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 additions are quality-of-life features meant to keep things moving. Multiple new hint systems make the game’s more byzantine puzzles and obscured objectives easier to parse (if desired), switching out party members is snappier, and the script gets some minor touch-ups.
Mostly, The Thousand Year Door will likely bum you out about modern Mario games, and how they seem like they’ll never again be this strange. While subsequent Paper Mario games (and its now-defunct sister series, Mario & Luigi) would display comparable wit and charm, they would also feel hamstrung in retrospect, in complying with the aforementioned narrative limitations and Nintendo’s stated desire to largely have each new franchise entry be mechanically distinct. Paper Mario: The Origami King, for example, isn’t a bad game; it’s just the clearest example of a Paper Mario that would immediately be improved were it free to more fully remake Mario’s world in its image, much like The Thousand-Year Door did.
Because even with its 20-year-old quirks, The Thousand-Year Door dazzles with its large cast of oddballs, from the gossip-hound Goombella to the perpetually nervous Koops and the way-too-horny Madame Flurrie. (And she is far from the only one. Every lady in this game wants to jump Mario’s bones.) It’s got goofy new villains, the X-Nauts, that offend the sensibilities of classic villains (Bowser and his minions). It is a game where you want to talk to everyone to see if they have something funny to say — you could meet the Koopa who’s hooked on Fire Emblem, or learn just how much no one cares what Luigi is up to, even if he’s saving a whole other kingdom. In short, it uses its deviations from Mario canon to make the vanilla Mario cast shine that much brighter.
Of course, Mario is not in trouble currently. Far from it — he might be more popular than he’s ever been, with a top-grossing movie in the books, a theme park, and a regular cadence of critically acclaimed games across genres. Mario and his world are some of Nintendo’s most elastic creations, somehow making just as much sense behind the wheel of a go-kart or in a board game as they do in a 3D adventure. The embittered tenor of Paper Mario fans gets at something important, though: While there is plenty of fun to be had with Mario in 2024, none of it feels daring.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is one of the last times that Mario didn’t feel like a carefully managed pop star, never allowed to appear even remotely unlikable. In The Thousand-Year Door, however, he can be a little prick, should you so choose, telling people to “beat it, loser!” as if a little paper mustachioed man was capable of intimidating anyone. The fact that this game is returning on its 20th anniversary, hot off the heels of a remake of the similarly idiosyncratic and beloved Super Mario RPG, hearkens back to a time when a big Mario game could be for a specific kind of person, and not necessarily for everyone.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door will be released May 23 on Nintendo Switch. The game was played on Nintendo Switch using a pre-release download code provided by Nintendo. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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