Paper Mario: The Origami King Trailer Shows More on Combat and Companions

Nintendo shared a new look at Paper Mario: The Origami King this week to highlight combat, companions, and much more. It’s been confirmed that you’ll have companions with actual names following you around at times and that they’ll assist in combat, and we got to see more of how the ring-based combat system allows players to move around their enemies to formulate a battle strategy before the fight actually begins. Some bosses were shown too, but even with all these details showcased in the trailer, people still have some questions about how Paper Mario: The Origami King will handle different features and systems.

The trailer above from Nintendo shows nearly six minutes of Paper Mario action as Mario and his friends take on all kinds of folded-up enemies and even some office supplies in the form of big bosses. It starts with an overview of the game’s story before highlighting different features like air battles, sailing, and battling with your friends.

Those friends have been a hot topic for The Origami King ever since the game was revealed. We saw people helping out Mario in the debut trailer and in screenshots afterwards, but it wasn’t confirmed how often they’d be with Mario or whether they’d be just random, generic characters from Mario’s world. This trailer confirms the characters have names, so you won’t just have “Koopa” and “Toad” joining you, but the trailer didn’t say how long they’d stick with players.

As for the combat, we saw more of how Mario will have to organize his enemies by moving rings around before using his weapons to deal damage. You can also slide them around from one side of the arena to the other to group enemies together.

Additional details on the Nintendo UK site showed some of the ways you’ll use coins in combat. You can extend the timer with coins to give yourself more time to line enemies up and can pay spectating Toads off to come help you for a brief time. Items will break after too much use, so you can also use the coins to repair them.

One thing noticeably absent from the trailer is any indication of gaining experience points after combat – it only showed coins. Having no experience and therefore no levels to gain has been a big concern about the new Paper Mario game, and the trailer points more towards the game not having these components. Accessories Mario can equip also give him things like more health or more time to solve puzzles which may explain why he’s got more health in some scenes.

This evidence isn’t conclusive that the game won’t have these features, however. A previous trailer for the game showed the Bob-omb only called “Bob-omb” and nothing more while this new one shows the same scene but confirms the character’s name is “Bobby.” Perhaps more refined details about these combat features and more will clear up additional questions before the game’s July release.

Paper Mario: The Origami King releases exclusively for the Nintendo Switch on July 17th.