Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remake is full of quality of life updates
Next month, Nintendo will celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of its finest games. Nintendo GameCube classicPaper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is getting a Nintendo Switch rerelease that’s somewhere between a remaster and a remake (not unlike the company’s recent Super Mario RPG revisit). But a game as beloved as this presents a challenge for developers: How do you stay true to the original while still upgrading it enough to justify a full-priced double-dip rather than an HD port?
I got an answer to that question when Nintendo gave members of the press a close look at the upcoming Switch release. The good news for protective purists is that the remake doesn’t seem to be changing much about the core RPG aside from a bit of dialogue translation. Instead, the new version delivers key quality of life improvements to make a cult classic a bit friendlier to newcomers. That leaves it feeling like an even lighter makeover than Super Mario RPG, but a welcome one nonetheless.
What’s new?
During my hands-off demo, Nintendo would walk me through several familiar snippets of the adventure. I’d see the opening combat tutorial in Rogueport, some fights against Pale Piranhas, and Chapter 1’s climactic clash with Hooktail. Naturally, the most obvious change here is the remake’s newly redone visuals. The Switch version is notably more crisp than the GameCube original, thanks to the removal of messy artifacts around the edges of its paper characters. It’s smoother and more vibrant overall, with some more dynamic lighting to boot.
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While it’s nice to see newly retouched assets, I’d be lying if I said the visual upgrade makes too much of a difference. Like The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, another GameCube classic, The Thousand-Year Door featured a
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