Jeremy Gallen's Game Reviews

A Thousand-Year Paper Cut

I mostly got a Nintendo GameCube for Tales of Symphonia, which for me was the best game on the system (though that really wasn't saying much), but I really didn't amass a collection of titles for the system as I had with the PlayStation 2. Another game I had bought in the system's time was Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, which I felt was okay, but again, far from a masterpiece. Two decades later came a remaster on the Nintendo Switch, which I got as a Christmas gift from my younger brother, and decided to play, providing a great opportunity to fix the original's flaws.

The main backstory involves a city that fell underwater due to a storm, with additional background of the eponymous Thousand-Year Door sealing away an ancient evil and a mystical treasure. Come the present, where Princess Peach shuns her royal duties and gets kidnapped by the X-Nauts and gets taken to a mysterious high-tech location. One major idiotic aspect about the narrative was the decision to stir a "mystery" of where Peach could be, when it's really, really obvious from the beginning that she's in some kind of moonbase or spaceship prison.

The scenes there where she forms a bond with the intelligent computer TEC are also asinine, as are the various misadventures of Mario and his allies back on terra firma. The chapter-based narrative structure makes the story feel incredibly disjointed, and making the player to sit through mountains of unskippable text makes the plot feel really forced down their throats. Blatant product placement including Mario's Game Boy Advance SP messenger and standard GBA computer panels (which the remaster team could have freaking changed) doesn't help and has never at one point in the history of video games helped them as it has in movies and television.

Blatant dated product placement

Aside from decent Godfather and Sherlock Holmes references, some okay humor, and Goombella giving some insight into various NPCs, the plot is downright horrible, with one, for instance, able to make a drinking game of all the clichés in the backstory and present time plot elements. Fetch quests are also among the main vampiric lifelines of the plot, the ending sequence feels ripped straight out of EarthBound, and the main goal of collecting seven stars came from previous Mario RPGs. In the end, the story hurts Thousand-Year Door far more than helps.

Although there are no spelling or grammar errors, to call the game's dialogue "piss-poor" would be well beyond a gross insult to urine. Most of the dialects feel incredibly forced, and Thousand-Year Door is chock full of lines not even the most inebriated human would ever say naturally. Screams are spelled out, with odd emphasis of words and a typical JRPG overuse of ellipses and exclamation points. The spelled-out forms of grunts like "Blarf harf harf" and laughter like "Mwee hee hee" and "Uh guh guh" are also nothing short of irritating, with further idiocy like "I, (insert character name here)."

What would "escape" mean other than, "Get the hell out," you moron?

Furthermore, there are lines the remaster team could have updated like an NPC advertising the original Game Boy Advance Fire Emblem, although there is some humor that has aged okay. However, some dialogue is nothing short of mind-boggling, such as a moment where Princess Peach moronically asks what the word "escape" means. Yes, a member of a royal family doesn't freaking know what it means to get the hell out of a place, making it obvious formal education failed her. There are far more other awful elements, but really, if movies and television had dialogue like this, they would be eviscerated by critics.

"Terrible" doesn't even begin to describe the "music" composed by talentless hacks Yoshito Hirano and Yuka Tsujiyoko, as one can infer from the pre-title screen backstory sequence. Seriously, this is some of the absolute worst, godawful music I've ever had the displeasure of listening to, with horrific instrumentation (while one can change to the original GameCube version version's tracks, they're not any better), blandness, and irritation galore. It's absolutely painful to listen to and made me want to plug my ears with glass to the point where I just played with the volume muted. I've heard a lot of AI-generated music that's a million times better than Thousand-Year Door's garbage soundtrack.

That pretty much leaves the gameplay to shoulder the burden, and there are definitely a lot of good ideas. Enemies are visible wandering dungeons and fields in between them and towns, and once they notice Mario, they charge at him. He can get a preemptive attack and damage by whacking them with his hammer or jumping on them, but this can be a real pain in the ass at times. Mario can further get up to six partners throughout the game, and he can use them to get preemptive damage as well, with his Koopa ally Koops able to get good range here.

When combat begins, Mario and his active companion have their turn, with the player able to choose who executes their command first, although if they choose their ally, they're stuck on the frontline to make them more vulnerable to the enemy, and players can only receive two upgrades to each ally. On that note, I had to reference the internet to figure out how to unlock the second upgrades, and while players can further boost ally stats (in addition to Mario's) through Badges, the game doesn't give them nearly enough Badge Points to utilize them.

Not even the most inebriated human would say crap like this naturally.

Mario can execute hammer or jump attacks, with said Badges able to grant him additional abilities, but again, the really strict limit on Badge Points, whose max the player can only increase through leveling, which is slow, and where players can also increase maximum Heart Points and Flower Points. Alongside Mario's standard hammer and jump attacks are those requiring FP, both those that he acquires at fixed points throughout the game and the additional ones players can grant him through Badges, which can have all sorts of interesting effects and tricky timing.

Timed button pressing has always been a tradition in Mario roleplaying games starting with Super Mario RPG, and Thousand-Year Door continues that trend. While the game is mostly transparent about the sequences before using the skills, timing can be a real pain in the ass, with even slight mistakes fouling things up. The same goes for enemies attacking Mario and his ally, with gross inconsistency and unpredictability of when to press a button to reduce damage or counterattack. This can lead to neverending frustration, especially when enemies constantly change throughout the game.

Mario plays on his Gameboy Advance SP in more blatant dated product placement

Mario's allies have useful abilities, like Goombella's Tattle, which reveals enemy stats, and the other good skills of the other ones he gets throughout his quest, but swapping them in battle wastes the player's turn, a step down from the vastly-superior character swapping systems of RPGs like Wild Arms 2 and Final Fantasy X. Mario also gets special abilities executed through Star Power as he acquires the seven stars, allowing for things like healing (though the timing again is really, really tricky), damage to all enemies, increased attack and defense, and so forth.

The player can regenerate Star power through repeated assaults against the enemy and through executing "stylish" moves in between timed button presses. Mario and his partner can also use items for recovery and attacking enemies, and many bosses can really tax the player in this regard. All in all, the battle system has its enjoyable moments, but most of it is smeared by the sheer unbalance and countless mentioned issues, with the endgame sequence, for instance, being a real pain, and some bosses able to slaughter the player easily. Granted, Thousand-Year Door's mechanics are far fairer than in developer Intelligent Systems' Fire Emblem titles but could have been more refined.

Bluh huh huh yourselves, idiots.

Control is far worse. While the player can get reminders on how to advance the main plot, there are many moments where direction is still vague, and the endless puzzles utilizing Mario's paper abilities and his allies constantly forced me to reference the internet; that is not something anyone should ever have to do when playing a game. There are also many cheap dungeon elements like having to restart areas from scratch if, for instance, Mario takes damage from things like spikes. The inventory limit is also incredibly annoying, with no stash points outside towns, and the player can't manually dispose items from their inventory if it's full. Ultimately, The Thousand-Year Door is a huge usability chore.

The remastered visuals are inarguably the high point of the game, well adjusted for widescreen televisions, with vibrant colors, environments, and character sprites. The various paper effects, with most characters sprites being flat (although there are many bigger models that utilize 3-D paper elements), and many environmental elements being as such, look nice as well. There is, however, the typical JRPG cliché of reskinned enemies, but otherwise, this is one of few elements where the game doesn't fall flat on its face.

BEWAAAAAAAAAAARE so much as even touching this game.

Finally, there's theoretical lasting appeal in Goombella getting backstory on everyone, scanning all enemies in combat, and dialogue differences during cutscenes depending upon Mario's active partner, but frankly, to invest any additional time in the game would be far more painful than gender-affirming surgery. That the game is way too long, 48 hours-plus, doesn't help at all.

When all is said and done, I can safely say that Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is mostly unfit for human consumption. It starts innocently but ultimately becomes a slog, with its unbalanced gameplay mechanics, awful control, terrible plot and writing, and especially the "soundtrack," with perhaps the remastered visuals being the only real bright spot. While the game had won awards after its release, that says a lot about the terrible state of video game journalism that continues today. Due to my sordid experience with Thousand-Year Door and especially most of their Fire Emblem "games," I will happily be avoiding anything else Incompetent Systems defecates in the future, for sake of my ailing mental health.

This review is based on a playthrough of a physical copy gifted to the reviewer.