September 20, 2024|

Filed under: Editorial

Walk the Line: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

In “Walk the Line,” Wolfman Jew looks at the critical path of a game from start to finish. These games may be nonlinear open worlds, straightforward shooters, and anywhere in between. Some may be great at how it tells its stories and presents its worlds, some may not, but these give us an idea of how games function as interactive stories. As every article will be exploring the critical path of a game, expect spoilers for the plot, distinct formats for each article, and a generous length.

Thanks to Hamada for edits.

When the idea of storytelling in games is brought up, we talk about dialogue or character arcs, or maybe the ways in which gameplay affects the plot or themes. But story and storytelling is much broader than these elements, especially when you experience them as a whole. There’s linearity and nonlinearity, cinematic set pieces, quiet time, backtracking, and the use, reuse, and abandonment of mechanics. You might have high caliber acting or a perfect plot structure, but this is a game, and the most important story in a game is the one you tell from the first cutscene to the end credits. That’s the basis of “Walk the Line,” a new Source Gaming series that examines the pace and plotting of games from the perspective of how we play them. These articles will likely be long, extensive, and fully spoil the plot of its subjects, so do be warned.

Image: Source Gaming. The title screen of the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. The remake features a plethora of quality of life changes, but the experience and almost all the gameplay content is the same.

And Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a great subject to kick us off. The 2004 GameCube classic and its aggressively faithful 2024 Nintendo Switch remake (the latter of which I’ll be primarily covering due to its newness and availability) are delightful RPGs: nimble, energetic, and beautifully paced. That makes them something of a rarity among role-playing games. And it manages this not through overt mechanical or genre changeups but basic level design, structure, and tone. It’s a good example of how to make a game feel vital from beginning to end without having to adapt wildly new ideas—or to leave the range of very specific movement and combat suites.

Purely mechanically, The Thousand-Year Door is an evolution of the original Paper Mario from 2000: Mario has to find seven doodads, all scoured to the four winds, before he and his partners marshal their power in a bombastic, no-holds-barred climax. After you find one McGuffin through basic RPG adventuring, you return to a central hub to find the location of the next one. And these are fully delineated as eight chapters and a prologue, in keeping with the series’ storybook imagery. Future Paper Mario entries would change mechanics and plotting in significant ways, but this format has mostly held. Mario goes out to find a thing, returns to Port Prisma or Flipside or wherever, and launches his next expedition. Even the ones that aren’t written with explicit chapters follow this to some extent. This has a lot of benefits. You have an idea about the length of the adventure, you have a clear sense of story progression, and it implies that each section will get to be something of its own thing. Perhaps most of all, it adds a sense of cohesion.

Image: Source Gaming. Mario’s Magical Map, showing the setting of all chapters save the last.

Paper Mario creator Intelligent Systems made this structure, and I’d like to use it. In theory, every article of this series will have a format suited to the story it’s exploring. A sprawling open world will dig into specific spaces and optional content. A collect-a-thon might warrant an examination of every level one by one, or something entirely different. But this is a fairly linear, serialized story that builds on itself, complete with a formalized structure. It makes sense to follow that.

PROLOGUE: A Rogue’s Welcome

“A Rogue’s Welcome” gets into the swing of things and sets the tone. It’s extremely brief, for one thing—it lasts a fraction of the time of the one in the first Paper Mario, which stranded Mario in the boonies and forced him to slowly hike to the main hub. You’re not crossing into Rogueport from afar; you get dropped off at the port. Similarly, while the last game held off the Action Command mechanic that lets Mario add to his attacks with button prompts, this simply has it and offers an optional tutorial if you want.

Image: Source Gaming. The first appearance of the Thousand-Year Door. You repeatedly go down to access it.

The most important thing the prologue sets up is a recurring motif of repetition. You go to Rogueport, then into Rogueport Underground to find the Thousand-Year Door, are brought out for a cutscene, then go back in the sewers to get to Chapter 1. This comes up a lot in The Thousand-Year Door for good and ill. At its best, it adds a sense of place or ceremony or comedy. For instance, every time you complete a chapter, you slink back to the Door, and it feels momentous (this is aided by the remake’s score, which is awash in multiple arrangements of tracks and adds instrumentation to the Door’s theme with each Crystal Star you find). But it’s also undeniable that some parts almost clearly exist for padding. Many Nintendo games of the 2000s were notorious for including late game fetch quests and the like as methods of artificially increasing the runtime, and this was no exception. Of course, how each chapter incorporates it is different. I think it’s fine enough here when setting up the importance of this mysterious giant door, Mario’s ultimate goal and a gigantic cloud over this town of thieves.

Tonally, the opening sets up another important motif. Mario games are full of cute cartoon people, bouncy soundtracks, and bucolic hills. The hubs for his RPGs follow that to the letter; they’re often villages with giant mushroom houses. Rogueport feels like it belongs in a whole other world, maybe a whole other franchise. It’s a nasty, grimy harbor town full of lowlifes, mafiosi, and a haunting gallows in the main plaza. Mario accidentally stops a kidnapping within a minute of stepping on the dock, and barely any time later he witnesses a gang fight, gets his pocket picked, and—in the Japanese release of the original game—potentially stumbles into a house with a police chalk outline on the floor. The most comforting voice is that of your first partner: Goombella the valley girl archaeology co-ed Goomba. Her enthusiasm helps sell the initial search for the Crystal Stars as not completely obligatory, and she provides a bevy of optional flavor text that makes clear that if and when you want dialogue, the wordy TTYD will deliver.

Image: Source Gaming. Mario gets his first taste of Rogueport’s hospitality.

All of this is actually important for the pacing. See, Paper Mario 1 was a typical Mario adventure. You had to go out and save all seven Star Spirits, but there wasn’t even a token sense of rising threat. TTYD fashions itself as more of an adventure serial; it doesn’t take long for Mario to wind up bedeviled by the X-Nauts, a mad science supervillain outfit unlike any of his prior villains. They have Princess Peach, and everyone wants the Stars, so it turns into a globetrotting race—if not one that’s time sensitive in a material way. This is where Rogueport comes in handy, as it gives a sense of threat, foreignness, but also excitement. Similarly, Goombella and your guide Professor Frankly always push for you to keep going (this is notably different from the first Paper Mario’s cast, who are a lot more chill about Bowser’s onset reign). They alter how we see the game world, which impacts how we play. It’s also a huge part of why the game has had an unbelievable twenty-year legacy. The Thousand-Year Door is weirder, more narratively dense, more serialized; a Eurogamer retrospective called it “novelistic,” and it carries the energy of a lot of non-gaming media. But it’s also fast and constantly reshapes itself. This comes from eclectic level design and storytelling, but before that we have to start at the simplest part.

CHAPTER 1: Castle and Dragon

The least interesting chapter in the game, “Castle and Dragon” is very much “World 1,” the baseline to which the other chapters respond. It’s also a remix of Chapter 1 of Paper Mario, which did the same thing; both involve a flowery land, peaceful Koopa Troopas, one who joins you, and the shadow of an ominous castle. But the land and supporting cast—largely the diffident citizens of Petalburg—are a bit lower tier by the game’s standard. The star is Koops, a hoodie-clad nebbish jonesing for a fight against Hooktail, man-eating dragon and apparent foot fetishist. Koops is fine, even better than his predecessor Kooper, but the town doesn’t get much shading beyond light eccentricity. And frankly, eccentrics are everywhere in the Paper Mario series.

Image: Source Gaming. A Petalburg denizen gives you a pretty blunt hint about an upcoming mini-boss.

The structure of Chapter 1 is split in two. In Act I, you walk straight to the right through Petal Meadows, pass through Petalburg, and continue until you reach the dank mini-dungeon Shhwonk Fortress. Then, you walk all the way back to the very first room to open a path to Hooktail Castle. The land is picturesque but not much else; on a purely topographical level it has barely any features. Enemy diversity is small, too, and a series of mini-bosses supports backs this up. You fight a pair of Bald Clefts, then a pair of Bristles, then a Gold Fuzzy and Fuzzy Horde, most of whom exist to teach the importance of items—a POW Block is the best way past a Bristle’s spikes, after all. The remake also adds a tiny battle to help explain the stage mechanic, that you’re actually performing each battle as a play and can get help or harm from audience members.

Then you get to Hooktail Castle, and things get a lot more fun. Dungeons in Paper Mario tend to be grand and full of puzzles, like Zelda temples. Much of the exploration even involves finding a new ability—in this case, the ability to turn Mario’s cardstock self sideways and shimmy through thin gaps. With ominous gated windows and undead Dull Bones, the castle is just eerie enough. There’s even a wild deadly maze with an actual timer, some puzzles based around mild spatial reasoning, and a particularly fun bit has you toying with the world’s inherent papery artifice. And the final battle with Hooktail throws that into a blender with a goofy secret weakness and a gag that upends the stage setup before you’ve gotten used to it. It’s a delightful bit of RPG chicanery.

Image: Source Gaming. Hooktail Castle, Dungeon #1.

On the whole, Petal Meadows is a somewhat unsatisfying location, and it starts off on poor footing with aggressive linearity. But it finds a lot of fun in a dungeon that lets Mario go off on his own and explore. It also finds a strong core in a gameplay loop of finding powers that solve and recontextualize puzzles, not unlike a Metroidvania. And thankfully, it’s rather short and breezy by the standard of the other chapters. There’s a value in finding a baseline, especially when that’s going to be violently played with by the end credits.

CHAPTER 2: The Great Boggly Tree

For the most part, things are similar to Chapter 1. Sub out the castle for the watery innards of a giant oak, and the warm flowers for a forest of monochrome trees and rainbow vines. There’s a lot of the same backtracking, too. You walk to the right, find the path to the Great Tree blocked, keep going right until you find the house of bassy wind spirit Flurrie, and recruit her by fighting the Three Shadows (Shadow Sirens in the original release). The distinction here is that the land is a lot more dynamic, and the characters’ bigger personalities give things a slightly greater sense of heft. Flurrie’s wildly over the top, and the Shadows—cruel Beldam, vacuous Marilyn, demure and (finally) trans Vivian—are very fun and important. Plus, by being recurring agents of the main villain, they matter more than the one-off Hooktail and will eventually become part of the Thousand-Year Door‘s main cast. The structure is the same, but there’s more energy than Chapter 1 had.

Image: Source Gaming. One thing Boggly Woods does have going for it is an incredible visual style: it’s a forest / tree level with a strange and entirely atypical color palette.

Once we get into the tree, the dedicated dungeon, things change again, and mildly for the worse. It’s still filled with puzzles; Mario still has to find a new power in the Super Boots. But in an apparent reference to Nintendo’s 2001 treasure Pikmin, he now has to wrangle a hundred Punies, a cherubic insect race. The invaders you fight are the X-Nauts, who confront Mario for the first time and have been ripping their home apart for the Emerald Star. So narratively it’s about fighting an occupying force, and mechanically it’s about directing these characters. But controlling the Punies isn’t fun, more tedious than challenging, and the Tree’s pretty interior is confusing and less parsable. It’s odd; Chapter 2 should be better than Chapter 1. The villains are better, more numerous, and more interesting. The picturesque Boggly Woods are wild. But it lacks something. Perhaps it’s the Punie characters, who are kind of a drag, or simply that the Great Tree is too inscrutable as a video game level.

The most memorable bit comes at the end as X-Naut capo Lord Crump whips out a detonator and starts an actual, five minute timer. You can only stop it by chasing him to the entrance and triggering the boss fight. Hooktail Castle also had a time limit with a death sentence, but this one is bigger. It ticks down during dialogue and in battles, and because it’s tied to the bad guys, there’s an emotional hook. It’s one of the only times The Thousand-Year Door makes good on the idea that these parties are actively racing each other. If “The Great Boggly Tree” had more moments like that, it’d feel faster. As it is, it’s probably the least popular chapter amongst the game’s very passionate fandom, and coming right before the next one does it no favors.

CHAPTER 3: Of Glitz and Glory

Over the two decades since The Thousand-Year Door’s release, “Of Glitz and Glory” has become the most popular—or at least, the most iconic—section of not just the game but any Mario RPG. It’s the one where Mario has to get the Gold Star by joining a morally spurious wrestling outfit, fighting up through the ranks, and slowly untangling the corruption behind the company. It’s an American boxing tragedy, an anime tournament arc, and a (barely) hard boiled conundrum all in one. But as a JRPG, the entire chapter is a “dungeon” where only two fights can kill you, every fight is in one room, and your enemies are NPCs. It should not work this well.

Image: Source Gaming. Mario, his newfound pet Yoshi (who I named “Niles”), and the Glitz Pit. Hamma the Hammer Bro is a dangerous foe on the stage and rather personable off it.

Despite being the most combat-heavy part, Chapter 3 is rather slow going. With far fewer rooms than any other chapter in the game, it feels like a bottle episode. For the first half (as you might have picked up on, most of these chapters are bifurcated), Mario lives in the dank Minor Leagues locker room and goes through fights in a strict order before coming back, chatting with your friendly rivals, and fighting again. There’s rarely a reason to leave. Outside of three boss battles, which you fight in the ring anyway, every single enemy in the Glitz Pit is on this tier list and will only fight when you request a battle. This shifts once you hatch Yoshi, get him to beat the Iron Adonis Twins, and jump to the Majors. Now, after roughly every other battle in the top ten, a nameless informant will send Mario to explore an empty room or pick up an item, like the Super Hammer or a key. In between these, other events play out: threats are sent, gifts of dubious value are offered, and a contender you befriended mysteriously disappears. All the while, the background music crafts this sense of wealth, violence, and intrigue. And then you fight an evil promoter who becomes a thirty-foot goliath.

What this leads to is a chapter far more akin to classic adventure games or visual novels than a traditional RPG. Mario does a battle against the Poker Faces or Craw Daddy or Chomp Country, then takes a break to solve a puzzle or explore the strange, floating city of Glitzville. A lot of the game’s backtracking and fetch quests actually have that kind of energy, and even though that structure is often controversial, I think it’s a huge part of TTYD’s popularity. You’re always soaking in the atmosphere. That does help the pacing and momentum, because suddenly every chapter promises to have something really new. And if you’re not a fan of it, this is still a game of reasonable length, so the next thing may be more to your liking. All in all, it’s a crossover of styles, motifs, and a malleable mascot who might otherwise not make sense with them.

Image: Source Gaming. The nasty, dour Minor League locker room warms up as you spend time with Bandy Andy, Master Crash, and King K.

Chapter 3 is slow, and it’s definitely uninteresting from a standpoint of pure gameplay, but it doesn’t feel that way. It has heft and mystery and a structure we almost never see in Mario. It also helps that the cast of plucky has-beens and never-weres is great and earns the time we spend with them. For just a few hours, this game shifts into a light drama about celebrity and sports before turning into something else. It has an energy the other chapters don’t. It’s also the second and last time in which Mario isn’t harangued by the X-Nauts in any way. After this disconnected sojourn, characters start to reappear, most notably Crump, the Shadows, and their increasingly elaborate schemes.

CHAPTER 4 – For Pigs the Bell Tolls

The previous chapters split their stories based on location or mechanics. In “For Pigs the Bell Tolls,” it’s about disempowerment. The adventure is nominally about saving the people of Twilight Town from a curse. You chat with them, do some adventure game puzzles, go through a spooky forest, and wind up in a cathedral. Standard. The nameless shapeshifter boss at the top of Creepy Steeple is easy; the optional Atomic Boo is far more of a threat. And then… Mario leaves, you wind up in control of the shadow you just trounced, and that’s the twist. The real premise is that you go through the chapter twice, first with all your party members and then with only Vivian, unaware that the bodiless spirit is the guy she’s supposed to whack. You end up walking from one end to the other five times to uncover the bad guy’s secret, which is a bit excessive. Perhaps the final battle with Doopliss could have been done in the town itself, exposing him to the Twilighters and saving you a third walk through the woods. The remake helps with this immensely by simply plopping in a Warp Pipe between the town and the church right after finding the villain’s secret. Blunt, and perhaps the game could’ve been willing to change the story and not just add a very appreciated quality of life feature, but it works so well.

Image: Source Gaming. The opening cutscene of Chapter 4. Twilight Town is very much in keeping with Mario’s various Boo Houses and “spooky” levels, but it goes just a bit further.

Twilight Town and its surrounding lands are just a bit scary. The moon looks like it came right out of The Nightmare Before Christmas. The Twilighters are a glum folk, living ragdolls with stitched felt skin and morose outlooks. Doopliss is Rumpelstiltskin, only weak to his victims knowing his name. He tricks your friends and turns them against you. And Mario’s newest partner is a former antagonist, one under the thrall of a wicked witch of a sister. Paper Mario often fashions itself an interactive storybook, and this is a spooky fairy tale. It’s horror, a bit beyond the “spooky” levels of Mario’s platformers and with a challenging gameplay shift to match. Other Mario RPGs have horror stuff, but none are nearly this effective.

Restricting Mario’s abilities is also a standard Nintendo tactic: give you a cool power and then take it away. Twilight Trail and Creepy Steeple are full of tough enemies with supercharged attacks, high defense, and dangerous status effects. After struggling through them with your partners, now you have to walk back without any of them, then back again with an all-new one. Vivian provides unique skills, but the other four could have all been upgraded by this point and she isn’t. Or rather, she can’t, because of something else that distinguishes Chapter 4. Up until this point, Mario could in theory return to any previous area. You won’t, in all likelihood, because you’ll have everything you need and backtracking is what it is, but the option is there. This is something the first Paper Mario established; two of its chapters are even based around returning to the hub. This ends once Mario’s body is stolen. There’s an explanation (the Twilight Town pipe requires you to have your name on your clothes, and our hero’s shadow form has neither) and reason (you’d lock yourself out without Yoshi). But it’s also a thematic continuation of this casual shift to horror.

Image: Source Gaming. The second battle with Doopliss (and Mario’s party members). After Vivian permanently joins Mario’s party, he replaces her on the Three Shadows as yet another recurring baddie.

From this point on, each path to a Crystal Star will, at some point, cut Mario off from Rogueport. And while, again, there’s never a serious material reason to stop the plot mid-chapter and go back, this is good for the sense of tone and forward momentum. This time, it’s one more way Mario has been cut down. And in all of them, it builds the sense of threat or grandeur, and especially that travelog sensibility. After all, once Chapter 4 ends, you discover that the X-Nauts are trying to revive a millennium-old demon, and that’s what’s been behind the legendary Thousand-Year Door the whole time. You gotta pick up the pace after finding that out.

CHAPTER 5 – The Key to Pirates

And what goes with picking up the pace like than a pirate adventure? If there was any doubt that The Thousand-Year Door was a wacky globetrotting comedy, then a trek to a lost island of marooned ghost buccaneers should clear that up. The most memorable moment here comes right after it “officially” ends. Once Mario has beaten the grim pirate Cortez and the “Chapter Clear” sign appears, they and all of the chapter’s NPCs team up to battle the X-Nauts. The ship-to-ship duel is a small bit, but it’s exciting. There’s that sense of unpredictability you keep finding in each chapter. It also puts the onus on the overarching bad guys and not one, albeit very charismatic, Spanish ghost pirate. Coincidentally, the second most memorable moment also involves a ghosts and a boat, when an armada of ghouls wreck Mario’s ship to splinters at the chapter’s start.

Image: Source Gaming. The pirate attack that sets Mario’s entire crew adrift. Crump’s in disguise as one of the crew; in keeping with the game’s meta comedy, he (lightly) threatens any player who “tries” to tell Mario what’s going on.

Part of what makes this part such a big deal is that it’s an evolution of that idea from Twilight Town, the one about Mario being stranded in the setting for the entirety of each chapter. After pirate ghosts capsize their ship, the crew wind up trapped on lost Keelhaul Key, eking out a life and giving you a second goal of finding a way back. Even getting the Sapphire Star doesn’t actually get them home on its own. Your useless captain Flavio logs the events in a diary, the main fetch quest involves finding food, the only locations are an untouched jungle and an eerie haunted cavern, and it’s all wrapped around a puzzle whose clue has been sung in the background since the very beginning of the game. There’s still a Toad House and a shop, so you’re not, like, roughing it, but you are stranded.

Image: Source Gaming. Mario’s newest sidekicks, the actual partner Bobbery and the useless tagalong Flavio.

Beyond that, “The Key to Pirates” is similar to what we’ve seen before. You walk back and forth Keelhaul Key a few times before diving into Pirate’s Grotto. The dungeon is fine; it has a few puzzles that demand memorizing the layout, which is good, and some navigation through Mario’s new boat mode, which isn’t so good. The final required party member, Bobbery, opens up some combat options and adds some flavor to the team. And that’s the biggest boon here. From Flavio’s utter ineptitude to Cortez’s vague gesture of a face turn to the tired, salty sailors who help you, the personality of the cast uplifts what’s a bit too standard of a chapter.

CHAPTER 6 – Three Days of Excess

But naturally, then we go to the second most unique chapter, and the second most famous. We’ve got another mystery, but we’re far from the Glitz Pit’s web of deceit and failed stardom. Now it’s a whodunnit on a posh train full of rich idiots, a dangerous culprit among them, and a delightfully moronic Poirot pastiche whose theme—especially in the remake—aggressively riffs on Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks soundtrack. And the premise of the whole chapter is that Mario forgoes the luxury of a three-day trip to deal with a stream of obstacles and threats. Again, you have all these touchstones that aren’t particularly tied to gaming, or Mario, or RPGs.

Image: Source Gaming. The game is afoot on the Excess Express.

The sojourn is TTYD at its most like an adventure game. There are fights in the Riverside Station and Poshley Sanctum dungeons, but there’s not a ton of them, and the bulk of the gameplay is more just going from train car to train car solving basic questions. This is not Return of the Obra Dinn; it’s more about presenting the aesthetics of mystery stories, which helps ensure that you’re not spending that much time dealing with any one problem. It’s the least satisfying chapter to replay, but the uniqueness and charm is more than enough to compensate.

I think that’s the key to this chapter, and probably that of The Thousand-Year Door as a whole: everything moves, and it’s riddled with charisma. The mystery of what Bub the Bob-omb wants as a present is not interesting, but he and his horrible family are. Riverside Station is a bit unnerving (partially due to having notable cut content and several rooms without background music, but also due to being dead and dusty next to all this wealth), and so is Poshley Sanctum; they’re just differently unnerving and sandwich the insane boss fight nicely. Adventure games often have this kind of smorgasbord of different genres or setups or switches, as do several of Mario’s platformers. Like a variety show. And while JRPGs can struggle with wearing multiple hats, this succeeds with aplomb.

Image: Source Gaming. Riverside Station, the slightly eerie dungeon of the chapter. It’s the only part with substantial combat.

Other parts of the chapter help in this. The cast is fun and wacky, and the investigation plot forces you to spend time with them. The move from Rogueport’s scuzz and sleaze to the opulence of the train, then the sad and slightly ominous station, and then the obscene opulence of Poshley Heights adds to that variety show idea of throwing in new things. Bringing Doopliss back, now using his shapeshifting in a plot to blow up the train, is a fun move and shows a serialization where characters—like Bub, whose family first appears in Chapter 3 as missable NPCs—can reappear and evolve. Suddenly this one-off character’s now a main bad guy. All of it keeps you on your guard, not unlike Mario spending three days on errands, investigations, and a fight against a truly baffling cloud creature.

CHAPTER 7 – Mario Shoots the Moon

While the chilly Fahr Outpost is very pretty, Chapter 7 starts with the game’s single weakest moment. The search for General White—a Bob-omb you need to find who’s running roughshod across the land—is notorious amongst players. It’s an overlong shaggy dog fetch quest, and the game gets nothing out of your revisiting the previous six chapters. What should be this glorious reprise is a chore, and it puts off engaging with the game’s single wildest plot twist: that the final Crystal Star, Princess Peach, and the headquarters of the villains are on the moon. It’s audacious. But the runaround kills the pace.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take “too” long (especially in the remake, whose backtracking-related quality-of-life features make it a snap to go through what’s still a meaningless joke quest) for Mario and his pals to blast into outer space. The moon itself is appreciably small, since its unique gravity is cool but makes things a bit slow, and the X-Naut Fortress is a decent late-game dungeon based around finding keys and one giant, dense puzzle. The two dimensional layout makes moving around fairly easy—though the factory-model architecture is a bit samey. Perhaps there could’ve been signs on the doors, like what the remake does for various Rogueport buildings. But things still go by relatively fast before you have a final showdown with Lord Crump. There’s a sense of propulsion to it all, knowing that you’re actively taking the fight to the bad guys’ main headquarters in what’s clearly the penultimate chapter. That’s slightly rare for Mario games.

Image: Source Gaming. Striking first against an X-Naut PhD in the X-Naut Fortress. With tight corridors and a functionalist design, it feels almost industrial.

What always sticks out to me is the isolation and danger once you hit the moon’s surface. You obviously can’t shoot yourself back to Earth; the only exit is through a teleporter connecting to Rogueport (which you can use whenever, but I don’t until after the chapter because it really feels like you shouldn’t). The only NPC is TEC-XX, the HAL-9000 parody from Peach’s story who shows up at the end to sacrifice himself. It’s all forward momentum. But, that also makes it dependent on your enjoyment of the puzzles, atmosphere, or fights. If you’re only here for Paper Mario writing or character beats, you’ll find “Mario Shoots the Moon” wanting. But if you wanna strut your fighting skills, the back half’s pretty dang good.

CHAPTER 8 – THE THOUSAND-YEAR DOOR

In one way, the X-Naut Fortress is a test for the Palace of Shadow, the final dungeon and one of the more over-the-top finales in the Mario franchise. There are no characters other than bosses, no respite other than the odd healing block or secret item. It is just a massive collection of high-level enemies, dangerous boss fights, extensive puzzles, and an atmosphere of overwhelming doom. But there’s more in the way of character moments, thanks to bosses and party member dialogue. Still, it’s a trek.

Image: Source Gaming. The upper levels of the Palace of Shadow employ very flowery and dark red colors. As you go down further, the color scheme changes, always evoking mystery and danger.

We can think of Chapter 8 as a five-act structure. The first and longest is your initial descent; there are puzzles, a few callbacks to both older chapters (fighting through a mob of Dry Bones, a lane of Bill Blasters) and the previous Paper Mario (a trick corridor, Fire Bars). It’s stylish but the least memorable, especially since most of the enemies are simply tougher versions of ones you’ve fought. It’s telling that the boss who corresponds to this section, Gloomtail, is cut off so far that he’s basically the entire second act on his own. After him, you’ve got to solve fun, self-contained riddles in an eerie Palace Tower before contending with the Three Shadows and Doopliss one last time. The puzzles in the next section are more complicated, though, as they involve going back and forth between rooms and feature weirder enemies and a more threatening atmosphere. That ends with the final showdown against the X-Naut boss Grodus, before Bowser and Kammy Koopa blindside you. Then it’s just a quick walk to fight the Shadow Queen and end the adventure. Easy.

What makes the Palace of Shadow work for me is two things. Firstly, while it is very creepy overall, its creepiness is varied. The Palace Tower has that spooky music and magical starry floor; it feels truly ethereal. The lower section’s darker, louder music, which gets multiple arrangements in the remake to drive this home, gives the impression that you’re descending deeper and deeper into the bowels of the Earth. Every part feels specific. And that variety is only furthered by how these areas feel distinct by corresponding to specific challenges, like mild platforming sequences or boss rushes. Without as much character work it really depends on that, and I think it works on the whole.

Image: Source Gaming. The final boss, the Shadow Queen, becomes vulnerable from the well wishes of the various characters you’ve saved. It’s a special moment, especially in a game that’s so built around a large cast.

The other part is that it crucially feels like a culmination. The puzzles and enemies force you to regularly use all of your partners, items, and special abilities, so everyone in the party feels useful and every challenge feels like a way for you to show off. With the exception of the final boss (who’s still possessing Peach, a decades-old gaming icon who you play as in multiple sections) and Gloomtail (who’s in practice still a palette swap of Hooktail), all the villains are characters you know. But it also has that wonderful part of the final fight where almost every single named, plot-relevant NPC shows up to wish you luck against the Shadow Queen. A lot of Nintendo games like to end on something of a final exam, and this one takes that to be the capper on not just mechanics, but multiple storylines as well.

IN BETWEEN THE CHAPTERS AND OPTIONAL CONTENT

I mentioned earlier that between every chapter, Mario has to go back to Rogueport to start the next leg of the journey. This turns the hub into an event, especially once your ability to return gets cut off. Typically, you’ll have to do “something” before leaving—do a favor for the local Don Corleone parody, secure a boat—making the return a mini-chapter on its own with the same sort of adventure game logic. Some of the denizens are plot-relevant, but all of them are NPCs for the entirety of the game. You can talk with them before or after they’re important, and what they say will be different for every chapter. This gives Rogueport a very concrete sense of place and the plot a greater weight. In fact, everyone feels like something of a Greek chorus. A notice board sensationalizes plot points, Luigi spends the between-chapter sections on a breather from his own, stupider offscreen adventure, and dialogue constantly references older events or foreshadows the next one.

Image: Source Gaming. One of Bowser’s interstitial sequences. He and Peach have them after each chapter, but while Peach’s involve trying to learn about the next chapter, Bowser’s dopily crash through the last one. Here he’s “menacing” Bub from Chapter 6, right after Mario’s finished Chapter 7.

There are also explicit chapter breaks in which you play as Peach (who tries to undermine her captivity and uncover the plot) or Bowser (who merely fumbles through the plot in a move that cemented his position as Nintendo comedy royalty). They’re palette cleansers after the boss fights. It’s an expansion of what the first Paper Mario did, and it adds to both that variety element and the general sense of high adventure. These generally don’t do as much to alter the formula, beyond the three of Bowser’s that turn the game into a Super Mario Bros. parody; neither character can even jump, and mostly you just move Peach or Bowser to the right area to see a bit. But I also don’t think they need to be much more than that. It keeps them in the story and gives you a wider look at a world that seems to exist without Mario in it.

Image: Source Gaming. The final floor in the Pit of 100 Trials. The first time, you face off against Bonetail; the remake adds the goofy optional NPC Whacka for subsequent challenges as an in-joke two decades in the making.

Despite such a linear, segmented structure, there’s actually quite a lot of optional content. Much of it involves busywork (most notably the Trouble Center, which has a few good side quests alongside tedium), but there’s also a number of things you can just fully miss. You can find an optional party member, upgrade your team, rejoin the Glitz Pit, enjoy the Pianta Parlor mini-games, trade Star Pieces with Dazzle, or talk to weirdos like Grifty and Wonky whose personalities are almost mini rewards for exploration. The biggest is the Pit of 100 Trials, a hundred-level combat dungeon that is exciting, fun, and brutally challenging by the end.

THEMES AND MOTIFS

Looking over all of this, there are a few notable themes. The first is a wealth of events and setups. Outside of following a structure in which Mario has to get in some fights and eventually come home with the McGuffin, each story finds plenty of ways to be distinct. They may be adventurous, comedic, dramatic, scary, mysterious, or heroic (though the first two are most common). But crucially, they don’t involve the core mechanics being upended. In fact, the most famous and extreme Chapters, 3 and 6, are still very standard JRPG levels. They just transpose the stuff you do in these games—exploration, battles, puzzles—onto settings that don’t match the genre’s ethos. This is good, because it shows how you can create interesting and diverse settings or levels through toying with the aesthetics. I could imagine a future Paper Mario building plots out of premises like a mayoral election or natural disaster or prison breakout. Making multiple fully distinct movesets or gameplay systems can be prohibitively costly, prone to bugs, or not gel with the main gameplay, so finding ways to toy with the system you have is really smart for pacing and variety.

Image: Source Gaming. Mario’s contact X sends instructions for in-between the Glitz Pit fights.

There’s also that structure of fetch quests, backtracking, and basic puzzles. At its worst, it’s annoying or can feel like homework, especially if you’ve replayed the game as many times as I have. But it’s often a tool for tone and pacing and humor. Rogueport, Glitzville, and Poshley Heights feel about as lived in as you could ever get from a Mario game, and… that’s really cool! Mario doesn’t have this in his games; in fact, most of the time that’s a good thing. It’s often antithetical to his virtues of giddy forward momentum. But by marrying it to those very specific mechanics, this kind of material comes across as an extension of Mario’s bouncy personality. This wasn’t uncommon in the early 2000s, as plenty of Mario games explored this to some degree. It was just that entries like Luigi’s Mansion or Super Mario Sunshine were often compromised by other issues or didn’t sell their newcomers as well. This felt the least compromised, and that’s true of most of its design decisions as a whole.

That repeated motion of going back and forth adds to this kind of serialization, which is another idea we don’t associate with Mario. There are so many recurring characters and events, to say nothing of how the story is more heavily plotted or that Rogueport NPCs can go through entire arcs through missable dialogue. Mostly this is confined to the hub, but you do see many characters jump around, whether that’s the minor NPCs the Traveling Sisters Three, villains like Doopliss or the X-Nauts, or the optional party member Ms. Mowz. It creates a sense of broader stability.

Image: Source Gaming. Podley’s Place in Rogueport’s main square. Flavio will keep singing his song until it becomes useful in Chapter 5, and Luigi and his… “friend” Torque hang out for a spell in Chapter 4. The nameless Bob-omb and Little Mouser get new dialogue for every chapter.

And while we didn’t really discuss it, one element is important, which is that this is a game about artifice and theater and performance. You literally act out the plot of the game through battles on a stage. You find required items by causing the backgrounds to randomly warp. The end credits in the remake are a curtain call. Two of the main characters are actors. Mario takes on roles and even identities: The Great Gonzales, his own shadow, Luigi, and plenty of mustache-themed nicknames. This has been a central part of the Mario character forever, and it’s also part of many games in the Paper Mario series as a whole, but it’s rarely felt stronger than here. Which is good, as it’s just one more way that everything fits together.

CONCLUSION

In the years since The Thousand-Year Door’s release, it’s taken on an outright mythological quality. The game is the apex of Mario RPGs by consensus, but it also carries this sense of loss. Super Paper Mario would go even weirder but married that to boring 2D platforming before Nintendo demanded the series shed much of its identity. Fans point to the terribly gimmicky combat of the series’ last three original games, or the branding edict that has banned characters like Goombella, Vivian, or the Glitz Pit’s bombastic heel Rawk Hawk. I don’t have an interest in continuing this debate, but playing the remake this summer I realized that it’s not just characters or gameplay that sets TTYD apart from the rest of its series. It’s also the sense of pace, drive, and narrative diversity. The other games have it, but not as much and not as well handled. And while the Mario & Luigi games are known for even loopier plotting, I’ve never found them to come anywhere close to this, whether in their characters or their structure.

Image: Source Gaming. Lord Crump pulls out the time bomb at the end of Chapter 2. Surprising moments like this are everywhere in the game.

That being said, it’s not as though it’s the only part of the franchise with these qualities. Paper Mario: The Origami King in particular does many of the same ideas. It’s limited by the basic combat being unsatisfying, and you don’t get dungeons or areas this distinct, but that same exploratory design is still there. But oddly enough, perhaps the greatest heir to The Thousand-Year Door isn’t another RPG but the superlative Super Mario Odyssey. The globetrotting, the ways it opens up and cuts off, the themes of each sandbox, the sense of humanity, and especially that energetic pace are all there.

Looking outside, though, away from the Mario franchise, I think you can see Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door as an example of how to develop a satisfying structure for your game. It provides one way in which you can map one genre onto another and wind up with something that feels wholly unique. It shows the value of treating parts of your story as connected even if you cordon off parts into their own segments. And it teaches us that we should think of pacing in the broadest and narrowest senses. If you are making a linear game and want each part to be special, this gives you a pretty good direction.