Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door will make you mad Mario isn’t this weird anymore

polygon.com:

There’s an apocryphal folktale that fans of Mario RPGs are fond of sharing. Somewhere along the line, the internet urban legend goes, someone at Nintendo — Miyamoto himself, maybe — had it out for Paper Mario. As a result, everything fans loved about the series — the RPG mechanics, the fun twists on classic Mario characters, the elaborate character-driven stories — became verboten.

Nintendo can be an opaque company; it is very selective in what it shares and quite zealous in its secrecy, so any suggestion of palace intrigue can take on a life of its own in the fandom’s imagination. If there’s any truth to this tale, it’s mostly inferred from a 2020 interview with Paper Mario series developer Intelligent Systems, in which two things are noted: (1) that former Paper Mario producer Kensuke Tanabe embraced a philosophy from Miyamoto to “challenge yourself to create new gameplay,” and (2) that “since Paper Mario: Sticker Star, it is no longer possible to modify Mario characters or create original characters that touch on the Mario universe.” These mandates, coincidentally, were opposed to the two things the Paper Mario games seemed best at.

The new remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is bound to reopen this wound. Almost immediately hailed upon its debut as the pinnacle of Mario’s journey into RPGs that began with the Nintendo/Squaresoft collaboration Super Mario RPG, the 2004 game was beloved for fine-tuning the Mario RPG experience in a colorful world chock full of strange new characters and goofy variations on the usual assortment of Goombas, Bob-ombs, and Koopas, with a witty story to match.

While nostalgia has papered over (ha) some of The Thousand Year Door’s shaggier aspects — finicky platforming, a pretty slow start, and battles that can drag before you have a suite of fun abilities to deal with them — the remake makes its considerable bright spots shine brighter. It’s largely a faithful 1:1 reconstruction of the original; most meaningful nonvisual