Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (2024 Remake)

In 2021, I was over the moon with Moonsprout Games’ (pun not intended) Bug Fables on Switch: finally a proper Paper Mario-esque fan-game that came close to the original. Three years later, Nintendo surprised us all by dropping the Thousand-Year Door remake announcement in a recent Nintendo Direct. Is this really happening? And the release date wasn’t that far off either! Yes, it really happened, and I’m very glad to say/write that it’s not just a quick cash grab riding on the nostalgia wave either. If you’ve never experienced a Paper Mario game before, you’re in for a treat. This is pretty much required gaming material—it’s in my Top 25 Games of All Time list for a reason.

This is technically speaking Paper Mario 2; the first one was released on the Nintendo 64 and is available to play in the Nintendo Online subscription service, yet comes with rough edges that were smoothened out in the 2004 GameCube release twenty years ago. Twenty years ago! I remember picking up this game in our local game shop and then driving to my girlfriend’s high school with my grandfather’s car to pick her up. I feel old. I also remember paying €60 for it, and games still cost that much, yet inflation has gone up more than tenfold, so something is not right here.

Why was this game so highly regarded back in the day? After booting up the remake and playing for a few hours, you’ll immediately get why: because of the humour. This is (mute, thank god) Mario in a universe where Bowser is the loser who’s always too late to do his thing, where in the main city hub called Rogueport people get mugged and beaten up by the mafia frequently—including our protagonist, where Luigi also has heroic adventures but the tales that come with them send my companions right at sleep, and where Mario gets kissed on occasion, and not by princess Peach.

Mario himself in this paper dimension doesn’t feel as a traditional Italian plumber who’s only job is to jump on Goomba’s and make it to the end of the stage. Yes, princess Peach has been captured, yet again, but the universe in which the adventure takes place feels very atypical of Mario: a more mature and dark place, especially compared to the atmosphere in most other 2D Mario games.

The fact that this is an RPG is just the cherry on top. The RPG mechanics are very lightweight: you do earn XP in the form of star points that’ll trigger a level-up once the counter reaches a hundred, and you do get to increase either your max health points (HP), flower points (FP) that act as mana, or badge points (BP). The last one is the most interesting and can be seen as slotting in special skills that turn Mario into another “class”, although there’s no such thing in Thousand-Year Door.

For instance, Mario attacks by either jumping on enemies or by using his hammer. There are badges that enable multi-jumps or more powerful jump attacks, and there are badges that set your hammer on fire or have it completely slam through the enemy’s defences. Each badge costs an amount of points to wear, just like in Hollow Knight—it’s up to you how to “build” Mario. You can ignore jumps and create a super-powerful hammerdin (are we playing Diablo II or Paper Mario here?), or you can mix-and-match to be able to handle all situations. You shouldn’t jump on spiked enemies though—but guess what, there’s a badge to fix that problem.

And even if you’re not suitably equipped to handle a certain situation, your companions might be: throughout the game, Mario will accumulate a devote group of followers that will help in and out battle. Each companion has a unique skill that “unlocks” blocked pathways: Koops can reach far places to retrieve keys, Yoshi can float in the air with Mario on his back, Admiral Bobbery can blow up cracked walls, and so forth. It’s not a Metroidvania but its gradually enhanced move-set might be.

Speaking of which, the biggest annoyance of The Thousand-Year Door is probably the amount of backtracking you have to do for certain mandatory quests in order for the story to progress. The remake did partially soften the blow by adding a few shortcut pipes here and there which was a welcome addition: now it’s bearable enough.

So what exactly is new in this Switch remake? There’s no proud “HD” badge embedded in the cover art giving the illusion that the answer to that question is nothing much, but that’s just an illusion. Let’s start with the visuals: the game is gorgeous. Everything looks stunning, pristine, and above all: extremely sharp. This was a bit of a problem in the 2004 GameCube version: yes, it had 60 FPS and this one “only” has 30, but it was blurry has heck compared to this! And no, I don’t feel a difference in smoothness because of the frame-rate drop. An RPG doesn’t really need that anyway, I think?

The menu has also been reworked, the fonts again look very sharp, and some features are made more accessible, such as quickly swapping in and out companions with a simple button press instead of fiddling in the menu. This saved me an hour of total gameplay as once you unlock Yoshi you can ride him to run through scenes instead of walk, but you’ll need to switch often out of battle to complete puzzles and in battle to employ the right skills. It looks and it feels like a 2024 game even though it’s 20 years old.

But Nintendo wouldn’t be Nintendo without rising above even those expectations. The soundtrack received a giant overhaul as well—so giant that we’re talking about an entire new one. In towns, as soon as you enter an inn where you can rest and recover HP at a fixed price, the music becomes muffled and and suddenly hints of soothing jazz are intertwined with the main theme. This reminded me of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge’s iMUSE that helped match the music with the action in the screen by seamlessly transitioning between scenes.

In the GameCube version, the battle music was a standard fanfare tune you got tired of hearing over and over again. In the 2024 Switch remake, the battle music has hints of the main theme that’s unique for each chapter. For instance, when battling on Keelhaul Key, a tropical island, the music will reflect that, and when killing it around Twilight Town, the musical spookiness factor will increase.

They didn’t need to go that far, but they did. I would have been very happy playing a straight port for all I care. There’s even a badge that lets you revert the music to the GameCube version which is nice to fool around with to hear the differences. If you don’t believe me, fine, here’s an OST comparison YouTube video, feel free to zoom around The difference is remarkable, even for the title screen. The default battle theme is at minute 30:37.

The Thousand-Year Door is still amazing, yet there is something that bothered me now and didn’t back in 2004. The game is relatively simple: the puzzles hardly provide a challenge, even in the last portions of the game. The same is true for the battles if you know how to execute stylish moves and equip the right badges. Even most of the end-game fights against regular enemies were done after two actions. Of course, I was very familiar with the game, but still.

Also, don’t expect intricate mechanics, Final Fantasy Tactics-style. It’s barely an RPG, but that’s also a part of the charm of the Paper Mario games. This play-through still took me about thirty hours, and I skimped on most side-quests (which are boring fetch-quests and mostly net useless coins). My original GameCube save clocks in at forty-one hours and level 27: it’s clear that I has too much time on my hands during university. I’m glad that I got this done, to be honest: the end tends to drag on and I have other games to play. Ploughing through thirty hours nowadays takes me a month, but that’s hardly the game’s fault.

This is the best Mario RPG ever created. If you consider yourself a Mario fan, a GameCube fan, an RPG fan, or a fan of humour in games, you should play this.