Paper Mario is back... again! (Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door Remake, in review)

     Hey friends, I think I would be making a wild understatement here if I were to tell you that the Paper Mario franchise has had some weird steps. The series began with two solid turn-based RPGs, then an action RPG/Platformer, then a couple RPGs with linear pathways, limited characterization, and terrible battle mechanics, followed by a game with great world building, but still pretty bad battle mechanics. In the year 2024, to the joy of everyone, Nintendo announced a full remake of what many consider the crown jewel of the franchise, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. It was a great game when I played it as a kid, but I never beat it back then, the final boss was just too hard for me. This is probably because I didn't understand how RPGs worked, so hopefully I'll have an easier time going through it this time around. Everyone hop on the boat, we're headed for the seedy town of Rogueport today!

Just Another Normal Adventure for Mario!

    Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door begins in the same way as so many Mario games do. Princess Peach writes a letter to Mario, telling him that she's traveled to a strange place called Rogueport, and that she found a treasure map which she thought he would like. She attaches the map to the letter and invites him to the town right away. Unfortunately when Mario gets there, the princess is nowhere to be seen, and Toadsworth informs him that she's been kidnapped again. Through a long course of events which I won't get into here, Mario realizes that the map that Peach sent him is actually related to her capture, as is an ancient treasure and an evil conspiracy that could possibly destroy the world. Okay, I'll admit this story is a bit more in depth than the first Paper Mario, where the plot is essentially, "Bowser kidnapped Peach again and you have to save her, but with turn based battles this time." This game starts off strange, and continues to get stranger and stranger as you go along, involving fighting dragons, entering a fighting tournament in a flying city, and saving people from being turned into pigs by a shapeshifting demon, just to name a few.

    Mario meets many unique characters on his trip this time, some wild designs that are really different from the toads and goombas that we've seen before. Mario's first companion on the quest is Goombella, a student at Goomba University, and student to Professor Frankly, a Goomba who leads Mario with advice all throughout his adventure. There's Madame Flurry, a cloud woman who used to be a star on Broadway, but recently retired and is living in the Boggly Woods. We of course see some Mario characters that you'll always expect, like Luigi and Bowser, and they're always really funny in basically any scene they show up in. Bowser will pop up every now and then to fight you in this game, and it still manages to make me laugh. There are tons of weirdos and misfits here, and there's a good reason for that, after all, Rogueport itself is something of a cesspool of crime and villainy. It says something that in this Mario game, the central point of the Rogueport Town Square is a noose, which is pretty dark for a game as kid friendly as this one is.

    I really don't want to spoil too many of this game's cool settings, so I just need to talk about the combat, since that's the point that future games in this series were either confused about or hell bent to change just for the sake of changing. This is a turn-based RPG as I said earlier, which means for those who aren't aware, you take turns, you attack, then your opponent attacks, and it continues until one of you is defeated. This is not the only game in this genre, of course, but I will argue that this is one of the best in terms of theming and showmanship. The battles take place on a stage like a play, in front of an audience cheering for you. Mario gains a bigger and better reputation throughout the course of the game, and the stage you battle on gets better, allowing for different special effects, as well as for more seating for the audience. Your audience starts the game at 50 I think, and by the end, you get a theater that seats about 200, which is a really cool way of showing progress through the gameplay. The audience will occasionally throw objects at the stage, and you have the opportunity to jump into the audience and attack the person, or you can let them throw it if it's an item that will help you in battle. besides this, sometimes, an audience member will run on stage into the wings of the stage and drop a stage light on you or the enemy. It adds a level of randomness to the proceedings that actually feels pretty cool, and again, plays into the stage aesthetic really well. Other than the audience aspect, the action commands are really fun and satisfying to pull off, giving some element of challenge to the battles besides just picking a prompt, which makes the player much more connected to the gameplay than just watching a character swing a sword at an enemy.

    Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is one of the most exciting remakes that has come about recently along with Super Mario RPG. Remastering these two games in particular makes me really hopeful for the future, and maybe we'll see more Paper Mario games down the road that are tied to the excellent battle mechanics of the first two games, and if I never see the stupid circle puzzle system from Paper Mario: The Origami King, I would be very happy. There was a sentiment around the time of Sticker Star that Nintendo didn't like the original characters, so in Sticker Star and Color Splash, we had mostly just normal Mario characters and enemies, no interesting designs like Goombella or partners like that, so it's so nice to see these games remade from a time before that point, and I truly hope we've moved past that idea. We'll have to see in Mario and Luigi: Brothership (which comes out in November) whether or not that trend continues, but it certainly looks promising so far.

    I never beat this game as a kid, but I'm happy to report that I have finally beaten this game as an adult, and though it is a slightly different experience from the original, many of the changes made just amount to, "this game looks much better than the Gamecube one," and, "the music was reorchestrated." So many of this game's moments were still etched into my brain when I was playing through it, to the point where I recited certain favorite lines of mine along with the gameplay, and it was a very similar and faithful experience to the time I spent back in elementary school. I typically don't get too emotional towards nostalgic things coming back, but I'm fine with admitting that I got a little choked up in the credits when I finally saw the ending point of a story I started some 20 years ago or so. It's a beautiful thing, and I'm so glad I was able to play it again.

    Thanks so much for reading this, friends! I would recommend this game to anyone who likes RPG games, even some who don't like them, because this is certainly more simple than some of the more advanced titles of this nature, like Final Fantasy. I've heard this called "Baby's first RPG" or something to that nature, but that doesn't come from a place of shame, I don't think. The sentiment there is that it plays so well and the battle mechanics are so timeless, that it's a joy to play through from beginning to end, no matter what age you are. Until next time, I'm Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed Paper Plumber, and I'll talk to you again soon!