Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Switch review – back to the crease-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door – it doesn’t dragon (Nintendo)

A forgotten classic finally gets another chance to shine, with an excellent remake of Nintendo’s best role-playing game.

Of all Nintendo’s many classic games, from across the decades, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is perhaps the most overlooked, by both players and Nintendo themselves. Players haven’t had much of a choice, as until now it’s never been re-released or remastered, but not only has Nintendo let it fall into obscurity, but they’ve purposefully ignored most of its best qualities when making its many sequels.

Although 2020’s Paper Mario: The Origami King was the best entry since The Thousand-Year Door in 2004 it still wasn’t in any real sense a role-playing game, which seems crazy because the inspiration for the whole franchise was the recently remade Super Mario RPG. After that came the original Paper Mario on the N64 (which is on Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack) and then portable sister series Mario & Luigi.

Although it was very unconventional, Paper Mario was a proper role-playing game, with levelling up and turn-based combat. For reasons best known to Nintendo, and despite everyone pleading with them to go back to the older style, all the later sequels removed the more overt role-playing elements. Although the real problem with the other games is that they were never as hilariously funny as The Thousand-Year Door.

The Thousand-Year Door was originally released for the GameCube and as a result of its stylised graphics it still looks good today (as indeed does the original N64 entry). We didn’t realise it at first, but this is a full remake, with significantly reworked visuals and soundtrack, as well as a number of quality of life improvements, including an expanded hint system and fast travel.

You start the game off with – you guessed it – Princess Peach being kidnapped, although by a new group called the X-Nauts (which may or may not be a reference to Xbox, we still can’t decide) and not Bowser. In fact, Bowser is outraged when he finds out and in-between chapters you get some highly amusing segues where you get to control Peach, as she tries to teach a computer the concept of love, and Bowser as he rampages through the kingdom trying to mete out his own justice.

Meanwhile, Mario explores the shady town of Rogueport and quickly gets mixed up with a quest to find a series of crystal stars and open the titular door, beyond which lies treasure of an unspecified nature.

Naturally, the story is entirely inconsequential, but the dialogue is surprisingly and consistently funny. We don’t know what it was like in the original Japanese, but the translation is peppered with in-jokes, unexpected references, and amusing asides.

It’d be wrong to call it adult exactly but a number of characters prove to be unexpectedly horny, Peach has a full frontal nude scene (she’s invisible at the time), and the game even finds an excuse to be disapproving about the Guantánamo Bay scandal that was current at the time (honestly, it’s in one of the enemy descriptions).

Not every line in the game is a zinger but there’s a charm and unpredictability with The Thousand-Year Door that isn’t quite like any other video game. It constantly breaks the fourth wall and we love the surreal moments with Luigi, as he recounts his recent exploits as you and your companions slowly fall asleep while he witters on forever.

The whole tone of the game is completely different from other Nintendo titles, since the main square of Rogueport has a gibbet in the middle of it and most of its inhabitants are good-for-nothing lowlifes. You visit many other areas, with more traditional Mushroom Kingdom residents, but The Thousand-Year Door shows you seedy underbelly of Nintendo’s world, that has never really been hinted at again.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door – battles can be avoided if you want (Nintendo)

Your allies, or partners as the game calls them, are a varied bunch and while we don’t think any of them surpass initial recruit Goombella, who desperately needs her own game, they all have their own amusing quirks and, importantly, unique abilities.

By default, Mario can run around as usual and while he can’t jump very high he can use his hammer whenever he wants, to interact with scenery and enemies. Each partner has their own specialities, such as Koops the Koopa being about to hit objects at range or Madame Flurrie the enormously-bosomed cloud being able to blow away parts of the scenery to reveal secrets.

Although this is a role-playing game, where all of the combat occurs in a separate screen once you touch an enemy, there’s plenty of platforming, puzzling, and character interaction to be done outside of that.

It’s all agreeably complicated too, with an almost Metroidvania like element where you gain a number of paper folding abilities, that let you turn into a plane or boat, and allow you to get to previously inaccessible areas.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door – this mouse femme fatale is one of many returning characters (Nintendo)

The combat will be familiar if you’ve played one of the associated games, as while it’s turn-based it also relies heavily on timing to increase the effectiveness of both attack and defence. Press the button at the right time and Mario can jump twice on someone’s head or time Flurrie’s gusts of wind correctly and you can do more damage, which is sometimes essential to doing any damage at all if an enemy has a high defence stat.

Battles play out on a little stage with a crowd watching you and the more entertaining you are the more the crowd applauds and your special bar refills quicker. Bore them though and they’ll begin to throw stuff at you, although you can quickly prevent them by jumping out and hitting them. The whole concept is frequently pushed to its limits, right from the first boss battle where the baddy decides to start eating the audience.

The whole game is utterly charming from beginning to end, with each new area having its own theme or gimmick, from a giant tree filled with little slug creatures you can order around like pikmin to an extended sequence where you’re trying to become the number one champ at a wrestling style fighting tournament.

Although the original game has aged very well this remake is excellent, with all the 3D backdrops designed so they look like they’ve been made out of craft paper. That was always the case, but the effect is now much more obvious, especially the fact that the characters are actually made up of several pieces of thin cardboard, with their feet and hands overlapping their bodies.

The only flaw the game really has, is the long-load times between each screen, which is probably just a limitation of the Switch, and the fact that your partners are completely unable to follow after you in any sensible manner. We’ve seen better behaved toddlers at a supermarket, as they frequently need to teleport back to you after just a few steps, which is visually quite distracting.

Oddly, nobody references the fact that everything and everyone is made out of paper, even when Mario does one of his paper-folding tricks, but we guess that’s just the world they live in. (The original intention of the art style was simply to make it clear this wasn’t a regular Mario game but something different.)

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Nowadays, Nintendo has a strange policy that prevents developers from making unique versions of any of the classic Mushroom Kingdom races. So now all Toads have to look the same, except for minor colour variations, as well as all Koopas, and Bob-ombs, and so on. The Thousand-Year Door shows what a nonsense that it is, as everyone looks so distinctive in terms of clothing, body type, and facial furniture.

The Thousand-Year Door is one of Nintendo’s best games ever and we can only hope that the effort put into this remake means that whatever the next Paper Mario game is, it will go back to being a proper role-playing game with an equal sense of ambition and absurdity. Not only was The Thousand-Year Door one of the best games on the GameCube but now it’s one of the best on the Switch too.

Formats: Nintendo Switch
Price: £49.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Intelligent Systems
Release Date: 23rd May 2024
Age Rating: 7

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door – some Boos are enemies and some are just regular Joes (Nintendo)

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