Of the many insidious consequences of the 7th generation of consoles amongst the most far reaching to this day is that sport and racing games remain largely relegated to the realm of franchise slop and 'bro gaming'
Once upon a time great game developers would occasionally just dip into this field and make something fun. I don't like golf, it's a beer and pretzels sport that inexplicably requires several square miles of terrain to play. Baseball is a great sport, everyone who plays it professionally has a fat ass and that's what it's all about, everyone who plays Golf professionally has a shrunken soul, Golf shrinks your soul, this is scientifically attested to. Nevertheless, Nazca, in the same year they released Metal Slug, also released a golf game, and it's cool! Just like when SEGA decided fucking squash was cool and made Cosmic Smash, which is cool. It's got that metal slug composer, beautiful terrain, mean level design and a level of immediacy and responsiveness you won't get from a golf game by a golf game company. defeat the programming, play a sports game, and no some indie game called like 'Lethal bullet league 20xx' and it's just pong with a gun and an anime girl doesn't count

There are games that come with a certain aura to them for those who have yet to play them. Many truly special games, one with massive critical and fan followings are as exciting to go through as they are intimidating. You know the ones, true classics like Final Fantasy VII or Resident Evil 4, monumentally influential games with huge fan followings that you can still feel the presence of even now. The Thousand Year Door, a game that is by all accounts, a very goofy Mario spin-off game with modest sales, a relatively small impact on the Mario franchise itself, and wouldn’t even dictate the course of its own spin-off series, is indeed one such game.

I want to get my own personal baggage right out of the gate because, despite not playing this game until its remake, I do have a bit of history with it. While I never played it personally, I watched my friend play the Twilight Town portion of the original when I was very young, and it always left a very big impression on me, as I’m sure it did a lot of people around my age. The look was instantly memorable, and it helped that it was such a moody yet oddly beautiful locale with just a dash of creepiness to it that instantly stuck itself in my brain. Despite my fascination with it at that age, and my ability to play Gamecube games at this time, I never ended up playing it, and I sort of forgot about it as the later half of the Wii era was on its way out. What ended up bringing Thousand Year Door back into the conversation, at least from my own observation, was the release of Paper Mario: Sticker Star. While I never played the game, and I only know so much of the context behind its release, it is about as universally hated a game as one could possibly imagine. A truly awful gameplay change bookended by the fact that it came during a time where the “Mario aesthetic” was reaching a pretty intentional marketization of itself that left the game feeling intensely hollow. While I am sure that the fandom before this game’s release was substantial, I think the release of Sticker Star is truly the moment that people realized how special a game Thousand Year Door was to them, and it became one of the most mythologized games in the entire Nintendo catalog as a result, helped by the fact they didn’t bother going back to that formula for two whole decades.

I’ve made the personal observation that the first two Paper Mario games feel like truly online video games, and while that does apply to the first game, no doubt, that is a statement I made specifically for Thousand Year Door. While the actual game would do little to influence the wider gaming landscape, I feel its presence nearly daily as someone who enjoys video games on the internet specifically. The soundtrack has backgrounded countless YouTube videos over the years, its intensely charming artstyle is very obviously a huge influence on many digital artists, and while this isn’t exclusive to this game specifically, it represents an era of “weird and charming” that specifically captures very online video game fans, Nintendo especially. This is also a Mario game with a pretty unambiguously trans-fem partner character… in Japan only, but still, Vivian is one of those characters that, as someone who has been very queer most of their life, means a lot to a lot of us.

All this to say, and I say it lovingly, people about this game are very annoying about it, and I do totally get it. The Paper Mario series pretty much turned into arts and craft bukkake with a New Super Mario Bros. gloss over the whole ordeal, but still. I guess that is what made the announcement of this remake and the fact they basically kept the whole thing as is, such a special moment. It is also as good a moment as any to finally get around to playing it. A lots happened in between seeing Vivian as an eight year old to having a full time job, and finally crossing it off the bucket list has been an incredibly exciting moment.

Comparing this game to its N64 predecessor feels like night and day. The original Paper Mario is quite a charming little experience, but I won’t lie, it was missing that special something to it to truly push it over the edge. Thousand Year Door makes it quite apparent that it is going to take the original, an already somewhat weird concept for a Mario spinoff, and go the extra mile with how weird a Mario game can get. The original game has Toad Town as its main hub, a quaint little castle town that you can totally picture as a picturesque “Mario location” for an RPG to take place. Thousand Year Door has Rogueport, a dingy port town where you get mugged immediately, the Piantas are mobsters who run casinos with bunny-girl Boo receptionists, and an entire section of the population chill in the sewers. The game only continues to throw equally wild concepts for set pieces for each and every chapter, homages to Pikmin, detective mysteries on a train, climbing the ranks of a wrestling federation, Intelligent Systems very clearly and obviously had a ton of fun throwing ideas at the wall for this one. There is just enough familiarity to the Mario formula, the plot is still to save Princess Peach (although from a much more alien force this time) and it eases in with a plot that feels very right at home with the first game. But it is not shy at all to be a game where one of the bosses asks if you want to smell their feet or trick you into thinking you’ve completed a chapter, only to reveal you lost and have to complete the real half of it. It is a game that is constantly throwing new ideas at you, and they all work so seamlessly, it is a constant joy.

The partners are also just a net upgrade, comparing Goombella and Goombario right at the start is savage, she shows right away how good this game’s writing is going to be. Tattling on enemies is something you will be doing the entire game, so having a character say that you need to kill a spider immediately because it grosses her out, or calling Bowser a big galoot, is a real treat. And in general, TTYD’s partners feel like they get to be real participants to the story around them, which I like the first game’s cast plenty, but it's basically just Kooper and Lady Bow who get any real significant material to work with. The partners in this one aren’t like the most developed characters ever put to page, but they are all memorable, charming characters, with pretty definable arcs, some going past their introductory chapters as well, it's a very clear difference. Also, while stuff like this should be expected, the fact Nintendo actually went and definitively made Vivian trans, no two ways around it, no localization gunk, no backhanded remarks outside of her abusive sister, nothing, it warms my soul a bit.

And of course the gameplay, basically just an upgraded version of the original for the most part, I love the action commands for this series, and having new tools to play around with is always going to be a lot of fun. But the battle system, it's good, but the real star of the show is the upgrade to the stage set. I adore this change so much, having an audience watch your fights, heckle you sometimes, having the stage fall apart, it is just an ingenious evolution of an already super clever artistic decision. Nothing here is necessarily going to blow your mind, but it always feels fun, and with the badge customization coming back, partners now getting a lot more developed with their own health bars, and all sorts of different tactile things to play around with in each fight, it never got as stale as the original could sometimes be. Although there are infamous portions of this game that many have critiqued, as there are plenty of instances of clear padding in the game. And while I do understand their complaints… cowards, the lot of them, all cowards. Having to go through 100 dialogue boxes of someone saying “I love you” or go through the entire game to find a bomb-omb who is revealed to be napping in his own damn house is prime early 2010s content bait. I think every Nintendo released game on the Gamecube has a section of it that completely and utterly wastes your time intentionally or otherwise, and these are still regarded as some of the best games they have ever created. I think there might be something in those wasted minutes that, while on the surface annoying, really sticks with you.

Everytime a game like this is in front of you, you think, surely this game can’t be all that, and I’m sure for many, it is not. For me, this is better than my highest expectations. A truly remarkable piece of video game history, preserved in a love from a fanbase that very few games get the opportunity to boast, and one that you only really get from fans who got kicked down a peg. Will we ever get a game like Thousand Year Door again? It is hard to say, I think Nintendo has shown they are willing to play ball with weird concepts of their most popular IPs again, and I know plenty are cynical of modern Nintendo which, to be fair, completely warranted, they suck, but let’s call a spade a spade; they’ve been making really amazing games recently, and giving a lot of people what they want. I think we do live in a world where a sequel to this game specifically feels very possible, arguably inevitable. But at the end of the day, I think what really matters is that this game, the one we got here, this one is special. It is the type of game I dream of playing, that makes me happy. I am around to love video games, that I am proud to say I’ve beaten, checked, and thrown off the backlog. I mean come on, its Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door! What more is there truly to say.