I’m a newbie to the Paper Mario series. A noob, if you will. I’ve played plenty of other games in the series, whether that involved venturing through the stars in my main series favourite Super Mario Galaxy, yeeting friends and foes off the stage in New Super Mario Bros or serving a fresh can of whoop ass to anyone who dared enter my dojo in Mario Kart Wii.
So Thousand Year Door was a fresh experience, visually and narratively. Well, not so much narratively, as in the plot still follows the basic ‘oh no Princess Peach gets kidnapped again go save her Mario’ kind of shtick, but it still does a few different interesting things. Like a kind of 2001: Space Odyssey relationship between Peach and an AI computer, but less insidious and a bit more romantic. So I guess still a bit insidious for a children’s game? Maybe. Anyway, there’s a darker plotline involving this duck-like creature murdering fighters and absorbing their power, but it’s done in a kind of child-friendly format (‘dead’ fighters are just flattened into the floor), so that’s cool. But the essential plot revolves around Mario trying to get seven stars to save the princess as well as the world. Standard stuff.
As our favourite red-hatted plumber advances on his journey, he acquires a wide range of new skills as well as comrades. TYD has a visual style I’m not used to, but it’s still a load of fun to see Mario transform into a paper plane or a paper boat to solve puzzles. The remake of Super Mario RPG was the last Mario game I played that used turn-based combat, but that mechanic feels particularly worthwhile here in terms of skill development. While you could only get to a maximum of Level 30, you can go up to Level 99 on this one. Did I do that? No, because it’s difficult to gain experience fast. But I got to a decent level and beat all the bad guys. And catalogued them. Or, you know, ‘tattled’ on them. Or that’s what it’s called in the game. You basically collect info on them. Like a pokedex. Or the catalogue in Animal Crossing. Y’know, that kind of thing.
Speaking of which, there are plenty of things to do besides completing the main storyline, so that adds a lot of content. And there’s plenty of light comedy too, whether it’s Mario and his partners falling asleep while listening to Luigi’s rambling stories or the game’s many eccentric characters. It also seems like a faithful adaptation of the Gamecube original, even if the price is a bit steep. This is Nintendo, after all, but still. But if you’re willing to take that leap, then you’re in for a colourful, creative, papery surprise.