Paper Mario: The Origami King Brought The Series Closer To Its Roots

Paper Mario: The Origami King is celebrating its five-year anniversary today, July 17, 2025. Below, we examine the ways the Paper Mario series has changed over the years, and how Origami King tried to recapture its early magic.

Though Mario's platforming adventures are universally adored, the Paper Mario series has a much more mixed reputation. Its first two installments, Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 and its GameCube sequel, The Thousand-Year Door, are widely regarded as Mario's finest role-playing outings, enchanting players with their imaginative storybook worlds and irreverent humor. As the series progressed, however, it gradually deviated from its RPG roots, shedding many of the elements that had made the first two games so beloved. While the series has never quite been the same since, its Switch installment, Paper Mario: The Origami King, is the only one that has come close to matching the heights of the original titles.

Paper Mario's identity crisis can be traced all the way back to 2007's Super Paper Mario. Originally announced for the Nintendo GameCube, this particular entry effectively began life as an offshoot of an offshoot--one last hurrah for the aging purple console spun out of repurposed assets and ideas from The Thousand-Year Door. By that point, however, GameCube sales had flatlined and a new generation was on the horizon, prompting Nintendo to move the title to the Wii, where it became many new players' introduction to the series.