I’d say that Nintendo surprised just about everyone when it announced a remake for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door last year. I mean, the company had spent the better part of 15 years trying to pretend that it wasn’t fans’ most beloved entry in the series and insisted on taking said series further and further from the TTYD model. Yet, here we are. The remake is out, and it’s absolutely fantastic. Honestly, I didn’t think Nintendo cared enough to put in this kind of effort, but here we are.

Well, perhaps I shouldn’t say Nintendo, because it was the original game’s developer, Intelligent Systems, that was responsible for the remake too, and I think it kind of shows in how this was handled. This new version of the game, for the most part, feels like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door as it was meant to be.

Things that were missing in the original are present here. Mechanics that were hidden before are tutorialized now, and other aspects like the soundtrack have been greatly expanded! In particular, I’ve been loving the battle themes and how they change based on location. It makes battling feel a lot less monotonous as your playtime climbs. The world is much more clearly made out of paper and cardboard, but not to the utterly

obnoxious degree seen in Paper Mario: Color Splash or Paper Mario: The Origami King. The whole world doesn’t exist to be one giant joke (a very obvious and annoying one at that), but rather it is, rightfully, as it was before: a normal world that just happens to be crafted out of paper.

This is carried through by characters almost never referencing paper and, yeah, having NPCs besides Toads. Seriously, why have the past few games had nothing but Toads in them???

I also love having a partner quick-select wheel just a single button-press away and finally having a proper understanding of superguarding. Speaking of, isn’t it crazy that two very important combat mechanics (stylish moves and super guards) straight up NEVER got mentioned in the original? You had to either have the official strategy guide to tell you about them or just stumble across them by accident! Isn’t that nuts??

Well, now they get proper attention and the timing has even been eased a bit to make them more usable. Like, I’m pretty sure you only had a 1 frame window to hit a superguard before, but now it’s more like 5 frames. It might not sound like a lot, but it really does make the mechanic much more usable. Did the game need it? No. TTYD was never exactly difficult, but hitting superguards on enemies is fun, so yeah.

You know what else is fun? Roiding up Mario’s attack to 8-10 damage per attack. It used to be that only the “Danger Mario” build could do this, but now all you have to do is equip a Power Plus badge and use the Power Lift special move. You can get a +4 buff from it pretty consistently, which render boss fights downright trivial. These guys will learn not to mess with Mario by the time you’re through with them; that’s for sure!

There are TWO new secret bosses in the game that won’t just get pushed over by this though, so there is still some challenge here for those who want it. Other than that, it’s nice to see so many things added to reduce backtracking. No more relying on the blimp to to go to Glitzville. No more having to run back and forth through the woods to get to Creepy Steeple, and no more having to do annoying platforming sections over and over again when revisiting certain locations. It’s awesome!

My one hang-up, and it is nonetheless a minor one, are some of the changes and additions to dialog and other things. Like, why does Hooktail now have a problem with frogs instead of crickets? I don’t necessarily mind, but why bother changing it? Also, why are the Shadow Sirens now just “The Three Shadows”? It sounds so much more boring and

generic! Why also bother adding extra dialog to influence Vivian’s character? It stands out like a sore thumb since none of the other dialog around her has changed. Also, why am I suddenly drowning in coins? Everything costs the same as it always did, but now I’m getting two to three times more coins per battle PLUS an extra hundred coins at the end of each chapter.

Like, getting money wasn’t a huge problem before, but getting a huge cash windfall really only happened once, and only if you talked to the right character at the right time, so it was really cool and fun when it happened. Now though, now it’s just more coins. It’s just very weird.

These minor gripes aside, the Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remake is pretty much the definitive version of the game now. Seriously, it’s better in almost every way. If you’ve never played the original or just haven’t played it in a very long time, then it’s absolutely worth picking up. The story, gameplay, characters and music are all just as good as they ever were, proving to everyone who scoffed that this old RPG still very much holds up all these years later.

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Have you had a chance to play this one? What’s your take on it?

Image from the Nintendo eShop