Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door - The Prelude

Disclaimer: These are all my thoughts on The Thousand Year Door prior to the release of the remake. While some of these opinions do hold true, a lot of them have very much changed and I don't exactly agree with everything I've written here now. However, I still want to keep this prelude review up just to establish what my thoughts on TTYD used to be. It's a necessary compliment to my proper review where I end up changing my tune on the game a bit.

Oh boy, this is going to be a behemoth of a review. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is probably the biggest Nintendo release of the first half of 2024. It may be a remake, but it's a remake of a game fans have been wanting back for decades, and a sign of Paper Mario's return to form. However, my thoughts have always been a lot more conflicted. I like The Thousand Year Door, I really do, but I haven't kept it a secret that it's a game I have a lot of problems with. Part of it is admittedly due to expectations. TTYD was one of the last entries I played after years of it being hyped up at the expense of games I had a lot of attachment to, and it didn't live up to the hype. It simply did not resonate with me in the same way that Super did, or TOK did, or even its predecessor did. It's hard for me to feel like TTYD being remade is a return to form when I like several of its successors more than it, and I definitely don't think the collective fandom even deserved such a remake after decades worth of whining about the new games and shitting on people who happened to like them.

However, with the remake finally out, I want to really give the game another chance and take in everything it has to offer. But before I can do that, I need to talk about the original version of The Thousand Year Door, along with what I liked about it and what I didn't.

TTYD is praised for its darker story and how atypical it is for a Mario game. Many of the species and NPCs you encounter are entirely unique to this game specifically, and the game touches on darker themes like death, grief, familial abuse, and even sex to a degree. And yes, that certainly is refreshing, but darkness isn't what makes a story good. TTYD's strength in terms of its narrative is in the individual chapters and situations the characters get into. Solving a murder mystery in a train, fighting in an arena and uncovering a conspiracy within the competition, exploring a town where all the citizens have turned into pigs where Mario's identity gets stolen by a ghost, those are all incredibly cool and memorable arcs that are some of the first things that come to mind when I think of TTYD. I also think the partners tended to land a bit more often than the ones in 64, at least in terms of writing. Goombella is a perfect starting partner and easily one of my favorite characters in the series writing-wise, Koops is basically just an improved Kooper, Ms Mowz is a fun and unique bonus partner, and Vivian is obviously amazing, barring the fact that Nintendo itself seemed confused about her gender identity. I love the 64 party, but for every Bow and Parakarry, there's a Kooper, Watt, or Lakilester.

However, my fundamental problem with this game's story is that the overarching narrative falls short by comparison. The individual arcs are fun, but they feel completely disjointed from each other and don't really add up to anything beyond Mario getting a Crystal Star. While I love the partner's arcs inside the chapters, they still usually feel completely sidelined after the chapter ends. By comparison, Super and Origami King take a more serialized approach where each chapter builds on the previous while still feeling distinct, and I think that approach works much better for an RPG like this. The villains are also pretty weak, partially because there's too many of them and rarely any of them get the proper development they needed. In particular, I never found the X-Nauts interesting at all, they have none of the personality of Bowser and his minions, and Grodus in particular feels pretty paper thin. The Shadow Queen is better in that she's intimidating and has a cool design, but she also has nowhere near enough screentime to feel as developed as, say, Dimentio or Olly. The best villain is Beldam, a cruel and realistic depiction of an abusive sister, but she has her own issues.

I also have a pretty big issue with TTYD's approach towards its female characters. For some reason, damn near every female character in this game has a crush on Mario. It's borderline a harem and it's bad. Even Goombella starts crushing on Mario like crazy and she's a college student, that's just weird. I also already mentioned that the stuff around Vivian's gender was also just an absolute mess in the original game. But the worst treatment of a female character in TTYD has to be Peach. In the first game, Peach gets these intermissions where she sneaks around Bowser's castle and plots out escape routes, but in TTYD, her intermissions mostly consist of her standing around while in captivity while TEC ogles her the entire time. Not only does she have zero agency this time, but her entire role kinda just feels like being a plot device for TEC's creepy arc about learning to love. But the worst thing about TTYD's story is the awful ending. Not the final boss, that's great, the epilogue where every antagonist is revealed to have been redeemed and every seemingly dead character is revealed to have been alive the entire time. It feels cheap at best (TEC being alive somehow?) and problematic at worst (Vivian immediately forgiving her abusive sisters who did nothing to deserve it). Say what you will about the modern games, but at least they have the guts to kill off their characters. I admire TTYD for its attempts at tackling darker story material and themes, and it works in some cases like Bobbery's backstory and Mario's culture shock in Rogueport, but the writers fumble the ball almost as often.

Geez, that was a lot. Thankfully, I have less to say about TTYD's gameplay because that's where most of my praise is. The Thousand Year Door expands and improves on the original in a lot of ways. The addition of paper curses gives the player more ways to navigate the overworld, partners now have their own health bars, Mario can do a more effective superguard with the right timing, and the pause menu now contains a variety of bestiaries chronicling your tattles, badges, and recipes which vastly bolsters the 100% campaign. The towns are more fleshed-out and unique, with Rogueport in particular being one of my favorite hub worlds in all of gaming for how densely-packed with detail it is. Frankly, Rogueport is so well-designed, it makes the rest of the game feel worse by comparison. The dungeons are also pretty great, none of them are massive steps up over the first game's, but they are all incredibly fun and varied. And I already mentioned how fun the setpieces in this game are, especially the Glitz Pit and Excess Express. When it's firing on all cylinders, TTYD is an absolute blast of a game that's packed with variety.

However, for every step forward TTYD takes, it also takes a step back from 64. Mario's overworld traversal may be more fleshed out, but the removal of the spin dash leaves it feeling more sluggish. The battle system does have more going on, but it also introduces frustrating RNG stage hazards that grow more frequent as the game progresses. The towns, dungeons, and setpieces are fantastic, but the actual world design is often straight, linear, and lacking in variety. PM64 had branching paths, exploration-focused nonlinear areas like in Dry Dry Desert or Jade Jungle, and platforming challenges in equal measure. Most of TTYD's overworld consists of straight paths with minimal elevation and little to interact with beyond enemies and the occasional Star Piece hidden under the floor. And of course, I can't be remiss without mentioning the abundance of backtracking in TTYD that the original game just didn't have. Most chapters will have you walking back and forth across the same few screens at least once, some times for completely arbitrary reasons. Like yeah, sure, going all the way back to the start of the Boggly Woods to retrieve Madame Flurrie's necklace is totally doesn't feel like blatant padding, no way. At its most infamous, you get Chapter 4 which has you going back-and-forth across Twilight Town three separate times, and Chapter 7 which has you painstakingly searching the entire world map to find a Bob-Omb named General White who it turns out was in the original spot the whole time. These are serious issues that kill the pacing of TTYD making it far less replayable than its predecessor for me.

I don't have quite as much to say on the presentation, though, I think it's pretty great. The original TTYD is incredibly clean and smooth, even running at a consistent 60fps. I will say I'm not quite as huge on the limited puppet rigging that's used for the characters compared to the more expressive sprites of 64 and the modern games, but it's a tiny nitpick and I otherwise do really like this game's look and overall style. The music is also pretty unambiguously great. I've always had a soft-spot of TTYD's more techno soundtrack and when it works, it really works. Despite my incessant praise towards the music of The Origami King, it's that quirky techno that TTYD and Super used that really feels the most distinctly Paper Mario. I can admit that some tracks, particularly the boss themes, can feel a tad interchangeable since so much of the soundtrack uses the same instruments, but for the most part, TTYD's soundtrack is the one aspect of the game that I have pretty much zero qualms with. It's just plain fantastic, my third favorite OST in the series behind Super and TOK.

So that's my take on the original Thousand Year Door. It's a far more inconsistent game than its predecessor with higher highs and lower lows. Gameplay improvements and detractions in equal measure, a flawed story I'm incredibly conflicted on, and a much larger scope in terms of scale and content, for better or for worse. I don't dislike the game, not in the slightest, but it's a game where every time I start to really enjoy it, I get hit by one of those moments. It's a good game, maybe even great, but it feels like it has too much holding it back from being amazing.

4/5 Stars

I just got the remake today. I will be playing through it in its entirety and going over every single bit of game design, writing, and presentation, along with all the major changes it made. Will it improve upon my issues with the original game? Will I grow to like it more? And will I come to see what everyone else sees in it? Well, we'll see in a few weeks...