Paper Mario: The Origami King

Green Hat Hero (YouTube-kommentar)>
It’s Miyamoto. It’s always been Miyamoto. At least, there’s copious evidence for it. This will be very long, but if anyone cares to know why things went the way they did with Paper Mario and the Mario RPGs in general, I believe I have a pretty solid evidence-based theory (and clearly too much time on my hands).

The Sticker Star Iwata Asks interview makes it pretty clear cut how much Miyamoto “persevered” with the series, as Iwata says, and what he wanted in terms of characters and story (and this is Miyamoto, these aren’t just “suggestions” when the man is treated like a god at the company), but in an interview about Color Splash with Game Informer from 2016 (“Afterwords-Paper Mario: Color Splash” if you want to google it), Tanabe reiterates how he is just respecting Miyamoto’s wishes when asked about the generic character designs. The “no longer possible” phrasing is scary, but I think it’s just a translation thing and his meaning is likely the same as “no longer allowed”, or basically just another reiteration of the "rules" except not throwing Miyamoto under the bus with fans this time.

But it goes much deeper than that. If you look at the timeline of Mario RPGs and Mario games overall, there is a very clear turnover when things started to take a turn for the more homogenized and less varied and creative, basically after the success of New Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Galaxy, the latter of which, while very creative in a lot of ways, was also the 3D Mario to bring back a lot of familiar classic aesthetic elements after the deviant Super Mario Sunshine. After this point, the main Mario series went from being almost as diverse as the Zelda franchise to largely a series of derivative sequels and nostalgic throwbacks until Odyssey breathed some much needed life into it a decade after Galaxy first hit the scene.

Then we have the RPGs, typically always where Mario could be free to really get weird and different, but that also began to change after Super Paper Mario in 2007 and Bowser’s Inside Story in 2009. There was Sticker Star in 2012 of course, but then there was Mario & Luigi: Dream Team in 2013, a game with plenty of new characters and non-standard elements, sure, but spoiler warning if you haven't played it also a very awkward shoehorning of Bowser into the story, where he uncharacteristically steals the spotlight from the game’s original antagonist instead of the other way around, as had been par for the course for the RPGs up to that point. I recall reading an interview at the time (probably the Iwata Asks for Dream Team, which I’d confirm but the Iwata Asks archive seems to be completely broken these days) where the developers made a comment about Miyamoto being critical of the way they’d treated Bowser in the past, perhaps alluding to the RPGs' long history of tending to treat Bowser like a joke or an afterthought, or alternatively as an anti-hero, which perhaps Miyamoto didn't like.

Fast-forward to 2015 and we have Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, an instance of Sticker Star’s influence literally invading the Mario & Luigi series, and while admittedly a game I never played because of how bland it looked, seemed by all accounts to basically be the “Sticker Star” of Mario & Luigi games, featuring a homogenized cast of characters, the Koopalings, bog-standard environments…all that stuff many of us have come to know and loathe. Afterwards we got "cleaned up" remakes of Superstar Saga and BIS, which make alterations to the more novel character designs from the original games, homogenizing the toads and giving certain enemies like the Hammer Bros. their now standard design.

Games like Super Paper Mario and BIS might have just gone too far and felt “not Mario” anymore to Miyamoto, deviating too greatly from the way he envisions the world and characters he originally created, and as Tanabe put it, leading the games “away from the Mario universe”, so he reined them in. There's also the fact that Miyamoto has on numerous occasions demonstrated that he really doesn't think Mario and involved stories mix, and apparently even when it comes to the RPGs, so just the very instance of a Mario game having a story at all might be seen as getting "away from the Mario universe" to Miyamoto. He might have also just wanted to simplify and homogenize the whole Mario family to keep things neat and simple. Miyamoto seems to like simplicity to an extent, and mainly seems to focus on game mechanics to an extreme degree, so anything that doesn’t underlie those mechanics in some way or draw their “form from function” as has been discussed in the past might seem extraneous and contemptible to him. I’ve long had a theory that for the last decade or so perhaps only the core Super Mario series (games like 3D World and Odyssey) have been allowed by Miyamoto to introduce original elements, or perhaps Miyamoto simply trusts Yoshiaki Koizumi and his developers with the brand, whereas Tanabe broke that trust with the previous Paper Mario weirdness he got away with. So Koizumi gets to have New Donkers and Steam Gardeners and Tanabe has to strain to make a sea of identical toads stand out. Maybe I’m going too far into the realm of speculation now, but at the very least it does seem that Paper Mario uniquely has to play it safe at the moment.
It's possible the Switch era marks a change in this policy, and perhaps at this point the PM series is just stuck in a rut in this regard that Sticker Star put it in...Miyamoto might not even actively be requesting generic characters anymore, but Tanabe and company might just assume or are used to this way now.

Look, I know people love Miyamoto and it might be hard to accept that he might be the main reason why one of their favorite series drastically lost its way, and I don’t want to start a hate train on Miyamoto with all this. The man is a legend, and deserves plenty of respect, but I’m of the opinion that series like Mario and Zelda have grown beyond him, and now have a variety of people that can be called their “creators” in a sense. Especially a spin-off like Paper Mario, which Miyamoto ultimately probably had little actual creative involvement in by the time of TTYD and SPM, when it really established its unique identity. In addition, I don’t think that the problem is that Miyamoto is a terrible meddler with terrible ideas, but rather he’s an eccentric creative mind that like all creatives can have good ideas and bad ideas. The real problem is how much power he has, and how often he’s gone unquestioned due to the enormous amount of respect he garners at the company. Any time one person has this much creative power in this kind of situation, it can lead to trouble.

So basically, while I’m sure Tanabe certainly has a good amount of say in the direction of these games, he far from deserves all the blame (not saying that’s what Arlo is doing, for the record, just speaking generally). When Tanabe says “the elaborate story led the game away from the Mario universe” and immediately follows it with “personally, I like games with stories” (note the personally here), to me that sounds like, “look, I liked the more involved storytelling too, but my hands are tied here”. That said, he does seem to genuinely have a ton of respect for Miyamoto, so he may be content with working within these restrictions, for better or worse (…for worse in my opinion, obviously).
Also, in addition to everything I’ve discussed about Miyamoto’s role in all this, the simple fact that the staff making Paper Mario now is mostly entirely different than the original staff of the first three is a major factor that many people are either unaware of or frequently ignore.

For me, the Mario series should be a creative canvas open to pretty much anything, which is exactly what it used to be, so I am strongly opposed to any kind of muting of the series’ creativity in these ways, but I just wanted to offer some possible, reasonable explanations as a longtime, somewhat jaded but still passionate Nintendo fan who can’t help but see all the patterns after following all this junk for so long. For now, I’ve personally made the decision to just not buy these new PM games if I still see these frustrating restrictions in place. Origami King looks pretty cool in many ways and a definite improvement from SS and CS in terms of characterization, storytelling, and environments from what I've seen and heard, so I’ll try to pick it up used at a discount much later, but the most effective way to really tell Nintendo I’m unhappy with the fact that the developers aren't allowed to alter a toad or make an original character design for flip's sake is to just not give them my money, even if the impact of such might ultimately be minute.

If you actually got through all this, thanks for reading. And please join me in now taking a much-needed break from the Nintendo bubble for a little while.

Det nåede et niveau hvor jeg (efter at have tjekket at jeg var alene i huset) decideret fandt mig selv bande højlydt af spillets provokerende opførsel.