I think that I really like to look at trailers for Paper Mario games, and that's my primary mode of interaction with the series. I put more actual time into the sorta-adjacent Mario & Luigi series. I'm not even saying they're better! For some reason, those are the ones I played more, probably because they tend to live on what were once called Portables or Handhelds, and in The World Before I lived a lot of my life on planes, or in the Hell Portals affixed to the fore and aft of such journeys.

Here is the Announce Trailer for The Origami King:

My eldest has concerns about the Emo Nature of this King, which to my mind indicates that the next few years are going to be pretty fuckin' Emo. That's just my read. Visually, It's of a piece with the Real Materials obsession Nintendo has had for a bunch of the secondary franchises for the last few years, one I really like, not least of which because - especially in the case of Yoshi's Crafted World - if you get bored you can literally just start making those characters from the shit in your recycle bin. That's not a theoretical: at least here, it happens all the time.

The disc puzzle combat - and the twist it receives in Boss Fights - is kinda cool. It gets pretty mean. You might not even vaguely want this sort of thing in your game. This is something I have to hear a lot about in the home. But The Eldest hasn't stopped playing it, so huh. It gives me an opportunity to cluck my tongue, arms folded, framed by the doorway, and say things like, "Huh! Maybe all new things aren't bad!" which goes over about as well as you'd expect.

But… the vibe is really cool. It's right on the seam - or crease - between ironic silliness and actual horror, which requires some skill to execute. Purely as a concept it seems sort of innocuous, but the way it's executed is weirdly eldritch and chilling. It's also a rad metaphor. I feel like the sensation of being folded and creased by hostile interlopers is probably universal.

(CW)TB out.