Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Switch Preview

Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door Switch header

It wouldn’t be a classic Mario game if he didn’t blindly follow the instructions of a letter or invitation and end up going on yet another adventure. That’s exactly what happens at the start of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, though in this rare instance, it’s actually a genuine invitation from Princess Peach to come and hunt down a mystical treasure, and not a dastardly ruse.

With the Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remake coming to Nintendo Switch in May, we’ve jumped at the chance to play the opening hours of what is, to many, the best game in the RPG series.

There’s plenty of reasons why Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is so highly regarded. Back in the day, the added oomph of the GameCube was able to refine the graphics over the original, but it held onto the original battle system, had some great, humorous writing and characters, and upped the ante on the gameplay interludes.

But could you play it after the GameCube’s heyday? Maybe not. Nintendo hasn’t always been the most even-handed as custodian to its back catalogue, the GameCube often feeling like the skeleton in the bottom panel of that drowning kid meme. ( https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mother-ignoring-kid-drowning-in-a-pool ). That’s thankfully changed in the last few years we’ve been graced with Super Mario Sunshine for Mario’s 35th Anniversary, Metroid Prime Remastered to tide us over until Metroid Prime 4, and the Pikmin 1+2 remasters in the run-up to Pikmin 4. Now we finally have the celebrated Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door being made accessible to everyone, without needing to hook up a GameCube and shell out for a now rather pricey second-hand copy.

Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door Switch Rogueport

Following Peach’s letter and with a treasure map in hand, Mario heads off to Rogueport, a town that has more than just a rough side, but which happens to be sat on top of the tunnels and caverns that play home to the titular Thousand-Year Door. Peach has completely disappeared though, and as you run into this game’s trusty companion, the budding archeologist Goombella, so begins an adventure to find the Crystal Stars and open the door before the emerging villains of the piece.

The opening stages are very tutorial heavy and honestly a little slow, but they gradually ensures that you get up to speed on the active turn-based battle system. Each attack has a timed-based element that can land a second blow or extra damage, with some basic strategy early on where you need to use the hammer on Goomba with spike helmets and have to jump attack at winged Goomba. There’s some new elements added to the core battle system though, with an audience watching your antics in battle, growing in size and giving praise to power you up, if you’re successfully landing attacks.

Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door Switch combat

This is a remake, as opposed to a remaster, making the game anew in a modern engine and with some significant stylistic changes along the way. In particular, the whole game now has much more of a paper craft appearance, as we’ve seen in the last few Paper Mario games – Paper Mario actually looks more like Card Mario, trees and buildings look like they’ve been constructed instead of merely being sprites or polygonal game objects, and so on.

The lighting has also been modernised, which adds more vibrancy to the scenes and allows grass and trees to wave back and forth and have shadowing and highlights change, and really adding some oomph to dramatic moments. That said, there is a rather odd choice for the floor to almost always have a metallic sheen and produce diffuse reflections of characters and world objects. It helps add more lustre to the graphics and absolutely suits the stage show backdrops for battles, but it’s a little odd when you step into Petal Meadows, for example, and the “grass” floor is shiny.

Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door Switch Petal Meadows

I also wish there were some more minor quality of life changes, such as being able to set the speed of text to be slower or faster than default – you also can’t tap through dialogue lines to quickly complete and dismiss them, which for anyone who knows the game inside and out would help speed up the game significantly. Beyond that, we’ve seen other remakes and remasters like Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age receive high speed modes to help players whizz through more humdrum action – of course, Paper Mario is a lighter affair than a massive JRPG such as that, so that’s not so important here.

All in all, the opening hours feel like a nice, solid remake of a GameCube classic. There’s a lot of the trappings of a modern Paper Mario game with some of the graphical enhancements, but it’s still the GameCube classic through and through, and a much needed avenue for fans and newcomers alike to get to play this game again.

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