REVIEW: ‘Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door’ Remake Is Refreshingly Fun (Switch)

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is Nintendo’s remake of the 2004 RPG of the same name. The remake has given the game all the bells and whistles, with a range of nice upgrades, quality-of-life updates, new content, and more. The remake also provides an impeccable gameplay experience featuring only a few things worth complaining about.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door begins with a letter and a map from Princess Peach to Mario, asking him to find a mysterious treasure locked behind the titular Thousand-Year Door. This prompts Mario to go on another grand adventure to find the seven jewels to unlock it. He meets new partners and fights the nefarious X-Nauts and other enemies who are after the treasure along the way.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door’s story is divided into a prologue and eight chapters, which serve as separate narrative arcs where players meet several characters and resolve many issues. The narrative is also one of the franchise’s best, sporting a fleshed-out story, engaging dialogue, and interesting characters, all of whom are great to talk to. Each character you meet while exploring the game’s world has an interesting personality. They all have something interesting to say and their responses and dialog are always refreshingly realistic to their circumstances. Characters also have a surprisingly good sense of humor, which makes them fun to talk to.

Gameplay-wise, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door features great RPG mechanics with various elements that make playing simple but fun. Players recruit several characters throughout the game, all providing unique abilities to the party. Some characters focus on pure destructive offense, some provide support and defense, while some offer healing. All party members can also be upgraded with items you find around the world. Doing this unlocks stronger moves, some of which deal devastating damage even later in the game.

Players can also upgrade Mario’s arsenal of abilities through Badges that offer a variety of uses. These range from unlocking stronger attacks to gaining specific abilities that are only effective on certain enemies or bosses. These badges can also be unequipped and swapped out for others, so players will continue to upgrade their move list to fit whichever scenario they face.

Moreover, outside combat they also offer support to Mario in several ways. Characters like Koops help with environmental and traversal puzzles by hitting switches that Mario can’t reach. Miss Flurrie can blow strong gusts of wind to find secret objects or remove objects blocking your way. And Yoshi helps Mario leap across ledges and move across vast distances.

Speaking of puzzles, the Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remake features many creative puzzles that test players’ spatial awareness, creativity, and intelligence. While none are particularly difficult, they can get tricky due to their creative placements and requirements. The game also provides Mario with special Paper Abilities that further flesh out traversal and environmental puzzles. These abilities are quite engaging.

This includes Paper Plane mode, which turns Mario into a literal paper plane to fly across large gaps. There’s also Paper Mode, which turns Mario into a sheet of paper to squeeze between steel bars and wall cracks, and much more. All these elements make solving puzzles and finding items rewarding and engaging.

However, while The Thousand-Year Door offers a superb gameplay experience, there are still features that make it less enjoyable. For one, the game highly relies on backtracking to get items and to progress, which can get irritating after the first few chapters. Additionally, as this is a remake of a 2004 game, there isn’t auto-saving, so saving is only done manually and in dedicated areas. Thankfully, the remake adds a way to fast travel, which makes the experience less painful.

Visually, the remake is highly colorful, with cute character designs and nice animations. While it isn’t exactly up to par with Nintendo’s other recent titles, at least in terms of its visual fidelity, Intelligent Systems did a great job updating the title to modern systems. Unfortunately, the frame rate is still locked to 30FPS, but it performs excellently without lagging, framerate dips, or glitches. The newly created soundtrack also sounds amazing, but players who prefer the older soundtrack can switch to it with a Badge in the menu.

Overall, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is an amazing remake of an excellent game. While it isn’t perfect, it provides a highly entertaining experience in almost every way.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is available now for Nintendo Switch.