Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door (Switch) Playthrough.
Fighter: Mario (Wario Colours)
Game: Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door, Nintendo Switch (Gamecube). First Released on July 22nd 2004.
I was surprised to find that there doesn’t seem to be a very long history for this costume. Despite being what seems like an obvious alternate colour for Mario to use, the only appearances I can find of this look are in Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door where using the W Emblem Badge changes Mario’s colours to match Wario and Super Mario Odyssey where the Wario Cap and Suit are available in Crazy Cap after reaching 340 and 360 Moons respectively. These costumes do differ slightly however, the main difference being that its version in Odyssey is more directly Wario’s clothes with his gloves having W on them in Purple and the hat having a W which contrasts with the palette swap in Paper Mario simply giving Mario a blue M on his hat and keeping his gloves the same. There is one final very debatable appearance of this outfit in Super Mario 64 DS, in this game caps for Mario, Luigi and Wario will appear in levels (depending on who you are currently playing as) and finding the cap lets you transform into that character in order to use their unique abilities, getting hit results in losing the hat and transforming back into the character you’re currently playing as. Going by this logic, technically this involves Mario wearing Wario’s cap, however since he completely transforms into Wario (only retaining his own voice) I don’t think it really counts as Mario wearing this outfit. As a late addition to this section I have become aware of one other possible appearance, however for now I haven’t seen any direct proof of it. I had considered the possibility that the GBA version of the Mario Bros arcade game, which was included in many GBA Mario games as a multiplayer mode such as the Super Mario Advance series and Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga had Mario in this outfit. However when looking it up there was Mario in a yellow outfit, but in it he had seemingly white overalls which I thought meant it wouldn’t count. Just now however I had a look on the Spriters Resource at the spritesheet for the game and noticed the spriter had put that on the Wii U Virtual Console version of the game, apparently Yellow Mario has purple overalls. I have seen no other evidence this is the case and even if it was I wouldn’t choose that version to represent this outfit, still I thought it worth mentioning since I said I could find no other appearances of this outfit for Mario.
Special Features: There does not seem to be any sort of special bonus or ability this outfit grants Mario, the only exception is as previously mentioned the case in Super Mario 64 DS with Wario’s Cap, but that is not really an example of the outfit itself so therefore I feel doesn’t count.
When it comes to the only two appearances of this outfit in games outside of Smash Bros, I had a choice between Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door where it first appeared and Super Mario Odyssey. Normally simply being the first appearance doesn’t mean I’ll choose that game to represent something, however in this case the design of the outfit in Odyssey has the hat with a W as well as W on his gloves whereas in Paper Mario Mario still has his regular M on his hat just in a blue colour instead of his usual red. With the costume in Smash Bros Mario does not have W on his gloves and the M on his hat seems to be a dark green (similar to his shoes in this costume). Therefore of the two I felt the appearance in Paper Mario was much closer to Smash than the one in Odyssey.
My history with this game.
So this is it, my joint second favourite game of all time (The other being the original Paper Mario, both being just behind Diddy’s Kong Quest). I won’t go too much into my history with the original Paper Mario as I will cover that in another post, however to give a little context, outside of Pokemon, Paper Mario was the second RPG I believe I ever played. I was a huge fan of the original game by the time I’d beaten it and when I first saw screenshots of Thousand Year Door in an old Nintendo Magazine I remembered thinking about how it looked like the next evolution of the game and I was really excited for it. Probably the biggest contrast and the most prominent part of most previews I saw was Hooktail the dragon boss, there were some fairly big bosses in the original Paper Mario, but with Hooktail they were showing this game will have bosses you fight who can’t even fit entirely into the battle screen, which really helped push the idea this was doing things the original game could only dream of. Another feature I remember being pushed fairly heavily in the advertising was how there were parts in the game where the screen would become swarmed with enemies or crowds of NPCs which again helped show it was capable of things that definitely couldn’t be done in the original game. Beyond this, I don’t have many other memories of the lead up to the game coming out, I’m sure I read more about it and got excited, but really Hooktail and the crowds are the main thing I remembered from the previews.
Naturally, being a huge fan of the original Paper Mario, as well as a Mario fan in general who’d been looking at all the screenshots excitedly in the lead up to the game releasing, I didn’t get the game myself. This was back in my childhood afterall and so I’d only get games when my parents would get them as gifts for me. I did get to play the game however, as I believe this might have been the final time where my cousins had a game I wanted and so I had to go over to theirs to play it. Due to this, I got to see bits of the first 4 chapters, and at a later time I believe I managed to borrow the game to play through those chapters and perhaps chapter 5 myself. It’s interesting as now that I think of it, this game might have been around the time I began to see the massive shift amongst people my age away from Nintendo. A fair few who had been playing on the N64 I knew of moved on to the Gamecube, but it was about halfway through that system I’d hear more and more of the people I knew at school calling Nintendo ‘kiddy shit’ and a lot of my friends would mostly drop Nintendo for Playstation and Xbox. It’s also at this time I believe looking at the dates, I started my time in Upper School. Middle School had been hell for me where I had the most bullying of my life, in contrast Upper School was where I managed to get by somewhat better and gradually my life got happier. I’d still have the odd run-in for sure (that hasn’t even stopped in my adulthood honestly) but either way, I suppose when this game came out, it was during a pretty transformative part of my life. It’s due to this, I suppose this game has always felt like a personal favourite of mine, not something a lot of other people I knew of had played, but a game I found so impressive for just how many small details there were in it and just how well thought out the world was. My Cousins did enjoy the game a fair bit too, in fact I remember one of them once describing something from one of the His Dark Materials books to me as being ‘like that town with the huge moon in Paper Mario where it’s always twilight’, so I know it left an impact on them for sure.
I suppose when it comes to the rest of the series, I will detail more of my thoughts and feelings on later entries and what happened to the series in posts for those games. I think the main point I want to make is, to me this was the pinnacle of the series, but the original Paper Mario will always be my personal favourite. It was therefore interesting to me when many years later the unthinkable happened, a whole remake of this game, with redone graphics and all sorts of additions was announced to be coming to the Switch. I couldn’t have been happier because not only was it a remake of something so important to me that looked amazing, but it gave me hope for the series I have loved so much before going forward. I was so excited for this remake I looked up everything I could about it, constantly, I was counting down the days to its release. Then something I’d not dreamed of at the start of the year happened, my Dad and I were going to Canada for two weeks, right around the time the game was due out, with the pre-ordered copy I had due to come to my home in the UK on that date. I decided not to cancel it because I was getting a special buildable battle stage with the game which was in limited quantities, but even so I wished the dates had worked out just a little differently. To be clear, I’m making this sound more of a big deal here than I really treated it, I had a great time in Canada, still it’s important to mention this because admittedly I wanted answers on certain things about the remake when it came out, so this led to me reading anything I could find on places like Reddit or Youtube about the game. Normally I tend to avoid fan discourse in general for things, especially stuff I like, but in this case I was so desperate for information I was scouring sites, and due to this of course I ended up reading through the sort of discourse and whining I tend to ignore. I’ll admit, not being able to play my joint second favourite game of all time’s remake whilst reading people who could play it whining about such things as ‘Goombella’s voice is the most horrific thing I’ve ever had the misfortune to hear’ etc did dampen my enthusiasm a bit. Still, eventually after we got home from Canada I was ready to play the game, in fact I was so excited to do so I created two save files, one in which I would play through the game the way I wanted to, and the other in a way specifically for my Smash Playthrough.
So as I said before, I had two save files I was playing through this game on, the first was for me to play the game my way, choosing options I wanted for my playthrough and the second was a playthrough where I tried to do everything as accurately as possible to their depictions in Smash Bros. Before I go over my playthrough of the game as such, I want to comment on a few things done with this remake and how I felt on them, I’ve said before I’m notoriously easy to please so if you’re looking for complaints feel free to delve into various other people I’ve seen whining about stuff. First of all there’s FPS, I bring this up because it was one of the things people never stopped going on about when the game was coming out, I’m someone who rarely notices frame rate in games and despite knowing about the complaints (because honestly you couldn’t not hear about it when looking for info on the game leading up to release) playing the game I barely thought about it. There are games where I definitely notice frame-rate issues and to me this wasn’t one of them, that’s all I really have to say on it personally. Next up are the audio changes, firstly I feel complaints about the music are always irrelevant when the original soundtrack in a game is available to be swapped to, and due to that I don’t really prefer either soundtrack more than the other, I feel like the new remixes added a lot, especially just how many variations there are but there are one or two tracks that I felt weren’t as good as the originals, and others that really were great alternatives to the originals. I really loved how often they added new tracks also such as every partner character having a unique new music track that plays at some point, usually when meeting them. Also audio related are the sounds, for one thing I loved the ‘voices’ added to the game, especially hearing what sounds from other games they use for various species such as Goombas as well as for characters and species unique to this game. I have seen complaints as I mentioned earlier about the voices, and whilst I didn’t find any time they annoyed me, having an option to change things such as turn them off is always better than not having one, although I disagreed with someone suggesting it should be tied to having the original music, mostly as that would limit you to one or the other. The new content is great, I won’t spoil it as this is a new game and admittedly I would have loved to see one or two other things (I was really hoping for them to implement unused cameos of the partners from the original Paper Mario that were in the files of the original somehow) but can’t complain about them, also having stuff like unlockable concept art is always great. I suppose I should make mention of the odd text change in the game, this is getting into a subject honestly I would rather not go into so all I have to say on it is, there’s things that I find egregious and things I find so insignificant when it comes to changes my only thought is I’d have preferred them not to change anything but it doesn’t particularly bother me in this case. When it comes to the remake of Mario & Luigi Super Star Saga, where they outright changed the designs of characters and enemies that were interesting into looking far more like the standard Mario art-style, or outright making a character who had a unique design now have the same generic design of other NPCs, I find that a bad change that really dents my enthusiasm for the game. The changes Thousand Year Door has do not do that, so overall I don’t really care. The game is amazing and I’m really glad to have it available again on a recent console (not to mention not going for hundreds of pounds online). I dislike them changing End of Chapter to ‘Cleared’ though, that text change sucks and I have nothing good to say about it, even if it’s closer to the original Japanese version, End of Chapter was just so much better.
So playing through the game again was great, it lived up to all my memories and expectations and with how different it was visually (better in my opinion but I’ve seen people who don’t like it) it helped make it feel much more fresh than when I played through the Gamecube original again for my list back in 2018 (which I might go over more for future entries relating to this game, not sure yet). Every chapter I got to had me excited to see how it looked, how characters now sounded and what additions might have been made. I don’t want to list every chapter in detail but I will briefly go over some of them. First of all there’s the introduction where you meet Goombella, the first partner to join you in the game and explore Rogueport a bit. Rogueport for the whole Mario series has always been one of my favourite locations for just how much ‘grittier’ it is than most, they really play up how seedy and dangerous the place is what with a gang war taking place in the background whilst Goombella’s speaking with Mario, you getting mugged and a guy blocking off part of town demanding a toll to pass. The place also looks much more detailed in this remake which I liked seeing. The plot revolves around Mario having a map he was sent by Princess Peach (who’s gone missing of course) and him gradually learning that the map shows the way to the seven Crystal Stars which are required to open the Thousand Year Door, a giant doorway deep below Rogueport that’s said to contain an amazing treasure. The game being an RPG works differently to the main Mario series with battles being turn based. This is unique from other RPGs however in that attacks often require some sort of timed button press in order to do decent damage, such as hitting A just when Mario lands a jump attack to bounce and do a second follow up attack, or holding the control stick and releasing it when you have charged enough power with a Hammer attack to do the most damage.
The next part of the story is the first chapter of the game which features Hooktail who as I said was a prominent part of the advertising for the original game I remember. For the chapter Hooktail is definitely a highlight with the boss battle, despite being the first real boss of the game so not really challenging, it's exciting. The rest of the chapter is fine but fairly standard, in fact honestly it’s probably one of the very few chapters in the game that doesn’t really have a gimmick to it with you visiting a town, going through some ruins and then taking on the castle after gaining a partner in town. Chapter 2 is somewhat similar although it’s always stuck with me due to how striking it is visually. Boggly Woods is a woodland, but what stands out the most is everything in the environment is either black or white, the wood of the trees are made up of shades of black and grey whereas the leaves are white for example. The ground is black but with grass patterns that are a shifting neon rainbow colour (the only environmental parts that aren’t black or white). It gives the place such an iconic and striking look that really helps elevate the chapter to me. A lot of the enemies that are native to the area similarly are either black, white or a shade of grey which helps make it feel like such a unique environment, and other characters not native to there (such as Mario) stand out. The gimmick of this chapter are the main friendly inhabitants of the land which are the Punis. These small creatures are likely inspired by Pikmin and similarly to them Mario ends up gradually picking up an army of them who follow him as he travels through their home in the Great Tree looking for the Crystal Star. Chapter 3 is where things in the game get controversial, by which I mean some people love it and others feel it exemplifies the issues with the game. This chapter takes place in Glitzville, a floating city above the clouds where there is an arena. Mario must enter the arena as a new fighter and make his way up the ranks whilst also dealing with mysterious happenings. I personally loved this chapter and still do, I like how you get to know a fair few of the other fighters through events that take place in the minor league which also builds up the mystery behind things such as fighters disappearing as well as a ‘man-eating toilet’ amongst other rumours. The main issue I see people take with it however is that it can get repetitive, with the whole setup meaning you have 20 fights to go through which some find monotonous. Either way, this chapter is the first one where it really deviates from the simple adventure through an area style which is common in a lot of other Mario RPGs, with you mostly going from event to event within Glitzville rather than making your way through the area like in the previous two chapters. I don’t want to go through every following chapter so I’ll just say highlights to me are the chapter that takes place in Twilight Town, a location that’s got a gloomy but still visually interesting style to it and the Excess Express, a train where the majority of Chapter 6 takes place in which might just be my favourite but I could see very easily being someone else’s least favourite. There were definitely issues, although the remake does help soften them a bit since there’s some added warp pipes that help deal with some of the backtracking this game is infamous for (especially in Chapter 4.) Still, for me the atmosphere of the game is why I absolutely love it, and therefore I enjoy the time spent in these locations so I never found the backtracking particularly draining.
So why I love this game and I feel personally it is superior to the original game, despite me personally preferring the original is just how detailed everything is. Every single character and enemy has a tattle for example, an ability used by Goombella that tells you something about them even for unnamed NPCs who there’s not much to say about you’ll get at least some comment. Tons of characters will get new dialogue in later chapters if you revisit them, there’s all sorts of sidequests (which are mostly taken on from a place called the Trouble Centre in Rogueport) that make new things happen in previous locations. All this can be a double edged sword of course, depending on whether you’re fine with reading a lot of text or not, but due to this there is so much content here, for example Luigi will appear around Rogueport after you complete every chapter with a unique partner with him similar to Mario and will tell you all about his adventures in the Waffle Kingdom that he’s been on whilst Mario’s been adventuring. These are often humorous parodies of Mario’s adventure essentially where most of the time he got through them due to sheer dumb luck and most of his partners are only following him because he owes them money or they feel he’s too dangerous to be left on his own. Not only does Luigi have all this to tell you, but then later in the game there’s a book series you can buy from the store in Rogueport that is written about his adventures that sheds further light on it all whilst also deviating from things Luigi told you were the case often playing them up to make Luigi sound more heroic. This isn’t the only example of the sort of background detail that doesn’t really serve a purpose but can to me be so fun to find out with there also being lore stories about the Thousand Year Door and other things about this specific game, as well as one character who travels to a location from the previous game and will tell you about his adventures there including various cameos. This is something the Mario series would not really do again, even in the next game that goes even further with story there’s not as much background lore (granted it’s still there in that game too) and with Sticker Star anything like that was ripped out of the series pretty much. I also find the world just such an interesting place and one I love to revisit, for one thing after you beat a chapter it’s still often worth revisiting locations because now you’ll get to see them in their new ‘peaceful’ form, for example the train chapter I mentioned earlier, you can take the journey the way it was intended to be rather than the events that took place during Chapter 6, with there being a whole load of new NPCs who will appear at random on board (including the only fully grown Yoshi in the game who will sometimes appear depending on how lucky you are.)
There’s lots more I could go on about but I think the other key thing to this game and sadly one which ended with this game are the partner characters, to me one of the best things about this game and the previous one. There’s some spoilers related to certain ones and some I will likely cover for their own posts down the line due to spirits etc, so I’ll mostly just talk about partners as a whole with maybe one or two examples who won’t be getting their own posts. Partners in the Paper Mario series are basically other party members who join Mario on his journey and can fight alongside him in battle as well as perform actions on the overworld that will help Mario to progress. An early example is Koops, a Koopa Troopa who joins Mario and can be kicked in his shell as a sort of boomerang to hit switches too far to reach or grab items too far to reach and bring them back to Mario. He also in Battle can use his shell attacks on enemies on the ground as well as help boost Mario’s defence. This is somewhat unique to a lot of other RPGs as Mario is always the most important character in the party who will do the majority of damage, this is mostly as you can’t ever swap Mario out. Due to this Partners aren’t just useful for how much damage they can inflict but also how well they can support Mario, helping protect him from powerful attacks or boost his attack power for example. Of these my personal favourites are the Yoshi Kid and Admiral Bobbery. Bobbery has a surprisingly dark and mature backstory for a Mario character and honestly was a surprise to me when he joined back when I first played the game, mostly as he seemed more of a key player in the story of the chapter he first appeared in rather than a obvious party member, that might just be me however. As you might have guessed from his name, Bobbery is a Bob-omb, another thing I loved about the Paper Mario series as you’d get characters that were from various species of enemies in the Mario series, but with their own unique designs that make them stand out as their own characters, something the Mario series seems very determined not to do anymore that I just cannot personally agree with. The partners in the original Paper Mario were all Mario enemy species and in a lot of cases this was the first time they’d ever been shown as friendly in any way. I loved this because it helped make Mario’s world feel like a much more interesting place, where random people on the street could be a talking bomb or a Koopa Troopa rather than Toads being the only friendly NPCs you’d come across. There would be plenty of evil characters from those species still so it’s not like it took away from the variety of enemies you face in the games. In this game the partners do include a lot of Mario enemies, but also a couple of unique species who join you as well as a small Yoshi Kid as I mentioned earlier (who will have his own post later). The final thing I want to touch upon is something I definitely used in my playthroughs but I know is what the more hardcore gamers who enjoy this game and the original tend to like the most, the badge system. This system is what allows you to customize the party to be played in so many different ways, for example you can get a badge that boosts Mario’s attack hugely, but only when he’s at 5 or below HP, this means that you’re playing in a way where you want to destroy enemies as fast as you can because you can’t risk taking a hit at that low HP. Other badges are simply good with no drawbacks such as the ability to swap between partners in battle without it taking up a turn, it’s due to this badges cost BP (Badge Power of course) so you can’t just equip every amazing badge and have god powers. Again, this is something I’m definitely not an expert on, but from what I’ve seen, it’s the original N64 game that people prefer when it comes to badge customization with you being able to do really crazy stuff in it, but this game definitely still has a robust and interesting selection. Needless to say, that’s another feature that was dropped in all future Paper Mario games.
When it comes to my specific playthrough I admittedly don’t have a lot to really go over, it was mostly a fairly standard playthrough of the game. I’ve played through the game probably about 6 times in my life fully and this time didn’t really stand out for being particularly difficult or anything. There was one thing I remember which was when playing Chapter 3 the game crashed. I don’t know why, but I do remember vaguely things seemed to be going slower than usual before it happened. It was annoying because it was after I’d done a fair few battles and things, still it didn’t take that long to get back to where I was and I made a point of saving repeatedly in case it happened again, which it luckily didn’t. I said before I did two playthroughs, first a personal one where I made a point of tattling every NPC possible with Goombella and didn’t worry with certain variables and then my Smash playthrough where I tried to make sure I got specific variables and made a point of using a specific partner for every chapter (granted still swapping out Goombella to tattle every enemy I could). This did actually prove a problem for this post as I realised one of the screenshots I wanted to use included a secret party member that’s a spoiler in every screenshot I had, so I had to go with a different one in the end which was a shame. I thought I’d be really burnt out playing this way but I think I just love this game too much for that as I never felt irritated replaying it. It could be because I would listen to stuff on my computer as I played so I wasn’t solely focused on the replay.
In conclusion, I love this game, I always will and I loved this remake, it looks gorgeous, it retains the atmosphere I loved and there’s nothing in particular I personally felt was missing from it that would make me want to return specifically to the original. The Paper Mario series to me has been doing the best it can with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, I haven’t played Origami King, I’ve heard some very good things but also that they clearly had no intention to return to how the original two games were. To me that just won’t bring me back, when I look at the villains of Origami King and see things like a literal box of pencils compared to a boss like Cortez or Rawk Hawk, I just can’t get excited or accept it personally. Until they undergo surgery to remove this self-inflicted bullet and allow the series to heal, it just all feels like missed potential to me. With this remake, I do have hope they might finally start looking back at how the series used to be, even if it doesn’t return to exactly that, I hope they will at least loosen up on these restrictions they seem to have put upon the series. Of course that could easily be proven wrong, afterall from what I’ve read I believe this remake didn’t sell anywhere near as well as Origami King did. There are various factors I believe in those sales figures, still I hope at the very least they try to find some new happy medium with the next Paper Mario if they’re not willing to return to the style of the first two games. As I always try to think with these things, I’m still glad at the end of the day that this game exists regardless of whether the series ever returns to what I loved about it.
Specific aspects about the game relating to Mario’s Wario Outfit in Smash.
Honestly I don’t think there’s much more I can add here, I said earlier about this outfit being closer to Mario’s in Smash than the Wario Outfit in Odyssey and in Thousand Year Door Mario doesn’t really have equipment or attacks that are similar to how Mario fights in Smash. I guess the main thing is keeping the W emblem (which is a badge) active to keep this colour on Mario, although I didn't do so for my whole playthrough, but I did have it for a fair few chapters.
For information on this game including dates of releases I must give credit to Super Mario Wiki.
The screenshots in this post are taken by me on Switch and Wii U.
