![]() ![]() Our writer, Mr Taro Kudo, has been grappling with this difficult challenge since Paper Mario: Sticker Star, but has managed to achieve giving all the texts a sense of humour. Tanabe: "From the production of Paper Mario: Sticker Star onwards, we were no longer able to graphically represent individual characteristics, such as age, gender etc., in the Toad NPCs (non-playable characters), and so it has become that much more important to convey their personalities simply through text. A lot of the humour comes through in your interactions with NPCs in the world and the companions that will follow you on your journey, so how did you approach that with regards to returning favourites and new characters like Olivia? It's so lovely to see that The Origami King continues the series' trend of dialling in on humour. This system is intimately connected to the adventure elements of the game and could definitely be stated as one the key systems in Paper Mario: The Origami King." "One of Mario’s abilities unique to this title is that Mario can throw confetti around the overworld to repair objects or terrain destroyed by enemies. Nagaya: "The 1,000-Fold Arms system came up while we were exploring whether it would be possible to use the features of the Nintendo Switch to reproduce the sensations from Mario’s hands in the player’s own hands we didn’t have any existing games in mind during the conception phase for this system." Did these take direct inspiration from Arms? Speaking of attacks, the 1000-Fold Arms are an ability that works both inside and outside of battle. However, when it actually came time to implement the designs, they all posed different challenges because each of their attacks were completely unique." In that sense, the initial conceptual phase was a lot of fun with all the different stationery. "When we were working out the battle plans for the different bosses, we started by going back to our childhoods to broaden our imagination and think about what sort of attacks the stationary would have, and where their weaknesses would be, based on their features or shapes. I suspect there are more than a few players out there who played make-believe with these objects during their childhoods." ![]() ![]() Masahiko Nagaya (director at Intelligent Systems): "For the stationery that appears in this title, we’ve chosen objects that everyone will have interacted with at some point in their lives. How interesting has it been to turn stationery into boss battles? Are there any that proved particularly complex to weaponise? Once I was sufficiently confident with the system, I proposed it to Intelligent Systems." I drew concentric circles on a whiteboard and used some small magnets depicting arrows or icons to test the idea over and over with Ms. Instead, I thought of putting the boss at the centre of the board and having Mario able to attack once he makes his way to the centre. There would only be one boss character, so there wouldn’t be any need to line enemies up. It was a challenge to make the battles work using essentially the same system. "After this, I started thinking about the boss battles. By later adding the idea of sliding, the battle system finally came together." Unfortunately, that proved to be rather tedious by itself. Mario would be at the centre, and players could defeat all the enemies at once by rotating the board to line the enemies up. ![]() I had the engineers at Intelligent Systems code a system where the enemies would appear scattered around a board made of concentric circles. I started by thinking about regular battles with regular enemies. This time he wanted to try having a battle system where Mario is surrounded 360 degrees by enemies. "This system is the realisation of a desire by Mr. (The system used two titles earlier in Paper Mario: Sticker Star used stickers, and the system used in the previous title, Paper Mario: Color Splash, used Battle Cards)." Kensuke Tanabe (producer at Nintendo EPD): "For the battle system in Paper Mario: The Origami King, I tried moving away from the theme of paper. ![]()
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