Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door doesn’t hold back. It isn’t offensive, or woke, or trying too hard to change the game, it is just unapologetically itself. It was released two decades ago, but is only now reaching a mass audience after escaping its Nintendo GameCube purgatory.

Now I’m deep into the second dungeon and loving it more than any Mario game since the brilliance of Odyssey, which I’m hoping will be followed up by a sequel once the Switch 2 is here. It’s smartly written, beautifully presented, rewarding to play, and modern in a way that totally doesn’t feel twenty years out of time. But most of all, I’m taken back that Nintendo ever allowed this game to be made in the first place.

Mario Is Sacred, But A Thousand Year Door Doesn’t Care

Last week I touched on how A Thousand Year Door understands the importance of giving Toads a personality all their own, instead of making them carbon copies of one another that we’re only able to tell apart thanks to a few different colours. Here, you see them with new outfits, facial features, personalities, jobs, ambitions, names, and other things that help them stand out.

As a consequence, the world they reside in feels more alive and real in spite of how absurd and fantastical it might be on the surface. This attitude permeates throughout A Thousand Year Door, even if it means distancing itself from what we traditionally consider a Mario game to be.

He might be in the title, but I’d argue Mario isn’t even the star of the show here. He’s more of a silent spectre who is constantly mocked, belittled, and called an incorrect name by an ensemble of far more interesting characters throughout this new land. Your dialogue choices are what give him personality, and you can choose to make him a valiant hero or a big bully to innocent Goombas and Koopa Troopas that deserve better.

I’d say this was the last Mario game to have this much character until Odyssey arrived, which once again seemed to throw out the rulebook and do some absolutely wild stuff. Super Paper Mario, Sticker Star, and The Origami King are all delightfully written and lush-looking games, but none of them lit the world on fire like Thousand Year Door.

If anything, the collective reaction to them was one that eventually morphed into disappointment, since Nintendo kept on getting close to replicating its magic, but never close enough. Now that so many people have a chance to play this masterpiece for the first time, it has me thinking back to how it came to be in the first place. So let’s take a little trip back to 2024.

After Sunshine, There Was The Thousand Year Door

The Nintendo GameCube generation was a strange time for Mario, beginning with the release of Super Mario Sunshine in October 2002, a few months after the console’s launch. While it was well received at the time and plenty of people still love it today, it’s impossible to deny that it was quite different. There hasn’t been another Mario game like it since, and for very good reason.

It often abandoned traditional platforming in favour of the FLUDD, and its hub world wasn’t the easiest to navigate. It had fully-voiced characters, new designs for most characters, and was seemingly trying to figure out where Mario could go after stepping into the third dimension with Super Mario 64. It was a slightly rough second album, but I cannot help but admire how experimental and ambitious it was in spite of everything.

Mario was in flux, and Nintendo was willing to let him wander in several different directions in order to find that identity, but once it was cemented, it seemed afraid to do anything else. It is why the Paper Mario games that followed in the footsteps of Super Mario Galaxy felt so tame or lacking in imagination, because in spite of their distinct aesthetic, they still had to stick to tenets of the franchise which it would be better served abandoning.

That’s why Thousand Year Door is so masterful and why Sunshine is such an oddity: they were produced in a time when more risks could be taken, often to the benefit of the games we play and those behind them.

The remake feels like such a breath of fresh air in the Switch catalogue. Suddenly, we are being reminded that this is what Mario is capable of with more narrative and mechanical freedom, that we don’t need to play through the same 2D and 3D entries over and over and over again with no hope of fascinating new characters and ideas.

With Alphadream closing up shop, we need games like this to diversify the plumber’s portfolio, and with remakes for Super Mario RPG and Thousand Year Door both launching this year, maybe Nintendo has finally seen the light.

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Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

RPG Adventure Systems 4.0/5 OpenCritic Reviews Top Critic Avg: 88/100 Critics Rec: 98% Released October 11, 2004 ESRB E For Everyone Due To Mild Cartoon Violence Developer(s) Intelligent Systems Publisher(s) Nintendo Engine Origami King's engine
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Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a remake of the well-loved RPG first released on the GameCube. Relive this iconic adventure that turns 2D on its head and turns Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom into paper.

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