Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remake's new Toad could mean an end to the controversial "Mario mandate"

gamesradar.com:

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is getting a remake, and a tiny detail in the new trailer has fans hopeful that we might finally be seeing the end of what's been called the "Mario mandate."

As noted by Mario trivia account Supper Mario Broth on Twitter, the Nintendo Direct trailer for the remake of The Thousand-Year Door features what appears to be a brand-new Toad in one area. This Toad is dressed a little differently from his brethren, with a purple stitched jacket and some sort of additional adornment on his head.

The fact that the remake might be getting a bit of fully new content - however minor - is notable enough on its own, but what's even more interesting is that this is one of the vanishingly few times in the past decade that Nintendo has designed a Toad that doesn't look exactly like every single other Toad in the Mario series.

Part of the charm of both the original Paper Mario and The Thousand-Year Door is that they imagined little societies for all the major races in the Mario universe. You'd run across generic Goombas as enemies, sure, but you'd also meet individual Goomba characters with their own looks and personalities. Similarly, you'd meet Toads who wore different clothes based on their jobs or where they lived, adding a bit of life to the world.

These sort of unique designs for familiar Mario characters popped up here and there across the franchise - not just the RPGs - in the mid-'00s, but for whatever reason, they abruptly stopped afterwards. Even in Paper Mario sequels like Sticker Star and The Origami King, almost every Toad looks like the same generic Mushroom Retainer we all know, and the same goes for many other characters in those games, too.

In a 2020 interview with VGC, The Origami King