Paper Mario: The Origami King is the perfect game just to kick back and get lost in a colorful and cute world. From the enemies designed after office supplies to the vibrant landscapes, Paper Mario makes it hard for you not to smile while stomping a few goombas.
The latest entry in the Mario franchise is fantastic, but it's by no means perfect. While most bugs won't affect gameplay dramatically, players have discovered a few game-breaking ones. In one case, players have found a way to softlock the game when attempting to flee a battle.
For Paper Mario's Next Trick He Shall Disappear
On Twitter, @MarioBrothBlog found a new way to softlock the game by causing Mario to disappear completely. The bug steps are outlined above, which involve you having Mario hit a Snow Spike as soon as a snowball is about to smack into Mario. If you time the action just right, then the game will cause Mario and his foe to disappear and softlock the game. For those of you that may not be aware of what softlock means, it refers to finding a bug in a game where the game is seemingly playable but will need a reset as no progress can be made.
While the bug is created under a specific set of circumstances and has no external applications other than a neat softlock, the bug has some implications for other players. What we hope to see from the discovery of this softlock are players experimenting with Paper Mario: The Origami King to find possible exploits to speed run the game. Who knows, maybe the disappearing Mario bug above can hide a shortcut to help speedrunners, and we just have not figured out how yet. Hopefully, speedrunners can experiment with the game's exploits before any updates roll out, patching the bugs. Fingers crossed that Nintendo just leaves in the bugs for speedrunners to experiment with and use.