As I make my way through games of older generations, my main goals are to better understand video games as a medium, and to find the titles that really speak to me and spark joy. Throughout this process I have learned a great deal about gaming’s history, but I have to admit I’m often left disappointed by the games I try, as most of them range from good to mediocre, with very few titles that stand out or that I feel all that compelled to go back to after I’ve looked them over. But every once in a while I will find a game that completely engrossed me, and that I love from beginning to end. Those rare but fulfilling moments make this search all worth it.
Paper Mario was one of these titles. I didn’t play it growing up, but as I went through the N64 library as an adult I tried it out, and I absolutely loved it. Aside from the N64 Zeldas it is my favorite N64 game, and just one of my favorite games in general. I played it again a few months ago, and it was still amazing. So between that and a lot of hype surrounding its sequel, I was quite looking forward to The Thousand Year Door.
And overall, The Thousand Year Door does deliver. It has the same basic concept and structure as the previous game but takes it in new and creative directions. The visuals, music, and overall presentation are absolutely stunning, and the world and characters are dripping with humor and personality. It is very much a worthy successor, and a great game in its own right.
Having said all that, I have to admit I was left feeling a little disappointed. Not because it was bad, not at all, but I just don’t think it was quite as good as the first game. I appreciate that it experimented with the concept and tried new things, but the thing with experiments is that sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. And with The Thousand Year Door its ideas tended to be much more hit or miss.
The thing that made Paper Mario work was that it was incredibly focused and polished, both on a gameplay and a story level. It had kind of a Zelda like structure, where you gradually open up new areas as you acquire new abilities, but it also had the turn based combat and battles of a JRPG. As I’ve said before, I’m not really a fan of turn-based combat, as I usually find it to be bland and boring. But there are some games that can spice it up just enough that I can tolerate the turn-based combat, and Paper Mario was one of those games. It made the combat fun to look at and listen to, and it added a few real time elements to make the combat a little more dynamic and interesting without compromising the strategic benefits of turn based gameplay.
The Thousand Year Door unfortunately takes things a bit too far. It greatly expanded the real time elements, and also added in other factors that are beyond the player’s control. While Paper Mario battles had the aesthetic of a theater, The Thousand Year Door goes even further and literally makes each battle take place on a stage. The crowd can sometimes help or hinder you in small ways, and sometimes parts of the stage will come loose and fall down and injure you, your opponent, or both. It’s a cute idea, but I think it adds too many variables and makes things a little overly complicated. More egregiously, the game makes it so that you can’t just pull off your super moves when you need them, you have to play a stupid mini game first every single time. The most obnoxious is when you want to replenish your HP and FP. In Paper Mario you just select the move, and you recover what you need, no hassle. In The Thousand Year Door on the other hand, you have to waggle the analog stick back and forth to toss stars at icons that fall down the right side of the screen. That would be annoying enough, but some asshole decided that to make this process even more aggravating there should also be some poison mushrooms mixed in with the icons, and if you hit one of them Mario is temporarily paralyzed, preventing you from making the most out of this limited move. It’s particularly galling because a lot of times you won’t see the poison mushroom until after it’s too late, so the game ends up punishing you for something you had no control over. Whoever came up with this asshole idea and whoever allowed it to be in the final product deserves to be punched in the face. And while that is the most obnoxious example, there are many instances where the combat is more complicated and finicky than it needs to be.
It’s not the worst combat system I’ve ever seen, as I still finished the game. There have been hybrid turn based and real time combat systems that were far worse, and were so awful they prevented me from playing any longer than a few minutes. There was a whimsical and upbeat charm to the combat in Paper Mario that made it both fun and satisfying, and despite some annoyances that is still the case in The Thousand Year Door. But if the combat in Paper Mario is like a bike, then the combat in The Thousand Year Door is like the same bike, except with a bunch of cowbells and disco balls glued onto it all over. Sure, it looks flashier, but it’s more cluttered and less efficient at doing its job, namely getting you from one place to another.
While that’s the biggest problem with the gameplay, it’s not the only one. In many ways the gameplay is improved from Paper Mario. I like a lot of the new physical abilities Mario can unlock as he progresses through the game, as well as the hilarious way he acquires them. I also like how there are fewer partners, as the first game kind of went a little overboard in that area. But one thing that’s gotten worse is the increased amount of busy work. In Paper Mario you were constantly moving on to new areas, while The Thousand Year Door has a bad habit of making you run back and forth across the same area over and over again. The most glaring example happens in chapter four, which forces you to go back and forth through the same place a minimum of five times. There’s also another really annoying fetch quest that happens in chapter seven, and overall the level design and progression felt more padded and less elegant than in the first game. In Paper Mario if it forced you to backtrack through the same place more than once there was usually a clever or compelling reason for it, and while that is sometimes the case in The Thousand Year Door, all too often it’s just tedious busy work.
Another area I think that was weaker in The Thousand Year Door was the story. Don’t get me wrong, I liked what they did in terms of worldbuilding and I appreciated that it wasn’t just the first game again. But what made the first game’s story work was that it was simple and straightforward. Bowser’s taken over everything, and now Mario has to collect seven stars to stop him. A simple, effective structure that the game can build around. In The Thousand Year Door though the story is more all over the place. There is the overall narrative of collecting the seven crystal stars to open the titular thousand year old door, but there’s also a ton of competing plot threads and recurring secondary characters, and very few of them are given enough screen time to properly flesh them out. Whenever a recurring character appeared in Paper Mario I’d go “Aha! You again!” whereas whenever a recurring character appeared in The Thousand Year Door I’d go “Ah. Right. Sorry, I’d completely forgotten about you. What was your name again?” The story's not bad, but it lacked focus, and it would have benefited from another draft or two.
Another good example of where I think the narrative was stronger in the first game is in the sections where you play as Princess Peach. In the first game she was captured by Bowser, but she didn’t just take it lying down. Throughout the game she made numerous escape attempts, each time getting further and further away from her room before she got recaptured, and each time she organically found out some important information about Bowser’s plans, which her little star buddy then passed on to Mario. Not only were these gameplay sections fun and interesting, but they also showed that Peach was a fleshed out character, not just a helpless damsel, and her interactions with Bowser and the other villains were very entertaining.
In The Thousand Year Door though Peach comes off as much more passive and less interesting, and her gameplay sections are much more brief and dull. This time she’s kidnapped by a villain other than Bowser, and the only reason she’s able to accomplish anything is because the villain’s computer falls in love with her and starts to help her. She doesn’t organically find out anything useful by exploring the bad guy’s lair, pretty much everything useful she learns is stuff that the computer flat out tells her, which she then emails to Mario. And on the few occasions where she actually does something she’s still just doing what the computer tells her to do.
These sections also come off as a bit exploitational and rather creepy. The computer falls in love with Peach after it spied on her in the shower, and the rest of the game the computer keeps coming up with roundabout excuses to get her to take her clothes off. I wouldn’t really mind if it was interesting or compelling on a story, character, or gameplay level, but I don’t think it is. It just makes me think that one or more of the developers was really bored and/or horny and wanted to see how close they could get to having Peach nudes in an official Mario game while still technically remaining family friendly. After how good the Peach sections were in the first game this felt like a let down.
I was also disappointed with what they did with Bowser. In Paper Mario while Bowser was a bit of a buffoon he was still a credible threat, and his funny moments didn’t detract from how dangerous he was. But in The Thousand Year Door he’s portrayed as a complete moron who is twenty steps behind everyone else. Every so often the game cuts over to him making a fool of himself, and while sometimes it's funny the joke gets old real fast. Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga showed how you can play around with Bowser without reducing him to just a punchline. For starters, Mario and Luigi actually team up with Bowser against a common threat, which offers a new and interesting dynamic between the characters. And the one time in that game where Bowser comes off as truly pathetic also happens to be when he has amnesia, and doesn’t remember who he is, so again it’s funny without reducing Bowser to a one note joke. Personally I think that The Thousand Year Door should have either done something actually compelling with Bowser, or else just removed him from the game altogether. Because as it is the game’s cast is rather bloated, and if you cut Bowser out almost nothing would change.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression, this is by no means a bad game. Overall I really liked The Thousand Year Door, and it does deserve the praise it gets. But for me Paper Mario was the smoother and more polished experience, and the more consistently enjoyable game. While The Thousand Year Door had more creative and imaginative moments than Paper Mario, it also had more boring and annoying moments. Basically the good stuff in The Thousand Year Door is better than the good stuff in Paper Mario, but the bad stuff in The Thousand Year Door is worse than the bad stuff in Paper Mario. So on balance I like Paper Mario more, and while I still greatly enjoyed The Thousand Year Door the fact that I didn’t like it as much or even more than Paper Mario is rather disappointing, especially given how much everyone was hyping this game up.
Still, I am glad I played it, and I’m sure I will play it again at some point. I would recommend playing Paper Mario first, and if you like it then give The Thousand Year Door a try. Of course getting your hands on The Thousand Year Door might be easier said than done. I have heard that a twenty year anniversary edition of the game is in the works, but that won’t release until 2024. Besides, given that this game is a little unusual, and considering what Nintendo did to Majora’s Mask 3D, I would be concerned about potential censorship and stupid unnecessary changes ruining the twenty year anniversary edition. So play the original version if you can. Of course, if you don’t like Paper Mario you probably won’t like The Thousand Year Door. But I liked both of them, and I’m sure I will play them again.
Final arbitrary score: 8/10 (Great)
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