- [Narrator] A new Paper
Mario game is almost out,
and it's nothing like you'd expect.
Here's how battles work in
Paper Mario: The Origami King.
(soft music)
The Origami King is the sixth entry
in Nintendo's long-running
role-playing game series.
Most of them play like standard RPGs,
with stats and gear and all that.
The gimmick is that all of our favorite
Mushroom Kingdom mainstays
are flattened into 2D cutouts.
And the world itself is
rendered in 3D papercraft.
It's cute, it's also kind of weird.
Origami King isn't like
any other Paper Mario game,
and that's most apparent
in the combat system.
The first thing you'll
notice is that battle screens
are arranged in a circle of rings,
kind of like a tree stump.
From there, things are
broken up into individual,
pie slices of battlefield.
Your goal, as with all Mario games,
is to stomp, hammer, and
fireball enemies into oblivion.
It's technically a turn-based game
insofar as you literally
take turns making moves.
But Paper Mario: The Origami King
feels more of a puzzle game, if anything.
At the start of each battle,
you get the chance to spin the rings
and shift the pie slices to
reconfigure the battlefield.
Sometimes, you'll be able
to make multiple moves.
Other times, you'll only
have one at your disposal.
Line up enemies in a perfect row,
and you'll deal 50% more
damage with your stomps.
Arrange them in a neat
little two-by-two section
in front of you,
and you'll get the same
boost for your hammer.
Doing so, at least in the
first half a dozen hours
of the game, will take out most enemies
before they get a chance to strike.
On top of all of this
is an extremely stressful countdown clock,
which you can expand by
holding down the plus button
to spend coins at a rate
of ten coins per second.
That's right, in Paper
Mario: The Origami King,
time really is money.
Fortunately, there's tons
of money hidden everywhere.
Boss battles flip this script.
During regular fights,
Mario stands smack in the
center of the battlefield.
During boss fights, like this one
against a pretentious
box of colored pencils,
our mustachioed hero is on the outside.
To deal damage, you have
to rearrange the board
to create a pathway, made up of arrows,
that Mario can follow
inside the concentric rings,
then land on an action space.
Some spaces on the
battlefield restore health.
Some make it so Mario attacks twice.
It's all a bit more
intricate, and rewarding,
than standard Paper Mario battles.
There are also action-based battles
against Paper Macho enemies.
Get a load of these guys.
When you come across one,
you need to use your hammer
to smack a weak spot on its back.
From there, rather than
a traditional battle,
it's a matter of real-time dodging,
strafing, and hammer-thwapping.
These Paper Macho enemies become
more intricate and involved
as the game goes on.
We can only show you a little bit
of Paper Mario: The Origami King today.
But look forward to our
review on Kotaku.com.
