July 22nd marked the 15th anniversary of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. It was the Gamecube sequel to the first Paper Mario on Nintendo 64 and it’s largely considered to be the best of the Mario RPGs. Let’s take a quick look back on it.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has the basic premise of Princess Peach being kidnapped but it’s not Bowser who kidnaps her this time. The Thousand-Year Door introduces a set of new villains, the X-Nauts, who plan to seize an ancient power that lies beyond the eponymous door that can only be opened by the Crystal Stars. In his quest to save Peach, Mario traverses a whole new region, allying with original characters in his search for the Crystal Stars.

The first two Paper Mario games are known for their partner system. Throughout the games, Mario meets up with original characters built off of pre-existing Mario enemies (or just new ones entirely). These characters fight alongside him and have a variety of nice, cute designs and fun personalities. The most famous of the game’s partners is Vivian, who is a trans woman character that the LGBTQ community has latched onto. While Mario fights by jumping and using hammers (whose uses can be diversified with equippable badges), his partners all have unique moves to encourage you to switch them around.

The game is divided into eight chapters, each ending with a segment where you play as Bowser (relegated to a secondary villain) and Peach.  Personally, I’m a big fan of the middle part of the game, chapters 3 to 5. Chapter 3 is pretty much an anime tournament arc, with Mario becoming the Great Gonzales, and climbing the ranks of a professional wrestling set-up with a new Yoshi partner as crimes go on in the shadows.

Chapter 4 is a gothic town where Vivian defects and joins you after Doopliss, a fun villain, has taken Mario’s identity and the rest of his party. The backtracking makes the chapter a bit annoying, but conceptually, it’s a cool level. Chapter 5’s got Mario recruiting a sea captain to go to an island, only to crash land there, ending things off with an intense boss battle against a skeletal ghost pirate. This is not to say that the rest of the game isn’t enjoyable, but these are the chapters that stand-out in my mind.

Building off the last game, The Thousand-Year Door‘s battles are presented as a bizarre stage play, the papercraft visuals befitting the image of stage props. Audience members join in or leave depending on your battle performance, charging up star power so that you can use the special moves given by the Crystal Stars.

Alongside the action command combat that calls for players to be more active in fights, you can also time button presses to do poses for the audience to increase his power further. Looking back on this battle system, the stage-play setup lends some more identity to the game, giving this weird showmanship vibe to the game that I really love.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a game that’s still looked on fondly, especially given the reception of later Mario RPGs. Like many Mario games, it enjoys a healthy speedrunning scene that actually has a well-documented Summoning Salt-like video, which I found in my research and I recommend giving it a watch.

However, despite the love for the game, The Thousand-Year Door has not had any form of official re-release. Super Mario RPG and the original Paper Mario were released on Virtual Console. The first and third Mario & Luigi games have been remade with new content. Yet, the Thousand-Year Door has largely been ignored.

The Thousand-Year Door being overlooked is only made more frustrating with the direction of the later Paper Mario games, especially those after Super Paper Mario. Mario is all by his lonesome in Sticker Star and Color Splash, aside from an obligatory exposition companion. There are no partners to interact with and no unique, original characters to act as Mario’s friends or enemies.

NPCs are mostly limited to Toads, with most of them not even having unique designs or distinguishable characters. To sum it up, the vibrant character of previous Paper Mario games turn into something generically Mario, the “New Super Mario Bros” of the Mario RPGs.

Paper Mario: Color Splash is viewed somewhat as a return to form in terms of fun writing coming off of Sticker Star. In Color Splash there’s a small instance of Mario talking with a friendly Shy Guy in a sort of ceasefire, and being forced to fight him later was a particular moment that stood out. However, this and Sticker Star had controversial battle systems, which relied on consumable items for combat.

Maybe one day, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door will get some form of a re-release. If it were to get a remaster on Switch, I’d be buying it at launch. For now, getting an official copy of the game is as hard as any other Gamecube game in that it’s ludicrously expensive.

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