Nintendo might be stomping around the internet, crushing all joy in its path, but it still knows how to make a cracking game. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door was absolutely one of those, and is looking like it will be all over again in five minutes of new footage from this year’s upcoming remake.
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The 2004 GameCube game was one of those times the lovely silliness of the Mushroom Kingdom was perfectly captured, a game you played less for the splendid RPG and more for the constant arrival of top-notch jokes. Like Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, it offered a sleek experience that acted as a delivery mechanism for superb ideas and awesome gags. And best of all (in my case, at least), the intervening twenty years since that previous playthrough mean I’ve entirely forgotten the story and likely most the jokes. What better time for it to be completely rebuilt from the ground up, and sold to me all over again?
Nintendo Japan has just released a full five minutes of footage from the remastered version of the game, and it’s looking just so perfect. And yes, while the above video is entirely in Japanese, you can just trust me that the writing is bloody brilliant, and enjoy the awesome new art.
It certainly helps that the game always looked amazing, and the original still holds up today. But if you’re like me, your memory of a game always has its graphics updated to modern standards, making it very hard to remember what it actually looked like at the time. So here’s the original:
You can see how those animation cycles have been hugely improved, and of course the 3D backdrops massively updated. If you want a good comparison of the difference, check out 7:06 from the video above, and compare it to 0:40 in the new footage higher up. Let’s try one of those fancy slider things (although they do tend to go horribly blurry on desktops).
It’s such a faithful update (unless your love for the game hinged on which direction this boat was facing), but every asset appears to have been entirely replaced and reanimated.
The other good thing to note, if you played 2020's Paper Mario: The Origami King, is that Thousand Year Door didn’t have that game’s bizarre and repetitive ring-based puzzle weirdness for its combat, and has a whole bunch of RPG elements that have really been lacking in every entry to the series since. There’s no question that TTYD was the series’ peak, and it’s going to be lovely to relive that all over again.
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