Retro Review – Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
Written by Ben Vollmer
When we’re first introduced to Paper Mario, the most notable difference is the shift from platforming to turn-based combat. Mario has never moved at Sonic speeds, but he’s always been fast. In fact, the mainline Mario games are so well renowned for their pacing that just about every every linear game has adopted its level-by-level design since its inception. So imagine that when I first picked up Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, that wasn’t even the game’s biggest deviation from the franchise. Instead, The Thousand Year Door manages to captivate through its narrative, characters and abundance of twists and turns.
By the time Mario arrives in Rogueport, the maligned hub area in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, the game as already established that things aren’t going to happen as expected. This isn’t your normal Mario game, and Paper Mario will let you know that from the moment an angry Toad scolds our red-suited protagonist for stepping on her eye contact. This isn’t the happy-go-lucky world where it’s Mario plus the world, this is Paper Mario, where Mario is just about the only amiable soul around.
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is a game that entrenches itself in the variety of its characters. Whether it be a mustached mob boss or a Stalin-like bob-omb, it’s hard to forget any of the (many) NPCs you’ll come across in your journey. They all have varying goals and objectives, some dumb and trite, others noble and affable. On top of that, every character in the game has a distinguished look and speech pattern. In large part, this is a result of The Thousand Year Door not catering to the franchise’s roots of good versus evil. Here, every character has depth and nuance. Even when their motives don’t make a lick of sense, the characters remain engaging and charming.
This bodes we’ll for the game, because it’s awfully story-centric. Not just for a Mario game, either. You’re set off on a quest to find seven crystal stars in order to open “The Thousand Year Door”, which props itself up as a prototypical Mario plot — with yet another Peach kidnapping, to boot. As mentioned, this gets put to an end awfully early. As soon as you get to Rogueport, you’re met with scoundrels, scams and malice. The game quickly hooks you up with a companion, Goombella, who serve’s as Mario’s encyclopedia on all things in the game. It’s a nice idea, especially when you consider how much is going on in Rogueport and the surrounding areas in the game.
Each hunt for the next crystal star leads Mario to a new area — most of which feel relatively lifeless in comparison to Rogueport. At the very least, each of the seven areas manages to feel distinct and none of them rely upon the tropes that Nintendo has built its former land masses upon, with fire, ice and water areas being nonexistent. Each area has a central location with a shop, hotel and various NPC’s who usually provide some helpful information. If there’s one thing that Thousand Year Door suffers from, it’s how repetitious it can be its exposition. If you didn’t hear the latest buzz from one NPC, you’ll hear it from about a dozen others. This can be helpful if you’re ever lost, but the game is so linear that it’s hard to disorient yourself.
Because the game is almost entirely two-dimensional, save a little lateral movement here 
and there, you’re really only moving left or right. With enemies well spaced every frame or so, everything has a natural progression to it. Unfortunately, the game often asks you to repeat this progression – sometimes just once, but other times twice, three times or even four. The level design is small and compounded, which makes it really easy not to get lost in, but it sacrifices a lot discovery in the progress. Instead of having Mario and company transverse new areas across each level, you’ll find yourself walking back and forth over and over again. Sometimes this means just wasted time getting back to the original point, other times it means fighting the same enemies over again. The unnecessary backtracking could have been easily avoided with some choice shortcuts (which the game uses to its advantage only a handful of times) or some cuts, as the game already sits at a lengthy 50 hours or so.
Unfortunately, much of this time comes at the hands of relentlessly dull exposition. At the end of each chapter, you’re put in control of Peach – who, again, has been kidnapped and is now imprisoned by the tacky X-Nauts. Most bizarre is Peach’s relationship with an autonomous computer by the name of TEC. TEC helps Peach send out telegraphed hints as to where Mario needs to go next, but at a cost. Often times, this cost is a series of weird developments, like the computer asking Peach to dance with it. Not only does it make incredibly little sense, but it encroaches distasteful territory. At best, it serves as an allegory for work-place harassment and an abuse of power. At worst, it’s Nintendo treating the already agent-less Peach with less care than ever before.
Luckily, you have much more fleshed out companions the rest of the way. With just about each level, Mario gains a companion that can be used in combat or as a useful partner in traveling the terrain. There are bits of platforming scattered through the game, a much of it requires the use of one of the six (seven, if you include an optional partner) companions. In terms of gameplay variety, it provides just enough to keep us entertained through some of the slower moments of the game. It doesn’t match the game’s core combat mechanics, which are fantastic, but it’s a nice touch all the same. It’s worth noting that I had a bit of a delay in the jumping animation (just an extra couple of milliseconds) that resulted in a handful of falls.
The game’s combat isn’t overly complex, but that doesn’t stop it from being endlessly engaging. It’s not too dissimilar from some more modern turn-based combat, from the likes of South Park: Stick of Truth or the elegant Child of Light, making it easy enough for anyone foreign to the genre to pick up. At its core, Mario has two attacks: jumping or swinging with a hammer. To match this, each companion has their own set of moves, whether it be Goombella’s hop (very similar to Mario’s jump) or Koops’ shell toss. These attacks are a little more limited to the kinds of enemies they can damage, providing an additional layer of strategy. This can be a little difficult to manage, especially when some battles have enemies of varying types.
Beyond the basic attacks, Mario has the ability to use items, star power and special badge attacks. The items are pretty standard, as they include healing mushrooms or slightly boosted attacks — like a lightning strike that damages all surrounding enemies. Most of the damage output items become useless once Mario’s pool of badge attacks grows. Similar to the original Paper Mario, Mario has a finite number of badge slots, so you often have to choose between the most powerful of the bunch. Some are attribute bumps, like an additional attack point per move, while others are unique attacks, like a move that allows Mario to fling his hammer at flying enemies.
The star-powered moves are the most intriguing. Mario gains a new one with each crystal star, and they all add an additional threat to the enemy. For instance, “Sweet Treat” allows for Mario to fling star dust at falling health and FP (a limited stamina source that is required for special attacks). If you time the chucks well enough, Mario can recover a large portion of both his health and your companion’s. The twist here is that star power relies entirely upon an ever-growing audience that watches the battle as if it were a theater act. Please the crowd and star power grows a little quicker, making these moves available at a faster rate.
This combat is used in expert fashion throughout the game, but there’s no better instance of how tremendously The Thousand Year Door blends all of its mechanics together than in the mid-game level, Glitzville. Unlike the other levels in the game, Glitzville manages to do away with much of the backtracking that bogs down the pacing of the game. Instead, Mario and crew are placed on a floating island that houses a massive battle arena called “Glitz Pit”. In a nearly self-contained story, Mario is tasked with battling his way to the top against the arena’s most intimidating foes. It’s a level that really highlights everything that is great about the combat system, including the various companions that you’ll need to utilize through your twenty plus battles. All the while, a pulpy noire is taking place and is wrapped up neatly at the end of the chapter. Glitzville’s lively atmosphere makes the game feel so alive, almost to the point where it could have stood alone as its own title.
Perhaps the best thing about Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is how unpredictable it is. Only a franchise like Mario has the context to do something like this, but all of the twists and turns that the game takes make for an unforeseen experience. It begins when the story introduces the dozens of antagonistic characters in Rogueport and doesn’t let up until after the game is over. Everything you’ve come to expect about a Mario game is flipped on its backside, mechanically and narratively.
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, much like The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, carves itself into the echelon of games that change the formula to craft something much more powerful and unique. Through its finely tuned combat mechanics to its screwball storytelling, The Thousand Year Door is an experience that constantly overshadows its own flaws.
