What Sleeps Behind the Door?
Time passes, the pages turn…and a new chapter unfolds in an unfamiliar land! Get ready for a two-dimensional role-playing adventure for the ages as Mario returns to paper form to discover a mystery that sleeps behind an ancient, legendary portal called the Thousand-Year Door. The quest is long, the dangers many, and this time, Mario will have to make full use of his papery qualities just to survive.
Take to the stage! Impressing the crowd builds power for super attacks, but don’t disappoint the audience, or you’ll pay!
No need to go it alone! You’ll need to rely on sidekicks to survive, and even enemies have roles to play…
Don’t fold under pressure! Fold into a paper airplane, turn sideways to slip through cracks, and much more.
Stay on your toes! Stamp foes, swing your hammer, and use timely button presses to do damage!
If you have a Gamecube, play it.
Adorable game, with memorable characters and some very funny moments.
Some chapters require a huge amount of backtracking
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is a blissful role-playing game that in every way improves on its successor. Its light story and consistently humorous dialogue makes it a perfect choice for any lover of games. Behind the distinctly colourful world lies untold depth.
The game begins in the drab city of Rogueport, a drab, seedy town with many humorous, morally grey characters. The initial brownness of the town and grey tones of the sewers quickly fade to levels that feel entirely at home in a Mario game, and burst with color. From quaint villages to draconic strongholds, there is very rarely a time when a room is not filled with chroma across the spectrum
The combat is also incredibly well-polished, and require the player to take a deceptively active role in the details of battles, despite a simple turn-based system. Action commands ensure the player is always responsible for the outcome of battles, while stylish moves hide secrets in the combat that players will discover over time. The variance of these commands ensure that fighting with different partners feels very different.
A remarkably deep character customization system ties with combat to leave the player with even more diverse character builds to create. The badge system allows characters to choose combat buffs or new moves in the form of badges, which take a quantity of badge points that may be increased by leveling up.
The aforementioned basics may be found in many great role-playing games, but the one quality that sets The Thousand Year Door apart is its world. Everything feels alive. All characters always have a consistent and developing story throughout the game, and interaction reveals this through the incredibly clever, well-written dialogue. Even background characters typically have a very diverse set of dialogue depending on one’s progress throughout the game.
Conclusion: The Thousand Year Door is like many other RPGs, but its mechanics and writing are polished to a mirror shine. Do not let the age be off-putting; Not only has the game aged well, but its charm and mechanics will likely transcend its age.