Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (TTYD) was the video game that got me to stay online. It wasn’t the first one to get me there–Pokemon LeafGreen gets that credit–but it was the one that directly took me down the path to where I’m at, writing about video games on a personal blog. I remember that the power was out due to heavy winds when I returned home from GameStop with TTYD, and took a rare nap to wait for it to come back on because I didn’t want to do anything else. I really loved the game. But I got stuck on some puzzle or another, and looked online for help. I found GameFAQs, a website that hosts text walkthroughs for video games written by users, and the guides were so helpful and funny that I stayed on the website’s forums and made great friends there that I’m still friends with some 15 years later. Heck, I even named my blog after a TTYD character (accidentally).
But that’s not what this is about. This is about the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door.
TTYD was originally released on the GameCube in 2004. It was the direct sequel to Paper Mario, released on the Nintendo 64 in America in 2001. If you ask some people, TTYD was the last Paper Mario game made. If you ask others, Super Paper Mario, released in 2007, was the last Paper Mario game made. If you ask me, and Nintendo/Intelligent Systems, Paper Mario: The Origami King was the last original Paper Mario game, released in 2021.
I bring this up because TTYD was viewed by many in the hardcore Paper Mario scene (“hardcore” is a very funny adjective to use before “Paper Mario”) as a game that “Nintendo would never make these days”. Not because Nintendo’s woke (though they are), but because TTYD makes many choices in its writing, setting, and design that the next games in the Paper Mario series back off of.
The 3DS release of Paper Mario: Sticker Star in 2012 was a watergate moment for many in the Paper Mario fandom. Gone was the unique, specific, and distinctly foreign from the Mushroom Kingdom settings of Paper Mario 64, TTYD, and Super Paper Mario in favor of traversing worlds called “World 1”, “World 2”. Gone was the dark and melodramatic writing and plot of TTYD and Super Paper Mario in favor of the most straightforward “Bowser has kidnapped Princess Peach, and Mario must save her”. Gone was the quirky, stylized character designs for NPCs and party members of Paper Mario 64, TTYD, and Super Paper Mario for a legion of identically-looking Toads (usually red).
Paper Mario: Color Splash, released 2016 for the Wii U, stayed mostly within these lines. Levels again had unique names instead of “World 3”. The scenario writing was more inventive than Sticker Star’s and can hit the player with emotional gutpunches as powerful as Timpani and Blumiere’s story, such as the scene on the Sunset Express between Mario and a Shy Guy where the Shy Guy monologues about the hardships of life. Toads come in many colors and sometimes, when the game is feeling real daring, in multiple outfits, such as the Toad Rescue Squad.
The Origami King continues the creative breakout that Color Splash started from the nadir that was Sticker Star. Though I personally enjoyed Sticker Star at the time and on a recent replay, it is clear that it is a paper-white blank canvas of creativity in a series full of color. TTYD is held up as the peak of the series by many people because it is seen as the last game in the series before Intelligent Systems became UNIntelligent Systems at the behest of Shigeru Miyamoto ordering all the Toads to be red.
For 20 years, TTYD has been an unimpeachable masterpiece of a game that was symbolic of a time when Nintendo wasn’t afraid to take risks with its IPs. Just as how The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker was always viewed as having an incredible artstyle though it was a great risk. Or how Pokemon Colosseum was always known as a grounded, serious and cool take on the Pokemon franchise despite being completely at odds with the handheld games.
If you can’t tell through the tongue in my pen’s cheek, Nintendo took many risks with its IPs in the GameCube era that were incredibly unpopular at the time. Though Super Paper Mario was somehow weirder than TTYD, the sequels to Wind Waker and Pokemon Colosseum took steps back towards playing it safe. Twilight Princess was famously lauded at the time of its release for The Legend of Zelda’s return to the darker artstyle and plotstyle of Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness starred a traditional young, innocent protagonist instead of the bad-guy-turned-good of Colosseum in a much more straightforward “go beat the bad guys” type game.
This isn’t to say that TTYD wasn’t actually popular at the time of its release. It sold the 12th most copies of any GameCube game did at 1.91 million total sold. It’s more to say that when Nintendo reined the IP back in for Sticker Star, it was very on-brand for Nintendo to do that. It wasn’t out of singled-out malice towards Paper Mario, it just was what they did during the late 2000s and early 2010s. Soon enough, the internal directive for Nintendo IPs to have all edges sanded off was gone, and Paper Mario: Color Splash was allowed to shine. So it’s really not that surprising that they’ve come full circle and remade the “game that gamers thought Nintendo would NEVER make nowadays”. TTYD is a game Nintendo always has and always will make.
Now that my gloating over the Nintendo antis being proven wrong is done, we can talk about TTYD itself.
I find myself 5/7ths done with the Super Mario RPG remake that I feel I must also remake this blog post to include a review of that. However, I really want to keep the meta joke of the TTYDR intro. As such, please pretend that you laughed at the joke earlier and that this blog post has always been titled “The Mario RPG Remakes of 2023-24” and started as such:
Remaking a game is different from remaking anything else. A player of a game already remakes your game when they play it. Even something with as little player agency as a visual novel is still remade by a player as they pause their play sessions or skip through dialogue without reading it. A game developer has to make a choice whether their remake is more of a remaster or a reimagining. The Mario RPG remakes of 2023-24, which are remakes of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and Super Mario RPG (formerly Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars or Super Mario RPG: It Is The Only One Just For Me), aim for a perceived sweet spot of a middle ground.
The original Super Mario RPG came out on the SNES in 1996. Originally developed by Square before the company merged with Enix and abandoned Nintendo hardware with the release of Final Fantasy 7, nerds expected that Super Mario RPG would be a one-of-a-kind “you’ll never see this again” type of game. A push was made by fans for Geno, a character from the game, to be in Smash Bros. Brawl as a sort of protest for Nintendo to remember the game existed. In 2008, Nintendo announced and then released Super Mario RPG for the Wii’s Virtual Console as if oblivious to the doom reverb within the game’s fanbase. Since then, Nintendo has propped up Super Mario RPG every handful of years to remind those stricken with fear that Nintendo does remember. 27 years after its original release, the company behind Arrow of Laputa was commissioned to make a remake of Super Mario RPG for the Nintendo Switch.
The original Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door has a similar story. It came out in 2004 for the GameCube to much fanfare (outside of one Game Informer 6.75 review). Given the opportunity to make multiple direct sequels, Intelligent Systems instead went in a very different direction, churning out four games that Paper Mario fans do not acknowledge as Paper Mario games. TTYD was upheld by charged fans as a one-of-a-kind “you’ll never see this again” type of game. Every new release of an impostor Paper Mario game furthered he narrative. Unlike Super Mario RPG’s public support, Nintendo didn’t seem to care at all for TTYD. Instead, they re-released Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 on the Wii, Wii U, and Switch. And, yet, 20 years after the original release of TTYD, Intelligent Systems decided it was time to remake TTYD for the Nintendo Switch.
The Paper Mario series is akin to Mallow in Super Mario RPG: separated at birth from its original parents. Paper Mario 64 was originally titled “Super Mario RPG 2”. Very late in development, the jilted lover Square Enix requested the name to be changed. The sprites used within the game just so happened to look like paper cutouts, and Paper Mario was born. It wouldn’t be until TTYD that the series would embrace its paper-ness, and it wouldn’t be until the remake when TTYD had the hardware to support a full papercraft style.
The remake makes it very clear that everything in Paper Mario is, well, paper. Compare the spool-looking table in the original to the remake, or the pot behind Mario.
The parent, Super Mario RPG, was the first full game that rendered Mario in “3D”. I mean, I guess Mario Clash, released in 1995, beats it out. Super Mario RPG was all about renders in a way quite different from Paper Mario. Whereas most things in Paper Mario harmonize with each other in terms of its pop-up book look (except for the ugly Chet Rippo–yeesh!), Super Mario RPG is a hodgepodge of very different looking models. Carroboscis and a Blooper do not feel like they are from the same game, for instance. And the remake leans into this dissonance. The “rough” edges of the game’s look have been sharpened to crystal clarity in ways that prove ArtePiazza understood what makes Super Mario RPG so charming. Just look at how they restored Culex’s sprite if you don’t believe me.
You can also see that the models for the playable characters are delightfully rotund, the background has been faithfully recreated, and that Culex’s FP is gone.
When remaking a game, the underlying expectation is that the remake must look “better” than the original. Usually, the expectation is that graphical fidelity and image sharpness will be improved to the standard of the current tech generation. Super Mario RPG and TTYD’s remakes both pass this check easily. However, another underlying expectation is that the game will “perform” as well as its origin, if not better. Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario TTYD were both 60 FPS games when originally released. With the improvements in image quality came a downgrade in performance on the ancient Nintendo Switch to 30 FPS. A lightly-trained eye can visually see the problem, and a lightly-experienced game player can virtually play the problem.
Super Mario RPG invented the “timed hit”. In order to keep players engaged with RPG combat which was seen as “selecting things from a menu then falling asleep until your turn comes up”, the game asks players to press a button or rotate the joystick when executing attacks or receiving them. TTYD expands further on the idea with more complex timed hits that ask for a series of inputs or stop-start holding of a button. Both games let the player completely block all damage from an attack should they perfectly time their press of a button. And it is here where the performance issue becomes more than just a looking issue. The 30 FPS cuts a player’s window for pressing timed hits buttons effectively in half compared to 60 FPS. Now, these games are notoriously easy, so it isn’t an issue for 99.5% of play in either case. But trying to nail 100 Super Jumps in a 3 frame window on 30 FPS for the Super Suit reward in SMRPG’s remake is borderline impossible. And attempting to superguard in that same 3 frame window to avoid taking 20 damage from an Amazy Dayzee in TTYD’s remake is also ludicrous. Especially with the input delays of the wireless controller of the Switch and the expected input delay of modern TVs.
But enough bickering about the only true negatives of these remakes. Another baseline expectation is that the sound design will be “better”, which is a much trickier piece of art to make better compared to graphics. Super Mario RPG goes for a relatively safe approach. Every track is remastered with new recordings and new instrumentation, but the melodies are all the same and the overall sound attempts to be the original but richer. TTYD goes for a safer and bolder approach. It allows players early on to use an item to switch the music to the original tracks with no remastering done. At the same time, every track has been re-recorded with new instruments around the same melodies, but can be very different from the original. Furthermore, many new tracks were recorded to account for changes in the environment. There’s a unique battle track for every chapter, for instance. In hindsight, I’m sure ArtePiazza would’ve liked to have done this, but both games do a great job making already incredible soundtracks even better.
The other notable piece of sound design between the games is the “voices” TTYD’s remake added. Whenever a character speaks, a sing-song set of grunts or vocal tics plays depending on what character is speaking. Writing this on paper, it sounds like a nothing addition. But playing Super Mario RPG’s remake afterwards feels so strange. The amount of characterization it brings is immense, and the lack of it is equally immense. Hearing the same background music in a loop as the only noise for a 45 second conversation feels like a hundred thousand phones that just can’t ring. No, OneRepublic, that lyric still doesn’t make sense. I don’t know, it’s so strangely noticeable for me.
By this point, it should be clear that both remakes are well worth your time. Each game has its unique charm polished to the most sparkling 30 FPS it could possibly be. Both games take what was there, remake it faithfully, and sprinkle some additions onto it with zero subtractions. Well, I guess you could call taking out the “Who do you think you are? Bruce Lee?” joke in SMRPG is a subtraction. But the re-translation of TTYD restored the original script as having Vivian be fully a trans woman. So I think we win out as gamers.
You can call the review finished. I just have some further musings. Super Mario Bros 3 took the Mario series in an interesting direction. It is meant to look aesthetically like a stage play. Super Mario RPG takes after that direction with playful cutscenes of Mario and co. acting out what happens in pantomime. TTYD goes all-in on the game being staged, as a party member is a former actress, every fight takes place on stage, and the wrestling is scripted. I think it would be cool if the next Mario RPG came back to the play as some sort of fulcrum. Especially when I think Princess Peach Showtime also excelled by having everything revolve around theatre.
AlphaDream, makers of the Mario & Luigi series, ended up having to close their doors after making two poorly-received and even-worse-selling remakes of Superstar Saga and Bowser’s Inside Story. Those games had a great deal of effort and care put into them, but fell flat because the remakes did not perform better than their predecessors, did not “feel” as good, and did not look as good. The Bowser’s Inside Story remake was especially insulting since the original Bowser’s Inside Story could still easily be played on the 3DS as it was a DS game. Also, the new content added had great dialogue, but felt like a bad free-to-play mobile game that you couldn’t pay to win. I am glad that Nintendo learned from these remakes’ mistakes when directing ArtePiazza and Intelligent Systems for the SMRPG and TTYD remakes.
It is strange to me that games I played 20 years ago are getting remakes. Some people mark the passage of time by remarking that nobody in a sports league is younger than them. Some mark it by lamenting that a band whose record they listened to in high school is getting revived as a logo on youth clothing. Some track the changing years through a calendar. I personally hand-wrote guides for TTYD 20 years ago. My love for writing guides led me into becoming a technical writer that writes guides for software. I would not have my career, and probably not this blog, without TTYD. It was really nice to get a chance to “thank” the developers again by spending $60 on it.
I don’t have an equally sappy story about SMRPG.
Pungry for Laughs 
Aaah, this is so great! Thank you, Pungry, for sharing the joy and impact of TTYD on you.