Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door Review

Battles in RPGs are usually tedious and annoying, but Paper Mario’s battle system is incredibly fun. It doesn’t feel random or unfair. You don’t periodically miss for no apparent reason, nor are you severely punished if you try to run. And, more importantly, you feel like you are playing an important role in the outcome instead of just selecting commands and hoping for the best. Paper Mario stresses interactivity. To deal the most damage, you will have to time button presses perfectly, fling the analog stick, and even balance a cursor inside a reticule. There is one special power you can execute which would technically allow you to jump on an enemy’s head forever as long as you time every button press just right. On the flipside, you can lessen the damage you take by pressing A at the right moment, and if you’re really good, you can turn that around and damage the enemy with their own attack. Another little touch is pressing A after you’ve already attacked in hopes of getting “stylish” points. Battles also take place on a stage where all kinds of crazy things can happen. Maybe the scenery falls down or someone in the audience throws a hammer at you. In these battles, you always have to stay alert, and it’s so much more involving.

The way “leveling up” is handled isn’t too typical, either. After every battle, you are rewarded with star points. This works like experience points except that you don’t have to win 2,345 of them to reach the next level. It’s always 100. But reaching a new level doesn’t instantly boost all your stats. There are three options to choose from: +5 health, +5 flower points, and +3 badge points. Flower points are a necessity if you plan on using a lot of special attacks, which you should, because they deal the most damage. Badge points let you wear more badges, and badges do many different things for you. Some badges will grant you new special powers. Other badges will raise your defense or slowly refill your FP meter. Mario may not be able to wear armor, and he may not even be able to carry many items, but the badge system more than makes up for it.

Paper Mario is surprisingly difficult, too. Many solutions to necessary puzzles can be quite subtle and easily overlooked. Battles, also, aren’t just handed over to you. Though I’ve only gotten Game Over a couple times, there have been matches where my teammate fainted, my FP ran out, and I only had two HP left before I won. It’s nice to play an RPG that doesn’t help you win every step of the way, but it can also be frustrating for younger gamers who may have mistaken Paper Mario as something they could enjoy just as much. Leveling up is misleading, and I know several kids who went about it all wrong. To them, maxing out the HP seemed like the obvious choice. More health means a better chance of staying alive… right?! But when it came time to fight a big boss, it was impossible for them to win. Without a lot of FP and badges backing them up, they didn’t stand a chance no matter how good their HP meter was. When this happens, the only option now is to spend five hours trying to level up by fighting monsters that don’t give you very many star points. For as accessible and family-friendly as Paper Mario tries to be, the leveling up system will manage to frustrate anyone who isn’t already familiar with the RPG genre and its hidden strategies.

Younger gamers will end up spending a good 40-50 hours with Paper Mario while older gamers can probably beat it in 25-30. And that’s still a lot. Fortunately, it remains fun and fresh the entire way through. This was a game I could have spent all day playing. The only thing that prohibited me from doing so was not the need to get some homework done but that I just got too tired reading all that dialogue. Seriously, it’s a bit much. But Paper Mario has so much to offer, it’s hard to get sick of it. The variety is great, and there’s a lot of hidden content for those who venture off the main road. Star shards to find. Badges to collect. Recipes to make. If you have to complete every RPG you play 100%, this one’s going to last you a long time.

Final Comments

Let me put it this way: If you liked Paper Mario on the Nintendo 64, you will like Paper Mario for the GameCube. And if you like RPGs in general, well… you know the rest. Paper Mario is huge. It’s a lengthy adventure packed with charm and humor and is diverse enough to keep things fresh ’til the end. And who doesn’t enjoy these interactive battles? They make me love the RPG genre again. My only gripe with this game is just how heavy it is on text. When I play a video game, my objective is to read as little as possible, and yet this has more “pages” in it than Crime and Punishment. It makes it hard for me to recommend this game to younger gamers, those who don’t yet understand the art of “skimming.” But the bottom line is: if you can read, you should play Paper Mario.