Nintendo are well known for not providing a wealth of settings for their titles. 51 Worldwide Classics has hardly anything. Animal Crossing: New Horizons has practically nothing, and neither does Paper Mario: The Origami King. Oh wait. No, my mistake, there are options locked behind an unlock, similar to how Animal Crossing: New Horizons requires you to purchase an inventory wheel that makes switching items easier. Oh, Nintendo.
Kotaku penned a tip piece on how to unlock the rest of the settings available in the papery Mario game, and it’s honestly a strange, but unsurprising move by Nintendo. When you start the game, Kotaku says that you’re able to adjust the brightness, the Joy-Con rumble or turning motion controls off or on. There are three other options listed as question marks.
Well, apparently one of those question marks offers you hints for puzzle battles. Another offers a buffer of time for each battle’s clock. And the last one lets you modify how large that buffer is. The trouble is, to unlock these, you need to locate the Battle Lab building that’s not mentioned but can be found in the northeast corner of Toad Town’s town square, near the museum.
Oh gosh, but hang on, the Battle Lab is closed when you visit the town for the first time. So how do you open it? You wander through Picnic Road according to Kotaku until you see a dog barking, hit it, and it turns into a Toad who is the owner of the Battle Lab. Only then do you get to access the building when you go back to it. Apparently, it takes a couple of visits before you actually get the Puzzle Solver feature, and then another visit after that gets you the remaining two features.
This is certainly an annoying thing to find out, although I don’t intend on playing Paper Mario: The Origami King. But locking helpful features that are seen as accessibility features in other games such as Moving Out! from Team17 is a disappointing thing to see. Despite this, Nintendo has just announced Pikmin 3 Deluxe which will have a range of accessibility features available at launch. Could this be signs of change?
