Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door | Kevin Knezevic, Associate Editor
Mario may be a platforming icon, but he’s also starred in some fantastic RPGs over the years, and the pinnacle of his role-playing exploits remains Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Released on the GameCube back in 2004, The Thousand-Year Door was a charming, light-hearted adventure that featured some of the most endearing characters to ever appear in the Mario series, and it’s long overdue for a re-release.
Like the first Paper Mario game for the Nintendo 64, TTYD was a unique hybrid of a platformer with an RPG, mixing light platforming elements with turn-based battles against some of the franchise’s most common enemies. While the fundamentals of the battle system remained unchanged, developer Intelligent Systems embellished it with some clever touches. This time, each battle unfolded in front of an audience. If you timed your attacks well, the audience would throw you helpful items and fill your star meter, which in turn allowed you to pull off special moves. Conversely, if you whiffed your timing often enough, the audience would pelt you, making every encounter fun.
But what solidified TTYD as an instant classic was its hilarious story. The plot whisked Mario through a variety of outlandish scenarios, from a WWE-like fighting promotion (where he was given the ring name “The Great Gonzales” because ‘Mario’ wasn’t marketable enough) to a twilit town whose residents would transform into pigs every time the bell tolled. After TTYD, the Paper Mario series would head in a more platform-oriented direction, shedding many of the elements that made the first two entries so beloved. Whatever you think of the more recent games, there’s no denying the series has yet to match the heights of The Thousand-Year Door, and it would be wonderful to be able to replay it again on Switch.
