As many Paper Mario: The Origami King players will know by now, the game features various bosses that take the form of animated stationery – such as color pencils, rubber bands, and more. Here’s a little more insight into how that came about!

In a recent interview with PCGames, Nintendo’s Kensuke Tanabe explained why his development team settled on the idea of regular stationery for the game’s boss battles. Namely, they felt that realistic-looking tools without human-like features was an interesting ‘visual hook’ for the game (rough translation below):

“The Paper Mario series is all about paper. We came up with the idea of ​​office stationery when we were thinking about various motifs that are related to paper but not necessarily origami. We found that the somewhat strange-looking real representation of stationery without adding anthropomorphic features to them could work well as a visual hook for the game. At the end of the day, “normal” isn’t necessarily exciting, is it?”

Do you agree with how Tanabe and his team approached the game’s boss battles? If no, what kind of bosses would you have designed for Paper Mario: The Origami King? Feel free to discuss below!