Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Hands-On Impressions – Recycled Materials

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Nintendo and its fans usually get a long pretty well, with the Paper Mario franchise being an unusual bone of contention. For many years Nintendo has stubbornly attempted to dial down the quirky stories, unique characters, and RPG elements that defined early entries in the series, much to the chagrin of a particular cadre of fans. As perhaps the last true RPG in the series, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has taken on a certain symbolic importance to those spurned fans even though it was never a particularly big hit, selling fewer than 2 million copies on Gamecube.

After decades of divisiveness, most had come to expect Nintendo would stick to their anti-RPG guns forever, so it came as a bit of a shock when they announced a full HD Switch remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door last year. That made some long-suffering folks very happy, but is the game still a cut above in 2024? I’ve had the opportunity to go hands-on with the new version of Paper Mario TTYD and can comment on roughly the first third of the game (up until the end of Chapter 3). Hop on down for my initial impressions...

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While I'll admit don’t have an encyclopedic memory of every line in the original version of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the writing in the remake seems to be largely unchanged, down to NPCs making now-very-dated references to hot new games like Fire Emblem on the GBA. That said, the dragon Hooktail does retain her dislike of frogs (rather than crickets) from the original Japanese version of the game now, so perhaps some tweaks have been made to certain aspects of the translation.

As before, Princess Peach has decided to take off on a holiday, but gets sidetracked in the sketchy town of Rogueport. There she’s given a map which points to the Thousand-Year Door beneath the town that is said to contain a powerful and ominous “treasure.” Peach invites Mario to dig into this