Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars isn’t the only decades-old, beloved role-playing game starring Mario remade for the Nintendo Switch this year. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2002, has also received a visual overhaul. It's the natural choice after Super Mario RPG, since both stand out as the best Mario RPGs ever made. Happily, The Thousand-Year Door still holds up, even if its fresh coat of paint is much lighter than the slathering Super Mario RPG received. It remains enough of a masterpiece to deserve its admittedly steep $59.99 price and earn our Editors' Choice award.
Story and Characters
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Princess Peach is in trouble, so Mario must find a certain number of magical objects that will help save her. As he searches for those items, Mario recruits a handful of new and interesting allies, most of which are located in unique areas. This is the plot of the Super Mario RPG and every Paper Mario game except Origami King (where you only have to find and defeat six bosses, not collect six magic items).
Rogueport is a lively and sordid town with many characters of ill repute, from pickpockets to gangsters. There’s even a gallows in the town's center, one of the darkest images included in a Mario game. It’s all playful, though, even when Mario is doing favors for the town don. In fact, the don and his eloping daughter, both bright and colorful piantas from Super Mario Sunshine, are pretty darn likable.
Mario’s party is a fun little band, as well. They include the goomba scholar Goombella, the meek koopa Koops, and a masked mouse burglar named Ms. Mowz. Some characters are extremely similar in concept to the original Paper Mario's party members, but they’re no less charming.
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Gameplay
If your exposure to Mario RPGs is limited to Super Mario RPG, you must deal with a few gameplay changes here. This title is still a turn-based RPG, but the combat party is limited to Mario and one partner that you can swap for another at the cost of that partner’s move for the turn. Likewise, fights take place on a two-dimensional stage and the positions of Mario, his partner, and his enemies greatly influence who can and will be targeted for attacks.
Badges add deeper strategy and customization to Super Mario RPG's core. You collect badges that offer many benefits, such as enhancing attacks or enabling new combat abilities. However, each badge requires a certain number of Badge Points to equip. Mario has a limited Badge Point pool that you can increase when the plumber levels up instead of increasing his maximum health or the party’s Flower Points pool (the fuel for unleashing special moves).
Even if you focus entirely on building Badge Points at the expense of HP and FP, you won’t be able to equip Mario with every badge you find. Balancing how you construct Mario is a big factor in how fights play out. Don’t stress too much about how you level up Mario, though; you’ll quickly meet a character who lets you reallocate your level upgrades for a few coins.
Outside of combat, you explore Rogueport and the lands hiding the Crystal Stars. There, you'll converse with NPCs, solve puzzles, and be chased by enemies. These locations include a spooky countryside featuring a haunted cathedral and a giant tree populated by a tribe of tiny mouse-slugs. Nearly every location is a cartoon diorama, with characters and walls either flat sheets or folded papercraft. Entering a house peels back the front wall to let you see what’s inside, and characters can be comedically crumpled or flattened. That said, it doesn’t quite lean into the conceit as strongly as Origami King, a title with office supply bosses.
Mario is made of paper, and that plays into the game’s puzzles. As you explore, Mario learns new abilities that let him tackle obstacles. For example, he can turn sideways to wiggle through cracks, roll up to slide through holes, and even fold himself into a paper airplane or boat. His partners have unique skills, too.
Paper Mario isn’t a sprawling, massive RPG like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, but it’s still at least twice as long as Super Mario RPG. It can easily last 16 to 20 hours, and that's without trying to collect everything or complete the 100-floor challenge dungeon. It manages to stay brisk and engaging from start to end, with chapters and dungeons seldom overstaying their welcome.
Graphics
The Super Mario RPG remake was a massive visual upgrade from the original SNES game, converting the primitive prerendered graphics into richly detailed polygons. Thousand-Year Door's doesn’t go nearly as far, because the original title is newer.
As anyone who has descended into the Rogueport-like underworld of emulation can attest, GameCube titles upscale to HD and higher resolutions extremely well. The Paper Mario games also have simple 3D models due to their art style, so there isn’t much space to add more polygons. As a result, Nintendo went over Thousand-Year Door with a relatively light touch. There are sharper textures, better lighting effects, and improved audio (though you can switch to the original GameCube music and sound effects by equipping special badges that cost no BP). Paper Mario looks fantastic on the Switch, with its clean, dynamic graphics.
Verdict: A Top-Tier Mario RPG
20 years after its debut, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door holds up incredibly well, rivaling Super Mario RPG as the pinnacle of the intersection between Mario and role-playing games. A few visual tweaks here and there make the GameCube title look excellent on the Switch, and it's still relentlessly charming. Like Super Mario RPG, it’s a must-play for genre fans. For that, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door earns our Editors’ Choice award.
For more in-depth video game talk, visit PCMag's Pop-Off YouTube channel.
The Nintendo Switch remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a fantastic Mario RPG that's every bit as good now as it was on the GameCube.
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