Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door got the remake it deserved

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door’s Nintendo Switch remake is here, and that’s a big deal for fans of this Mario subseries. Paper Mario has been around since the Nintendo 64 days and has seen many iterations across most of Nintendo’s platforms since then. It has gone through different shapes and forms throughout that time, some more well-liked than others. None are more beloved than The Thousand-Year Door.

Released for GameCube in 2004, The Thousand-Year Door refined the traditional turn-based RPG formula that the original Paper Mario established. It excelled in its writing and characters, as it takes a lot of creative risks, creates memorable original characters, and isn’t bashful about being one of the funniest Nintendo games ever made. It’s considered a high point in a series that has had a divisive run in the two decades between that original release and this remake.

Now that Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is back on Nintendo Switch and I’ve played through the whole thing for myself, I understand why this game needed a remake. The Thousand-Year Door is unlike almost any other Mario game out there because of the emphasis it puts on its comedic writing, quirky cast of characters, and placing Mario in a variety of wacky situations that he had never been in before. It’s the kind of game that has left a lasting impression on many fans — it has even inspired a subset of indie games — but The Thousand-Year Door had never gotten the same love from Nintendo that it had from fans … until now.

• Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is getting a surprise Switch release

The Thousand-Year Door is special

Twenty years ago, the Paper Mario series hit its zenith with The Thousand-Year Door. By making all the right refinements to the formula the Nintendo 64 original established, Nintendo created a GameCube game that would go on to influence a generation of game developers, influencers, journalists, and gamers. It might not get the same credit for having that kind of