Kensuke Tanabe

Paper Mario: The Origami King is a cross-genre video game, developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo; it was released exclusively for the Nintendo Switch console in July 2020. The story follows Mario teaming up with his new ally Olivia to prevent the Mushroom Kingdom from being folded entirely into origami. The game is designed to look entirely like paper, with multiple open-world areas allowing for exploration and puzzle-solving. Turn-based combat is organized into circular rings, which can be rotated to line up enemies to deal more damage. The producer, Kensuke Tanabe (pictured), anticipating that he could not satisfy every fan, opted for entirely new gameplay and concepts compared to previous games in the series. The game received generally positive reviews, being praised for its graphics, writing and characters, and critiqued for the lack of other elements of role-playing games, such as experience points. Reception on gameplay, mainly the puzzle-style combat, was mixed. (Full article...)