In terms of gameplay, the title uses its fantastic stories to create situations in which Mario needs to perform a surprisingly creative mixture of platforming, puzzle solving, exploration, and investigation. The Thousand-Year Door, as a consequence, is constantly bent on motivating players to keep on going, whether it is to figure out why in the world the X-Nauts need Princess Peach, what the cataclysm was all about, or why there is a dragon terrorizing peaceful a meadow. In other chapters, the hero will be forced to become a fighter in a wrestling-like arena where something blatantly fishy is occurring spend seven days inside a train where what was supposed to be a leisure trip will be disrupted by mysterious occurrences and much more. In perhaps what is the most unexpected setting to ever appear in a Mario game, for example, the plumber will visit a cursed town whose inhabitants are turning into pigs whenever a bell tolls a situation that gets creepier and weirder the deeper Mario delves into the riddle. On the other hand, even in those two instances when it is reusing rough structures, The Thousand-Year Door is able to infuse so much creativity, originality, and charm into what it does that every chapter feels like a completely different monster. On one hand, The Thousand-Year Door does do some recycling: case in point, two of the chapters involve storming a fortress and reaching a tropical island (settings that will certainly ring a bell in the minds of those who went through the original Paper Mario). Mario, once more, will be tasked with gathering a set of seven stars – this time around, dubbed the Crystal Stars – and in order to do so he will have to travel to different locations of this strange land that lies far away from the Mushroom Kingdom.Įach chapter, then, holds a standalone story arch that must be followed until a boss is defeated and the Crystal Star is acquired and each one of them is absolutely bursting with brilliancy. As it happens in Paper Mario, though, the greatest gems of The Thousand-Year Door’s writing are not found in its core plot, but in the underlying chapters that make up the game’s meat. Much of the plumber’s quest, then, deals with discovering the lines that join those seemingly unrelated dots: the X-Nauts, the cataclysm, Rogueport, Princess Peach, and the titular door. Unaware of said history, Peach visits that town, purchases a treasure map after being approached by a mysterious hooded woman, sends Mario the chart, and gets taken away. Later, a new port town – Rogueport – was built on top of it. 1,000 years before the game’s events, a town was destroyed by a dark cataclysm of unknown origin and it sunk into the earth. However, below Peach’s latest abduction lies a relatively unique premise. Truthfully, Peach does still get taken away – not by Bowser, but by the X-Nauts, a goofy-looking race of aliens. The Thousand-Year Door shuns Mario adventures’ usual setup of Bowser-kidnaps-Peach for something far more intriguing and intricate. The first statement such freedom produces comes in the game’s story. Therefore, with the title’s bases established, writers and developers alike were free to focus on coming up, respectively, with new scenarios and gameplay elements which explains why The Thousand-Year Door manages to, during the course of its forty-hour quest, achieve what its prequel had masterfully done, only in a much larger scale: be relentlessly entertaining, fun, and engaging. However, it is greatly aided in that task by the fact that while its prequel was forced to mostly fly blind, having to be constructed without the support of Squaresoft and consequently being forced to look for a brand of role-playing gameplay that stepped away from the tradition built by Final Fantasy, The Thousand-Year Door stood on solid well-defined ground. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, then, is a game with a whole lot to live up to. Acknowledging the overwhelming success with which the original Paper Mario was met, Intelligent Systems and Nintendo set out not to reinvent the wheel, but to replicate that experience with punctual improvements and the ambition to make it bigger goals that are certainly not as straightforward as they sound given how Paper Mario often flirted with perfection and, in the process, came off as Mario’s most epic adventure up to that point and also one of the very best. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is one of those games that understands what fans want, and then proceeds to give them exactly what is expected. A playable storybook in the form of an RPG that reveals outstanding characters, sharp writing, inventive story scenarios, and fantastic humor with every page that is turned
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