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Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door/YMMV

< Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door


  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: Fans went nuts when a remaster of this game was announced during September 2023's Nintendo Direct. And by nuts, we mean NUTS.
  • Anticlimax Boss: Macho Grubba from Chapter 3. Despite having a whopping 60HP, which is massive for this point, considering the last boss only had 30HP and the next one will only have 40HP, he's still incredibly easy to beat and also pretty easy to superguard as well. Although only if you do it quickly, as he uses his turns to buff himself up to monstrous levels.
  • Author's Saving Throw: The remake has gone out of its way to address a few aspects of the original game that were often criticized by fans.
    • To many fans' relief, backtracking is a lot less of a headache due to the addition of a warp zone hub in the sewers, with every location now having a corresponding Warp Pipe that leads you directly to it. Looks like the hunt for General White is now a lot less tedious!
    • You can swap between partners on the overworld instead of having to open up the pause menu each and every time you needed/wanted someone else on the field with you.
    • If you get too close to the edge of a body of water, there's now a brief mercy period where Mario will stop in place and flail his arms around, giving you time to course-correct before he falls in. While never considered to be outright dangerous, losing 1 HP every time you accidentally stepped into a pond/river/lake was incredibly annoying and surprisingly easy to do.
  • Broken Base: A few quickly cropped up for the remake.
    • Is it a graphical step down from the original or not? While the updated visuals and more atmospheric lighting in places like the Boggly Woods and Creepy Steeple have earned plenty of praise, just as many people feel that other places such as Rogueport and Petal Meadows suffer as a result while also taking umbrage with the more overt arts-and-crafts aesthetic since it brings back bad memories of the franchise's Dork Age.
    • You can expect any topic regarding Vivian's gender identity and how it should be handled to turn ugly. There's a three-way split between those who want her to be a crossdressing boy like in the original Japanese text, those who want her to be a girl like in the American localization, and those who want her to be transgender like in the Italian localization. In the interest of keeping the peace, we'll be leaving it at that.
    • The remake only appears to run at a mere 30 fps instead of the original's 60. To some it's an inexcusable deal-breaker since a newer, more powerful console somehow runs the game worse than far older hardware. But you'll find a surprising amount of people who find it to be a small issue, or even a non-issue altogether since the game still runs perfectly fine, and the Switch doubling as a proper console and a handheld means that sacrifices likely had to be made for it to stay stable.
  • Catharsis Factor:
    • Let's be honest: using Vivian to beat the ever-loving pigshit out of Beldam near the end of the game is ridiculously satisfying. Especially since if she's your partner on the field, she makes it clear that she's dying to pay Beldam back for all the abuse she's thrown her way.
    • Another satisfying villain to fight is Grubba, who is one of the most disgustingly evil and malevolent characters in the game. His giant size and easily Superguarded attacks make him feel less like an overwhelming opponent and more like a gigantic punching bag for you to unleash a karmic beatdown on.
    • And while we're at it? Try not to smile when you use the Yoshi Kid to humiliate the Iron Clefts after being forced to suffer a humiliating loss to them due to their "impenetrable" defenses.
  • Common Knowledge: Vivian being transgender in the Japanese release is treated as if it's fact (not helped by the Mario wiki locking her article where she's erroneously described as such), but that's not really the case. Her catch card in Super Paper Mario explicitly describes her as an otoko no ko, which is a type of male crossdresser putting on and committing to a female persona. She is transgender in a few localizations such as the Italian one, however.
    • Related to Vivian, she's often remembered as being abused by her sisters. However, Marilyn never abuses her (in fact, she doesn't really seem to react to her at all): Beldam is the sole abuser among the Sirens. While Marilyn never stands up for her, it doesn't seem to be out of malice so much as it seems to be out of fear of Beldam, since she's a victim of her abuse as well (albeit to a lesser extent).
  • Complete Monster: If her backstory alone is anything to go by, the Shadow Queen is one of the most evil characters in the entire Mario franchise. She is, after all, a mass-murdering, soul-sucking demon queen played surprisingly straight for a kid-friendly franchise.
    • Grubba is a lot lower key, but still pretty vile. Only someone as sick and vain as him would lure unwitting people to his battle tournaments only to drain the life out of them and absorb it in order to keep him eternally young and good looking.
  • Contested Sequel: Both this game and the original Paper Mario are some of the most beloved entries in the Mario franchise as a whole, but there's quite a bit of debate as to which one is the better game. Fans of this game cite the writing, deeper gameplay, and more unique environments as points in its favor, while fans of the original mark it down for the many instances of back-tracking, repetitive hallway-esque maps, and the way you can get completely fucked over if the mandatory in-battle slot machine decides to screw you over with a bad roll.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Bowser's battle in Chapter 8.
    • Pretty much all of the bosses have wonderful music. Notable mentions are Hooktail/Gloomtail/Bonetail's boss music and Rawk Hawk's kickass battle theme.
    • Also, the Rogueport Theme, the Rogueport Sewers theme, the X-Naut Fortress theme... hell, this entire game is a Crowning Music of Awesome.
    • Crump, Grodus, and the Shadow Queen's battle themes as well, only fitting as they are the main antagonists.
  • Demonic Spiders: Quite a few enemies count, mostly endgame ones.
    • Crayzee Dayzees are back, same with Amayzee Dayzees, and are exactly as annoying as they were in the first game. Only this time they're encountered in chapter 4 instead of 6, meaning that you're weaker and lacking in reliable ways to kill them in one turn without burning through resources and FP. And blocking their sleep-inducing attacks hasn't gotten a single bit easier.
      • Amayzee Dayzees are even worse though, thanks to how the Pit of 100 Trials handles them. They're among the enemies that can spawn in the last few floors, and any time you fight one? There's a chance you have to fight multiple Amayzee Dayzees at once. If they all decide to attack you, you're dead unless you've got multiple Life Shrooms on hand or are a god at Superguarding since being forced to eat multiple 20 damage attacks on one turn can kill you several times over.
    • Unlike in the first game where Piranha Plants are bog-standard weak enemies, this game's Piranha Plants are some of the biggest threats you'll run into in the Pit of 100 Trials. They often appear in groups, have 15 HP, and 9 Attack power, meaning that they'll chomp off huge chunks of HP every single time they get a turn. The only way to reliably kill these things before they have a chance to attack is to go absolutely nuts with attacks that hit all your enemies at once and hope that you've got enough items or Star Power to cover your losses.
    • Wizzerds and Elite Wizzerds will give you hell once they start showing up. Thanks to their beefy defenses, hard-hitting attacks, and love of boosting their stats, they're a nightmare to fight by themselves. So naturally, they almost always show up in packs, and Elite Wizzerds can create illusory copies to waste your time. How fun!
    • Being the strongest members of the Swooper family, Swampires combine their little bros' immunity to ground-based attacks and tendency to cling to the ceiling and nullify even more of your attacks with a monstrous 20 HP and sky-high Attack stat.
    • Arantulas. Just... Arantulas. Like many of the worst enemies in the Pit of 100 Trials they have high HP and attack power and often appear in groups, but what makes them unique is that they retain their weaker Pider cousin's multi-hitting web spit attack. Only this time, they change their firing speed between shots. Guarding this attack is even more annoying than it used to be, and even if you pull it off, it'll still hurt unless you're a pro at superguarding. These traits combined with actually being spiders also makes them a literal example of this trope.
  • 8.8: Game Informer originally gave the game a 6.5. This would have been bad enough, but the reviewer's primary complaint? The writing was bad. The ensuing fan backlash actually prompted two letters of apology. The first one claimed that the reviewer gave the score not of his opinion, but guessing how well consumers would like it. This caused more complaints about the review, so a second apology letter was written with the exact opposite message.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse:
    • You can find a lot of fan art of Vivian...usually with, ah, exaggerated assets. She's also popular in general for being an absolutely adorable Woobie who is a very useful partner in combat.
    • Another incredibly popular partner is the Yoshi Kid you hatch in Chapter 3. The fact that he can come in several different colors, can be named, and is very spunky and entertaining help make him one of the game's most memorable partners. He also helps you move faster around the overworld, a godsend for a game with several backtracking-heavy sections.
    • And rounding out the triumvirate of popular partners is Admiral Bobbery, for putting the Badass in Badass Grandpa and having what just might be one of the most tragic backstories among Paper Mario partners.
    • For a character that only plays a major role for a short time, Jolene is pretty popular with the fans thanks to be surprisingly attractive for a Toad, as well as being an effective Red Herring who proves instrumental in exposing Grubba's villainy.
    • Rawk Hawk, for his hilarious and incredibly entertaining Heel personality and kickass boss music.
    • Doopliss, who pulls the rug out from under you and turns what seems like the game's shortest and most unremarkable chapter into a tedious, yet heartbreaking ordeal where Mario loses his identity and friends for a bit. The Chapter 3 and 4 areas are chock full of darkhorses it seems.
    • Flavio. See Unpopular Popular Character below.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Defeating Bonus Boss Bonetail nets you a grand total of... one Star Point. Players will naturally rage at this... until realizing that this is the game's way of saying "You just beat the hardest enemy in the entire game. You don't need to level up anymore!"
    • It's the same with the Shadow Queen, as she was beaten by the legendary heroes a long time ago. They must have already gotten the Queen's star points when they defeated her!
    • Cortez's forms. First, a four-armed skeleton holding each of his weapons. Then, a hunched-over skeleton with some gem in the torso. And finally, his head and his weapons. Why do his forms progress like this? He's falling apart.
    • How come the impenetrable defenses of the Iron Cleft brothers never manage to get further than 10th place in the Glitz Pit? Because the guys directly above them are Spike Tops. Iron Clefts have unbeatable defenses, but only have an attack of 4, Spike Tops have a defense of 5. While they claim that their spikes can penetrate any substance, said claims just don't stand up to scrutiny.
  • Epileptic Trees: The addition of a brand new Toad character in the reveal trailer was surprising, considering Nintendo's stance on editing existing Mario character templates (they hate it). And naturally, it led a lot of speculation about his role in the game, with some theorizing that he'd be an important part of a sidequest, or possibly someone who would influence the Yoshi Kid's color, given his presence in Glitzville. A later trailer, however, would clarify that his purpose is to help you learn the timing for your action commands.
  • Fridge Horror: At the bottom of the Pit of 100 Trials is Bonetail. This means that a giant, skeletal dragon has been living underneath Rogueport all this time. Who knows? What if it didn't start out skeletal?.
    • At one point you must look behind a crate. You'll see a few of Mario's new friends lying on the ground, not moving. You can say they're stunned, until you see the flies. They live, but were right on the verge of dying had Mario not found them when he did.
    • In Rougeport, there seems to be some dried reddish-brown stuff on the ground. One could easily pass this off as dirt, until you realize that it's next to the gallows, and that it's found nowhere else in town...
  • Fridge Logic: Glitzville is presumably in the skies of the Mushroom Kingdom, yet pretty much nobody there recognizes Mario or Bowser!
  • Game Breaker:
    • Superguarding. There's no badge or FP consumption involved: just press B at the right moment during an enemy's attack, and you'll nullify it completely with the added bonus of doing chip damage to physical attackers. Attacks that can't be Superguarded are few and far between, and most of those require a turn to set up and thus allow you to avoid them completely with Vivian's Veil move. While the timing can be tricky to master, it seriously pays off.
    • Just like in the first game, combine Power Bounce with moves and/or items that beef up your attack and lower the enemy's defenses, and laugh all the way to the bank as you stomp the poor sap you attacked to death. Like with Goombario, Goombella can get in on the fun thanks to Multibonk, though unlike him she doesn't have native access to Charge.
    • An overlooked example who's been seeing more attention is Flurrie. She's one of the tankier partners, and has all sorts of tools that help keep both you and her in the game. Lip Lock is an armor-piercing attack that also restores her health and Dodgy Fog makes it harder for enemies to attack you and her, but the deadliest tool in her arsenal is Gale Force. It's one of several attacks in the franchise that can instantly clear the field of enemies regardless of how much health they have, and works on almost every single enemy in the game. While most attacks of its ilk balance things out by not giving you EXP for enemies defeated with them, that's not the case with this one! Feel free to unleash insta-kill hurricanes to your heart's content, especially in the lower levels of the Pit of 100 Trials!
    • Two of the Yoshi Kid's attacks are multi-hitting moves, with one of them targeting every single ground-bound enemy. While he won't do Power Bounce levels of damage, several attack boosts will still turn him into a pint-sized angel of death.
    • While the Crystal Star powers are amazing in general, Power Lift is a true king among kings. It acts like an inverted version of Muskular's Chill Out ability from the first game, but instead of lowering your enemies' attack? It allows you to boost your Attack and Defense through an easy minigame that lets you get several boosts before it ends. While said boosts are temporary, it uses surprisingly little SP meaning that late in the game, you can reset your buffs immediately after they run out the clock.
  • Hate Dumb: Less considerate fans of Origami King tend to be very aggressive in voicing their displeasure for this game, loudly declaring it to be overrated while attacking its fans for being "stuck in the past".
  • Hell Is That Noise: The sound the Fuzzies make when they bounce? That now belongs to the Stock Sound Effects. Good luck not worrying every time you hear it.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Years earlier in the live action parts of the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, professional wrestler Captain Lou Albano took on the role of Mario. In Glitzville in this game, Mario takes on the role of a professional wrestler, the Great Gonzales.
  • Love to Hate: Grubba is an evil, selfish old bastard, but you can't deny that he's as entertaining as it gets. The same goes for Rawk Hawk, whose Jerkass Heel presentation makes him incredibly fun to root against.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Two characters during Chapter 3 definitely lay claim to this trope.
    • Grubba. He's a hilariously Hot-Blooded yet polite Southern Gentleman who moonlights as a G-rated Serial Killer while using sheer charisma and surprisingly sharp engineering skills to keep himself above suspicion. Even when you uncover the truth, he proves to be on the more "affable" side of Faux Affably Evil and takes his loss on the chin due to appreciating the fight you put up against him.
    • Jolene, meanwhile, is running her own scheme to expose Grubba, which has her put on the persona of a frigid, shady Red Herring to keep you in the dark while pointing you towards important clues, secrets, and valuable items via Deep Throat-style emails. She ultimately comes out on top over Grubba, and gets her beloved little brother back in the process.
  • Memetic Sex Goddess: Vivian isn't this to the fandom at large, but she qualifies to a very specific portion of it. Said specific fandom is 4chan's Chubby Chaser crowd, who often flood Vivian-focused threads with art of her plumped up.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Grodus shutting TEC-XX down. As the player's guide says: "If you don't feel much animosity toward Sir Grodus at this point, you will by the time the event is over."
    • He gets another awful moment when he's holding Peach hostage in a barrier and threatens to kill her if Mario continues to fight him. He takes advantage of this by torturing Mario and his partners with a continuous stream of lightning bolts knowing full well that Mario wouldn't dare fight back.
    • Chapter 3's villain Grubba started out on the wrong side of this by luring unsuspecting fighters to his arena so he could drain the life from them and use it to remain young and spry forever.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The bathroom in the glitz pit. Seriously, what the hell, Nintendo?
    • Even worse is finding King K. and Bandy Andy on death's door in a sealed-off closet in the Pit.
    • The tune that comes with X's e-mails (from the ice world in Super Mario Bros. 3)
    • The 'victory' music that plays at the end of a battle and your partner has been knocked out. Ugh...
  • Nightmare Retardant: Doopliss's abilities remain terrifying throughout Chapter 4, but that doesn't change the fact that the one responsible for the town's curse is a Bedsheet Ghost in a party hat and bowtie who is sitting in an easy chair watching TV when you first meet him.
  • Player Punch: Sir Grodus shutting TEC-XX down, if you really felt for TEC.
    • Seeing Doopliss possess Mario's body and running around pretending to be him while the player is unable to do anything about it just yet or even return to Rogueport, can be a little jarring. Especially when you fight him for the final time and he's assisted by your partners, who are all hell-bent on beating you senseless while you can't do anything but either focus on taking down Doopliss or beat them down as well.
  • Political Correctness Gone Mad: The Bowdlerised script used for the remake has attracted a lot of criticism for needless censorship, but this particular brand of criticism applies to one surprising change. The trio of sleazy Goombas who hit on Goombella during the first trip into the sewers was changed to them complaining about "arrogant surface dwellers" barging in on their turf. While some have defended the change by calling the original dialogue sleazy and creepy, many have pointed out that it's supposed to be sleazy and creepy, and that Goombella sarcastically leading them on, blowing them off, and helping Mario kick their asses is not only a hilarious bit of karmic payback, but that it shows that she's a bonafide badass who refuses to be victimized by a bunch of creeps.
    • While not as infamous as the above example, other maligned-changes done for the sake of political correctness include Bowser calling Kammy a lunkhead instead of an airhead (often viewed as a more female-gendered insult), as well as him telling a Hammer Bro to do some situps without calling him fat (specifically, "tubby") in the process.
  • The Scrappy:
    • Flurrie is easily the least popular partner, which can mostly be attributed to her design. However, she has been slowly, but surely gaining popularity due to being surprisingly useful in the Pit of 100 Trials as well as a sweetheart to Punio and his Puni brethren. Then there are the people who like said "off-putting" design due to finding her to be more of a Big Beautiful Woman.
    • TEC is also one for people who are really disgusted the subplot involving him and Peach. To the point where Grodus deleting him causes celebration rather than being a tearjerker.
    • Francesca, Don Pianta's daughter. While Flurrie and TEC have their defenders who feel that hatred for them comes from weird personal hangups as opposed to being genuinely unlikable, Francesca's abusive attitude towards Frankie and entitled Jerkass behavior make her a very difficult character to like. It doesn't help that she's a big source of Padding thanks to stopping the action and forcing Frankie to say "I love you!" one hundred times to her during one part of the game, which gets old very fast and ends up being painfully unfunny as opposed to an amusing Overly Long Gag.
    • General White gets this for the obnoxiously long and drawn-out wild goose chase you have to endure if you want to start Chapter 7. Even worse, one sidequest has you hunt him down all over again!
  • Scrappy Mechanic
    • The slot machine, which will automatically roll a slot every turn in battle, and if it gets two matching slots, you're forced to roll the last slot. Most of the time, it's no big deal since you can potentially refill your HP, FP, SP, or even all three at once. But if you've got two Poison Mushrooms lined up, pray to god that you don't roll a third one, because if you do, you lose almost all your health, ALL of your FP, and all your SP to boot. There is nothing you can do to prevent this, and if it happens during the final boss fight or the Pit of 100 Trials, you're as good as dead.
    • Likewise, the battle stage can, at any time, be subject to luck-based phenomenon which hurts you way more than it helps you. Just some of these lovely effects include having a Boo turn your enemies transparent (making them impossible to hit), you or your partner being crushed under stage lights, both you and your partner being frozen for several turns by sprinklers, and having fog suddenly appear to mess up your accuracy.
  • Spoiled by the Format: Did you really think Chapter 4 would be finished in about 15-20 minutes?
  • Tainted by the Preview: While the initial trailer attracted a lot of hype, further video footage of the remake alienated fans who weren't happy with the Bowdlerised script or certain graphical changes, as mentioned in the They Changed It, Now It Sucks blurb below.
  • That One Boss: The Shadow Queen is quite hard, even by Final Boss standards. Despite having only 1 Defense and her Attack being outmatched by a boss from 10 minutes ago, she gets multiple attacks per round, as well as being very difficult to time for dodges, so the damage starts racking up very quickly. She also has an attack that will drain your HP, and at one point, eats the audience's SOULS to restore her health. Oh, and there's a pair of very long unskippable cutscenes before the real fight starts. Have fun.
    • Magnus 2.0. He's got That One Attack where he sucks up the audience in a hose and rapid-fires them at you, dealing completely massive damage unless you can block correctly.
    • There's also Bowser's appearance out of nowhere in the Palace of Shadow, primarily because, Mario is probably on low health from the preceding battle with Grodus, and Bowser and Kammy have quite a bit of health for this battle.
    • Gloomtail is basically Hooktail minus her crippling weakness to cricket sounds. He hits hard, has a ton of health, and he can super-charge his already hard-to-block poison breath so it will deal a stupid amount of damage.
    • Hell, even Hooktail can be surprisingly difficult if you don't equip the Attack FX Badge that she's weak too. 5 damage from every attack is brutal, especially since one of her main attacks is fire breath that hits both Mario and his partner at the same time.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: While the character designs were left intact (them being changed for not being in-line with Nintendo's post-Super Paper Mario character mandates was a common fear before its announcement), other aspects of the remake were changed, much to the annoyance of fans.
    • In keeping with Sticker Star and beyond putting a lot more emphasis on the "Paper" part of the equation, the remake changes a lot of objects, buildings, and other structures to look more outright papery. Instead of being made of wood, the gallows in Rogueport is now a bunch of papery sheets that look like wood. Streams of water are now blue paper streamers. And while they're nowhere near as blatant as before, characters still have white outlines around them as if they were cut free from a larger sheet of paper. Considering how the "Sticker trilogy" came under fire for being way too on the nose with the whole paper thing, it reminds fans too much of an era they had hoped to leave behind.
      • Related to it is the floor textures looking way too shiny and slick in a lot of places, including the rainbow plant matter in Boggly Woods and the pavement/stone walkways seen in places like Rogueport and the sewers beneath.
    • The lighting, likewise, has come under fire for ruining the atmosphere in a few locations. The Rogueport Sewers are way brighter and shinier than any sewer system should be, and the skybox is no longer visible through the windows in Hooktail's castle, with it looking so bright that some joke that a nuclear test is happening in her backyard while the castle itself, paradoxically, looks darker, duller, and washed out.
    • While some find the newly "voiced" dialogue to be funny, just as many find it to be obnoxious.
    • The new soundtrack has its detractors who find it to be less appealing than the original, but that has been mitigated with a low-cost, 0 BP badge that changes the soundtrack to the one heard in the Gamecube original.
    • The script has been changed in a lot of places, with many people feeling that it's for the worse. Some dialogue/wording is drier (The Shadow Sirens now being called The Three Shadows), while other parts catch flack for unnecessary censorship (the sleazy Goombas mentioned above).
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Jolene's brother and the Glitz Pit's first champion, Prince Mush. After you beat Grubba and the Crystal Star releases him, he could have been a good Bonus Boss along with Bonetail and the Atomic Boo. Despite false claims that he was supposed to be one, a look at the game's code indicates that Nintendo didn't even consider it.
  • Unpopular Popular Character: Despite being universally hated in-game, Flavio has a surprising fanbase. While he's an arrogant blowhard and a huge coward, he's hilariously arrogant and cowardly, and steals the spotlight in just about every scene he's in.
  • The Woobie: Vivian. Oh God. Beldam's just plain awful to her, and her abuse has done a number on her self-confidence. Is it any wonder that she'd abandon her sisters and team up with the very first person to show her kindness?
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