I'm not hung up on what game genre The Origami King technically falls into. My motivation in playing a franchise with the title "Paper Mario" is to laugh and have fun. If this installment can accomplish that much, it will have won me over. Based on the footage I've seen so far though, and on what these reviews are generally suggesting, I have some doubts. I can practically feel mediocrity oozing out of the available gameplay footage and into my living room.
The truth is that The Thousand-Year Door remains my favorite installment in this franchise to date as well, and that's not because I'm hung up on a particular kind of battle system. The Thousand-Year Door invested a lot in its world and characters! No subsequent installment has felt equally...well heartfelt to me. It's like they're trying to reach a younger player base than The Thousand-Year Door appealed to by dumbing everything down and never really succeeding in drawing that newer, younger, more casual group of players into this particular franchise so much as they're just slowly wearing down the fan base that The Thousand-Year Door established for it into disinterest (including me).
I'll probably give this game a rental to taste and see. I do that when I have strong doubts about the merits of actually buying a game because I live on a very finite budget.
