles rather than reverting back to the turn-based battles of the Nintendo 64 and GameCube titles.
Paper Mario: The Origami King is available now, exclusively on Nintendo Switch.
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Source: Nintendo Everything
