Rediscovering a Classic: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Remake Review
It feels like a thousand years have passed since Princess Peach first summoned Mario to the seedy city of Rogueport to hunt for the legendary treasure that sleeps beneath the town. In reality, it’s only been 20 since Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door graced the GameCube, but it seems longer because the Paper Mario series has abandoned its traditional turn-based RPG battles ever since. The Thousand-Year Door rapidly faded into legend, kept alive by the spoken word of longtime Nintendo fans who clung onto hope that it would one day open again.
Finally, that patience has paid off, as the Nintendo Switch remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is the definitive version of this classic adventure. It unquestionably justifies why the original is so treasured, pairing a faithful recreation of one of Mario’s most iconic quests with a set of welcome additions and modern improvements that keep it feeling fresh off the printing press even two decades later. Just as Princess Peach tells Mario he MUST come to Rogueport, I’m telling you that you MUST play The Thousand-Year Door.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Remake Screenshots
From its opening moments to the end credits, it’s still impressive how distinct this RPG feels from any other game in the wide Mario universe. The surprisingly gritty world of Rogueport and its surrounding towns, a lovable cast of offbeat partners Mario recruits along the way, and an Indiana Jones-style race between Mario and the scheming X-Nauts to unlock the secret behind the sleeping door give this journey an unforgettable identity that has passed the test of time with flying colors.
It helps that the Switch remake is absolutely gorgeous, with lovingly redone character models and dazzling environments that fully commit to the original’s papery, storybook aesthetic. It’s always a joy to look at, and the lighting in darker environments like Hooktail’s Castle, Boggly Woods, and Twilight Town is stunning. It maintains 30 frames per second very consistently, as I only noticed slight framerate dips in moments where the screen is flooded with hundreds of characters at once, but that doesn’t happen often so it never really bothered me. The revamped soundtrack is similarly amazing, with outstanding updated versions of the original tunes and new battle theme arrangements specific to each location.
The exciting premise and artistic world are backed up by a sharp, laugh-out-loud script that’s consistently as funny and charming today as it was in 2004. The Thousand-Year Door wastes no time setting its comedic, irreverent tone: Just minutes after Mario sets foot in Rogueport, he’s witness to the town’s high crime rate as members of the Pianta Syndicate get in a brawl with their rival Robbo Thieves in the background. Almost every character does or says something hilarious that also serves the excellent worldbuilding, like the evil, cackling spirits who are convinced they’re cursing Mario for all eternity, when they’re actually blessing him with a useful upgrade. Side characters like those from the Pianta Syndicate and Robbo Thieves constantly intertwine with Mario’s journey, and some folks even email life updates to his Game Boy Advance SP-like phone with adorable photos of themselves attached. How thoughtful!
It’s Dangerous to Go Alone… Take Partners!
Speaking of friends, Mario’s party of seven partners is one of The Thousand-Year Door’s greatest strengths. Each character you recruit has a well-defined design and personality: Koops is an insecure, shy Koopa who musters up the courage to travel with Mario to avenge his father, while Goombella is a smart, sassy student at the University of Goom who’s interested in archaeology. Every chapter provides some backstory for the new companion it introduces that’s generally very sweet and oftentimes strikingly mature and emotionally resonant, which highlights how the series hasn’t managed to match their quality since.
- When exploring, each partner helps out in a unique way: You can kick Koops’ shell to hit far-off switches, while Yoshi significantly increases your speed and can flutter across gaps. The remake’s new Partner Ring lets you change characters on the fly in the overworld, making some late-game puzzles that require lots of partner switching much snappier. And, there’s a robust new hint system you can access at any time where Goombella will tell you exactly what to do next. Some quests are a little bit obtuse at times, like when it’s unclear who exactly you need to talk with to advance the story, so that was a nice fallback that ensured I never got stuck.
There and Back Again
The Thousand-Year Door’s one major flaw I wish this remake had done more to fix is the main quest’s overreliance on backtracking. Most areas have two major points of interest separated by several linear pathways, and the campaign frequently forces you to travel back and forth between them multiple times over the course of a chapter.
Adventures on the pirate island of Keelhaul Key and in the spooky Twilight Town are especially bad about this. These chapters make Mario travel all the way to the edge of an area, realize he doesn’t have the means to progress further, walk back to the town he started in to get something, then return, and so on. It’s about as much fun as realizing you forgot your wallet as you pull into the movie theater parking lot. The new Partner Ring means your trusty Yoshi steed is more accessible than ever, so at least it’s quicker to run back and forth than it was on GameCube, but that’s a half measure when it comes to fixing the level design, which is noticeably outdated in a remake that otherwise feels pretty modern.
To its credit, Intelligent Systems made several changes to at least somewhat address the backtracking problem without fundamentally changing the original’s design. In Keelhaul Key, a helpful new spring shortcut means you only have to do an annoying section of precise Yoshi platforming once, rather than every time the chapter asks you to go back and forth across its screens. So they removed the painful part, but not the actual trek.
It’s not as if major changes were unthinkable, because The Thousand-Year Door has some big ones elsewhere, the best of which is its revamped Warp Pipe Room. This fast-travel hub opens up underneath Rogueport a few chapters in, and it’s a total game changer for quests that make you revisit previous locations. In the original, the only way to get to the Glitz Pit was to ride the blimp all the way on the far side of Rogueport. Now, there’s a pipe that zips you straight there, and it’s conveniently labeled in a room filled with pipes that lead back to the central locations from every chapter. Similarly, longtime fans will remember that Chapter 7 contains a particularly ridiculous quest that requires revisiting every major town in the world, but with the help of the new-and-improved Warp Pipe Room I was done with this mission in less than 10 minutes. It wasn’t a particularly stellar 10 minutes in terms of actual entertainment, but it was a lot less tedious than what I’d been braced for.