Thank you Nintendo for sending this game for us to review!

When people are asked about their favorite Mario game, many point to the classics, such as Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario 64. Others may prefer newer games, like Super Mario Odyssey or Super Mario Maker. Still others will pick out a game from the endless stream of spin-offs. In many people’s hearts, however, one game stands above the rest. Released 20 years ago for the GameCube, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door re-imagined what a Mario game could be. The simple yet engaging combat, fun exploration, unique setting, exciting plot, and hilarious writing found in this sequel to the original Paper Mario made this one of the plumber’s most memorable adventures.

Unfortunately, Nintendo never recreated the magic of the Thousand-Year Door. Future games tossed out much of what made it so great, from the combat, to the interesting stories, to the unique characters. There was some fun to be had in these sequels, but I always wished for Nintendo to revisit their abandoned formula or at least remake the Thousand-Year Door for modern audiences (the original is incredibly rare, after all). You can imagine my excitement when Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door was announced for the Nintendo Switch in the form of a remake with remastered visuals and music.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door begins with Mario receiving a letter from Princess Peach inviting him to Rogueport. This seaport was built on the ruins of an ancient city that collapsed into the ocean, and a legendary treasure is rumored to be hidden within. Peach wants Mario to join her in searching for this treasure and included a mysterious map with the letter. Once Mario arrives, however, Peach is nowhere to be found. With help from a Goomba named Professor Frankly, it is revealed that the mysterious map leads to the Crystal Stars, which can open the Thousand-Year Door where the legendary treasure may be hiding. However, a mysterious group called the X-Nauts, who may have been involved in Peach’s disappearance, are looking for the Crystal Stars themselves. It is up to Mario to beat the X-Nauts in collecting the Crystal Stars and find Peach.

Your journey to gather the Crystal Stars will have you experiencing stories far more exciting than anything in regular Mario games. You’ll find yourself fighting dragons in fantasy castles, participating in fighting tournaments, or solving mysteries on a train. Each chapter is filled with plenty of humorous moments and memorable characters. These include a handful of unique characters that join you on your adventure as partners, such as Goomba, a well-read Goomba who seems to know everything; and Koops, a cowardly Koopa determined to find courage.

When you encounter an enemy, you’ll engage in a turn-based battle. Your turn always occurs first, with you being able to perform one move each with Mario and one of your partners. Mario can attack by jumping or using a hammer, while each partner has a unique set of attacks. Each attack has its own set of timed button presses required to perform maximum damage. For example, Mario’s jump requires pressing the A button at the right time to stomp an enemy twice, while his hammer attack requires holding the left stick to the left before releasing. These quick-time events help keep the combat engaging. Standard attacks are viable in most situations, but you’ll often need to make use of attacks that consume flower points, this game’s version of magic. For a price, these attacks can hit multiple enemies, pierce defense, or apply status effects. You also have a meter that builds up during combat that can be used for special abilities granted by the Crystal Stars. There are also a few other actions you can make, such as using items or performing tactical actions like foregoing an attack to boost defense.

After your turn has passed, each enemy will either attack Mario or your partner. You can press A as the attack lands to negate one unit of damage or B with super precise timing to counterattack the enemy. Battles take place on a theater stage, which brings its own hazards, such as audience members throwing rocks at you or standees in the background falling on you.

Further expanding on the combat is the badge system. Rather than a conventional equipment system, you instead can equip badges, each of which provides a unique benefit. These range from boosting attack power, allowing you to use multiple items at once, or unlocking new attacks for battle. Each badge has a set weight, limiting the number of badges you can use at once.

The combat never became stale for me, despite fighting through hundreds of battles. This is in part thanks to the great variety of enemies, each with unique attack patterns, weaknesses, and immunities. For example, Koopas flip over and become incapacitated when stomped, while spiked enemies are immune to jumps. The boss fights are also very unique and memorable, and I wish more than just a few of them were able to be rematched.

Another highlight is the gameplay outside of battles, which is much more engaging than many other RPGs. You can use your abilities in the field, such as breaking blocks with your hammer or jumping over gaps. Your moveset will expand throughout the story to include abilities such as turning into a paper airplane to cross chasms or a ground pound that can smash through weak floors. Your partners can even be used in the field, providing you with more abilities.

Between each chapter of the adventure, you get to take a break by playing through short intermissions starring Peach and Bowser. These usually involve puzzles or platforming challenges. They only add up to a small amount of the playtime, but these sections are enjoyable nonetheless.

Arguably the most important aspect of this remake to get right is the visuals. While the original's graphics have aged well enough, its paper look has been greatly outclassed by newer games, which went all in on the paper aesthetic. These featured environments made out of paper and cardboard, along with characters appearing like they were printed on sheets of paper. In this remake, the world now has a much stronger paper look than before with everything looking like it’s part of a crafted project.

The Thousand-Year Door looks better than ever, and I am happy to say that I never experienced any bugs or slowdown during my quest. However, the framerate is locked at 30 FPS, compared to the 60 FPS of the original. This lower framerate didn’t bother me as much as I expected, and I probably wouldn’t have even noticed it if others did not point it out to me, but others may have a greater issue with it.

The music has also undergone a fantastic transformation. The original synthesized soundtrack has been rearranged with real instruments. Songs like Rogueport’s theme can only be described as heavenly. On top of simply remaking the music, plenty of new songs and variations of songs were added. For example, different areas have unique variations of the battle theme. That said, if you happen to prefer the original music, you can obtain a badge that swaps the soundtrack out for the original version.

The most significant changes in this remake are with the visuals and sound, but there are also a number of great quality-of-life additions. There is now a Toad in every town who can teach you battle mechanics and allow you to practice attacks. Revisiting previous areas is less cumbersome than before, as there is a room with pipes leading to any town in the game once its corresponding chapter has been completed, whereas the original only had shortcuts to a handful of towns. At any time, you can press ZL to receive a hint or reminder regarding what you need to do next (something eleven-year-old me would have really appreciated). The L button now brings up a ring that allows you to switch partners on the fly. Finally, obtaining collectibles now unlocks music and pieces of art for a sound test and gallery, respectively.

The controls are mostly the same as the original in this remake and feel great. However, there is one change I really dislike. In the original, you could press a button to scroll back through previous dialogue, but this was now cut, which I missed when accidentally skimming through dialogue too quickly.

Another negative change comes in the form of modifications to the script. Some dialogue has been changed from the original due to apparently being considered offensive. Some examples of removed dialogue include a remark where Bowser calls one of his minions fat and a scene where several Goombas hit on one of your partners. The replacement dialogue often falls flat (pun entirely intended), making those scenes less interesting. Thankfully, most of the script is unchanged, and none of the changes are particularly atrocious, save for an example that I need to discuss on its own later.

Despite being a Mario game, there are actually quite a few moral concerns in this entry. The violence is all very cartoony, with defeated enemies spinning around before falling flat and disappearing. Being an RPG, however, means that there is a lot more of it compared to normal.

Rogueport is a very rundown place, filled with crime. There is a bar present, and beer bottles are littered throughout the streets, but no actual alcohol is present. The town is run by gangs, and you even have to get involved with a fictional version of the Mafia at a few points to progress. This Mafia even runs a casino where you can gamble away your coins.

I was quite surprised at the number of supernatural elements in the Thousand-Year Door. Of course, there’s the standard Mario fare, such as ghosts, wizards, and skeletons in the form as Boos, Magikoopas, and Dry Bones, respectively. However, there are other cases where you will come across ghost Toads, fire spirits, and giant undead enemies. There are many fortune tellers in the game. Most of them will just give you hints, but one needs to be visited frequently to upgrade your partners. Finally, while trying to avoid spoilers as much as possible, an ancient demon becomes increasingly important as the story progresses, with the final battle taking place in an eerie room full of candles.

There are also a handful of sexual concerns, as hard as that may be to believe for a Mario game. Many female characters tend to flirt with Mario, and one partner has a somewhat sexualized design with large breasts. There are also a few weird scenes in the game, including one where Mario walks in on an enemy taking a shower with a curtain blocking the player’s view. In an even weirder scene, one of the intermissions with Peach requires her to drink a potion to turn invisible so she can sneak around. However, her clothes don’t turn invisible, so she walks off-screen to take them off. There is also some romance, include a strange plot point of a computer falling in love with Peach and a sidequest where you can try to set up any of your partners with a male Goomba.

The biggest sexual problem with the Thousand-Year Door involves one of the aforementioned changes in the script. In the Japanese script of the original version, there was a male character who looked like and pretended to be a girl, though other characters never acknowledged him as such. Understanding that something like this has no place in a kid’s game, the English localization team made heavy changes to the script so that the character was actually a girl, with no reference to transgenderism. However, the new English script has made this character a transvestite once again. There are only two or three lines referencing it, such as, “It took me a while to realize I was their sister...not their brother,” but it’s terrible that Nintendo would allow dialogue like this in a Mario game.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is my dream remake of my favorite Mario RPG. It remains incredibly faithful to the original while greatly improving how it looks and sounds. This remake also gives more people an opportunity to play this amazing game, as finding a copy of the original is a treasure hunt in and of itself. However, the moral issues are nothing to brush off. Nintendo’s willingness to make a character a transvestite especially upsets me, and this issue alone would prevent me from allowing a kid to play this at the age I was when I played the original. If you are able to ignore that change and the other moral issues, however, you are in for a journey you will not soon forget.

-Tyler Ferguson