A remake of a game is a weird thing to write first impressions about. My first impressions of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door happened almost twenty years ago, in Christmas of 2004. And in the two decades since then I have replayed the game again and again, affirming some of those initial impressions while others were altered by my changing perspective as an adult. Impressions became expectations and understandings, burying their roots into my brain and firmly establishing a particular idea of what it means for a game to be Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Because only one game ever was, those expectations were never challenged. The remaster brings a unique challenge in that it is supposed to be this thing that I have a very particular idea of in my head, but it also can never be that. My initial impressions are all about synthesizing expectations of what the game has always been along with the surprise at what the remake has changed about it.
It also brings to mind a core question: who is the remaster for? More specifically, what level of experience with the game did Nintendo tailor the experience towards? If I’m not the player whose level of experience matches that design intent, how does it affect my impressions of the game? When I see a change in the game and have a reaction to it, at some level should that reaction take into account whether the change is meant to benefit me or to benefit a different kind of player than me? I’ve been thinking about this a lot not only as I have played the game myself, but also as I have watched other people play and compared their reactions.
That’s the philosophical foundation of these first impressions, at any rate. As far as the more practical foundation: at the time of writing, I have played through the first chapter of the remaster as well as doing a number of side quests afterward. I’ve done all of the Trouble Center tasks available at this point in the game, I’ve played games in the Pianta Parlor, and I’ve explored down to floor 30 in the Pit of 100 Trials. In addition to my own experiences with the game, I’ve watched four different streamers play through roughly the same amount of the game as me. Two of them were – like me – people who considered TTYD to be one of their favorite games of all time, while two had never played the original game at all. In addition to my own impressions, I’ll be sharing moments when I found the reactions of others I’ve watched to be particularly interesting and worth noting.
Me after convincing my friends and followers to play this game
Presentation
The most immediately obvious changes to the game to the casual onlooker are the graphics and music of the game. Visually the game has been brought up to the level of Origami King in terms of both technical power as well as design sensibilities. The Switch is more powerful than the GameCube and so of course the graphics can just look prettier, but there’s more to it than that. In the earlier Paper Mario games, the characters themselves are paper but they primarily exist in a 3D world that wouldn’t necessarily be out of place in some other game. More modern entries in the Paper Mario series but particularly Origami King lean in harder on the paper aesthetic, making the 3D elements of the world out of crafting materials with visible seams, staples, and tape holding the whole thing together. This version of The Thousand-Year Door reimagines Rogueport and its surrounding environs in this way.
I’ll be honest with you: I am not a graphics guy. My evaluation of graphics generally comes down to “can I literally see?” and as long as the answer to that question is yes then I’m good. But I do often offer opinions on more subjective factors like the art style of a game, and in that vein I’ll say that I have really been enjoying the new look of The Thousand-Year Door so far. Origami King was quite a pretty game and seeing my favorite game of all time with a similar level of visual fidelity is a special experience. What I love more than those types of updates though are the extra animations they’ve added to the game’s character sprites. Mario and his partners all have new animations that make them more expressive, giving them brand new reactions to their repertoire and bringing those reactions out more frequently in order to create a cast that feels more engaged in the events of the game. NPCs too are more likely to have fun poses and expressions that convey their state: General White in Petalburg is visible deflated at the loss of all his hopes and dreams, and the Toad in Rogueport who almost fell in the sewer grate is trembling in fear in the alley a few paces away. For me these are the types of graphical changes I’m really looking for, and so far I have been delighted by what the game is doing here.
I’m a little more mixed on the music but I think it has a lot to do with nostalgia and very little to do with the actual quality of the music. In a conversation with someone in my Twitch chat I described the remixed music as “busy” – there are a lot more instruments and harmonies going on which pulls some attention away from the simple melodies of the original, melodies I have come to recognize and love over the last twenty years. Paper Mario TTYD uses a lot of synths and electronica in its soundtrack, while the new remaster uses a much broader range of instruments, including more traditional orchestral sounds. It does change the flavor profile of the music. But none of that shit is noticeable to anyone who hasn’t heard the original soundtrack, so I hesitate to even factor it in to my thinking. The music certainly isn’t worse, and this is most noticeable when songs brand new to this version of The Thousand-Year Door come into play. Like Origami King, the TTYD remaster features new remixes of the battle theme per region, and also transitions to alternate versions of certain themes when you enter buildings or special locations. In Rogueport for example, entering a shop or the inn takes the normal Rogueport theme and makes it a bit more subtle. My favorite new song so far has been the normal battle theme in Hooktail’s Castle, and it has made me particularly excited for other battle theme alterations to come.
They definitely were NOT this direct about his foot fetish in the original version
Writing
There’s been a lot of hullaballoo around the writing and localization of this remaster. The original Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is as celebrated as it is partly because of its unique writing. The dialogue is funny, has a lot of personality, and generally includes a lot of material that one wouldn’t expect to be present in a typical Mario game. A lot of people who played the original game remember so much of the writing and have specific moments where a certain turn of phrase or witty retort has stood out to them over the years. The remaster has largely left the game’s dialogue untouched but the more modern localization has changed some aspects of the game. Part of me hates to even write about this particular aspect of the game but because of the polarized nature of the internet, it has inevitably become part of my initial impressions of the game. To ignore it is to pretend that it hasn’t influenced some of my early reactions.
I would love to read an interview with the localizers to see exactly what the driving principle behind their decisions was, but alas at this juncture I can only speculate. As best as I can tell their goals were twofold: bring the game more in-line with the original Japanese as much as possible, while also being aware that certain scenes and terms might need to be adjusted for a modern audience. There is a certain brand of gamer who considers this type of localization effort to be “censorship,” and those translation literalists – people who believe that a game’s translation should be “word for word” instead of “thought for thought” – will potentially find stuff to be angry about here. There’s an early scene where in the original Goombella is being catcalled by a group of Goombas in the Rogueport Sewers, and this scene has been changed so that the ruffians are instead taunting Mario and Goombella about being “too good for the sewers” rather than it being a representation of this sort of gendered confrontation. There are translation literalists who are mad about this insignificant change! They exist! I’ve seen them harassing people in their Twitch chats! I would encourage anyone who is inclined the sympathize with this view but isn’t fully bought in to take some time to read actual interviews with localizers – the work is so much more complex and subjective than the typical person thinks it is.
For every change like this, there’s a change that brings the game more in-line with the original Japanese text. The thing that starts with cr and ends with icket that Hooktail is so afraid of has now been changed back to the original thing that starts with f and ends with rog. The Three Shadow Sirens are now referred to only as the Three Shadows, a hint towards content to come later in the game related to my favorite character from The Thousand-Year Door, Vivian. These moments go to show that there is more going on with the localization goals of the game. I think a potential argument for why the Goombella change was made is that Nintendo wanted to avoid “controversy” – but if they wanted to do that exclusively, there are other changes they would have made instead of sticking closely to the Japanese text. It’s hard to watch a stream of this game without someone popping into the chat to make derogatory comments about Vivian. Fucking Libs of TikTok even posted about it. Nintendo has courted controversy by choosing by choosing not to alter certain aspects of the Japanese text – clearly that wasn’t their sole localization goal, or at least not the primary one.
Personally, I have been fine with all the ways that the text is different from the original up to this point, and I think that will probably be the case for most people who aren’t conservative reactionaries. Most of the jokes are left intact and untouched. Many of the ones that have been altered make the game funnier. There’s an example during the first Bowser scene where in the original game, he fat-shamed one of his minions by telling them to do sit ups and calling them “tubby.” In the new localization, the message of the scene remains the same – Bowser tells the minion to exercise more – but instead of making it about the character’s weight he instead says to keep going until “even your hammer has abs.” That’s just funny stuff! In the aforementioned Goombella scene and in this scene, Nintendo took the opportunity to take out dialogue that probably would not have caused some huge uproar but was hurtful to a portion of their audience and instead replaced it with something that captures the original spirit and the overall humor of the game without being hurtful. These are good changes, and they have me looking forward to seeing how the localization team has handled other aspects of the game.
Charlieton selling you stolen goods is a hilarious touch that really fits the tone of the game
Gameplay
It is this particular aspect of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door’s remaster that I think is the biggest sticking point between people coming to the game for the first time versus people coming to the game as veteran players. Changes related to the gameplay are where I have found myself thinking the most about who this remaster is ultimately intended for. Many of the creative decisions made here prioritize the experience of someone new to the game: making the instructions clearer, pacing out the introduction of new mechanics a little differently, and making some aspects of the game more approachable. Conversely, these creative decisions don’t accomplish things like streamlining the game for veteran players or faithfully recreating their original experience.
If you’ve read reviews from other folks or generally participated in social media and seen people talking about this game, the most common criticism floating around out there centers the game’s frame rate. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on Switch is locked in at 30 FPS, compared to the 60 FPS of the GameCube original. This is something that I personally was prepared to be able to ignore – I can’t visually clock the difference between the two with my poor vision. But it turns out that even though I can’t see it, I do feel it. Movement and menus aren’t quite as snappy and responsive as the original, while windows for guarding and – more notably – superguarding feel wider. That on its own would be enough to alter the gamefeel for a veteran player, but there are other choices that kind of just slow the experience down. When you enter battle, the audience files in from offscreen and the player characters and enemies do a little battle-ready pose before combat starts. When you level up, the game shows your HP, FP, and star power each being restored to full one at a time, including a half-second to show you a flashing indicator for each on the UI. None of these changes are offensive or even particularly noticeable on their own, but the culmination of all of them added together – a half second here longer here, a slower menu there – is that the entire experience of the game feels more sluggish than the original. You probably won’t feel it as a newcomer, or even as a player who only played the game when it released twenty years ago, but as someone who has played hundreds of hours of TTYD its an inescapable part of my experience with the remaster.
There are a few new moments of tutorialization or changes to how existing tutorials are executed that can make the game feel a bit slower for veterans as well. Partner primers and cursed chest explanations now actually require you to use the moves that the tutorial is teaching you about, giving you additional button prompts rather than just progressing a text box with the A button. During the journey to Shhwonk Fortress in chapter one, there is now a required battle that explicitly teaches the player how the audience can throw things at you and the set pieces can fall over. In the original game, the audience tutorial was part of the special move tutorial, and the set pieces never got a separate tutorial at all. This change paces out the information provided to new players more slowly so they can get accustomed to new mechanics fewer at a time; for veterans it just slows things down, and unlike the action command tutorial or the special move tutorial this one isn’t skippable at all.
Providing this e-mail is a great way to remind the player that they need to buy the contacts to progress, while also creating a new opportunity for some humor
There are a few other notable changes in the early game that generally just make the experience easier or at least more convenient. Your starting item bag now carries up to 15 items instead of 10, allowing you to keep more healing or attack items on your person. It also makes money grinding with sleepy sheep faster since you can sell a larger quantity of sleepy sheep in Petalburg each time you go there. The game also just gives you more money generally – certain scripted fights like bosses and minibosses give you large chunks of money for winning, and the Pit of 100 Trials gives an additional money bonus compared to the original as well. There are certain badges or item purchases that have become more expensive as a result of this, but the kinds of items that newer players will primarily be drawn to – mushrooms, honey syrup, fire flowers, etc. – are the same price as the original or at least much closer in price compared to Charlieton’s items. You unlock fast travel earlier and more frequently in this version of the game, and certain areas that didn’t have shortcuts before have new shortcuts added to reduce backtracking.
In general I would say that all of the decisions made regarding the remaster were made with new players in mind: this version of the game is more accessible thanks to some modern design sensibilities, and it does a better job of making sure the player knows what to do and how to do it. A lot of the changes are just great improvements that will be just as appealing to veterans as new players; I would argue that veterans may even be able to appreciate some of them more than new players, who maybe won’t realize just how much unnecessary inconvenience they are missing out on. While the majority of the changes are positive, there are specific ones that will make the gameplay feel less snappy for veterans, and the early areas of the game in particular may feel notably slower. If you’re someone who has played the original a lot of time, you will need to decide for yourself how important that snappiness is to you and how much it will affect your experience.
Final Thoughts
Overall I have been enjoying my early hours with the new version of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door quite a bit. My moments playing the game on-stream with my audience have been full of laughter and excitement, along with lots of moments of interesting conversation around various changes and why they might have been made. I do feel the game being slower than the original and it does slightly mar my experience, but that one negative in a sea of positives does not deter me from loving this version of the game. I think new players won’t even notice the things about the game that I don’t like as much, but what they will notice are all the ways in which this version is going to be friendlier to newcomers and help them to have a positive experience. I’m excited to keep playing and experiencing new things about the game, and I’m sure I’ll have more things to say as I get deeper into The Thousand-Year Door for my second first time.