Completion Criteria: Credits Rolled.

A game like this lives on it's story and really, it just didn't click for me. I love short inviting games to stick my teeth into for a weekend but when that is the case I expect the plot to be suitable and this isn't. By the time you finish the first major segment, the game is already over. The pacing of the first two "sections" feels really good but at the same time, I was becoming extremely confused when I noticed that by the end of that second segment. The collectibles led me to believe that the game was ending, and it wasn't far off. Two short segment bottled together that feel very rushed just trying to press the ending together where you just jump between two set-pieces. The themes of the game feel a lot more murky also and the ending really messes with the sensibilities of the world which felt very carefully constructed in the first.

The game is really beautiful and the soundtrack is also great but the gameplay also seems to take a step back in my opinion. I'm aware most people didn't like the gameplay of the original but both the combat and puzzles felt like a step down. Fortunately I don't consider either the key attributes of this type of game or it may have been rated a bit worse.

Overall dissapointed and I'm glad this was on Gamepass as a full price purchase may have felt too much

Completion Criteria: All Requests + Put of 100 trials

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, has always been a game I praised as one of the best of the genre, if not one of the greatest of all time. So to play it once more and have it dawn on me that this one is one of those games I have been looking back on with nostalgia-tinted glasses hurts just a little bit. I by no means hate the game and I still think it does a lot very well but I can't ignore the flaws that maybe younger me did.

Lets start positive. I remember the game for it's vivid cast and intimate setting in Rogueport and those things are certainly there. Exploring the nooks and crannys of the small town is just a pleasant experience. Characters have character and they are some characters that look like regular NPCs still get a spotlight throughout the game. The majority of NPCs, with some notable exceptions played for humor, are well designed and memorable, utilizing the baseline of standard design and jazzed up. It really digs home how underdeveloped characters are in some of the later games. The music (the original) is great. Some are pleasant, some are eary, some get you head moving. Overall wonderful and will promptly be added to my playlists. The locals utilized overall in the chapters are very much hits with a few misses and the game still holds my favourite chapter in the franchise, being Chapter 4.

The gameplay I did not really coin until this playthrough as to why it's so good and ironically opposed to typical Nintendo ideologies is it's simple and restrained. Each option seems tight with no dressing. Jump hits flying, ground for spiky enemies. Item weapons and therefore item management matter. Each Partner has a niche (Yoshi hit well in the air with repeated attacks but Flurrie hits once, doing well against higher defence options). The badge system. Allows you to flex to cater to you're preferred type of offense/defensive strategy.

All sounds good so far. And let me preface that it is still very good...but there are some noticeable issues I can't overlook now. The first being the gameplay it's slow. All my memories of this game are falsities because every enjoyable moment I had was with the Unsimplifier on which doubles command speeds. this seems harmless but I was not really enjoying myself up until I could get that and the fact I can't enjoy the game without making it harder is a yellow flag that can't be ignored. I genuinely thought they might have forgotten to tune the speeds from 60fps it was so slow-feeling.
The next is a spot I threw away from my experience but the backtracking is actually genuinely bad. I'm sorry to the opinions I discarded who said this, believing they hated going back to rogueport. No, the requests in this game are really bad. 75% of them feel like "go to X area and talk to someone, go to Y area and talk to someone, go back to X area and talk to someone. If this was the original game, I would have done what I expect younger me did and completely ignored them and forgot they exist. But I am not young me anymore and I have become a stern believe in anything in the game should be good if you left it in. The gall of a game to tell you to go through a 100 floors of battles in which 70 floors are trivial, and then tell you to do it again. Sorry Mario. Unacceptable.

I think looking back, some of the areas really aren't as interesting as I once remembered. Hooktail and Glitz Pit which I had fond memories of as a kid have not aged to my liking and while I still do like the train, I used to hold in a little bit higher esteem. I was looking forward to the desert only to remember that it's not in this game and the cold area I didn't care for is actually this game and not PM64. I will have to take another look at that and see what else I have my memories crossed for (Spin dash).

Still heavy heavy recomendation, but I have to consider where in my rankings this actually sits after replaying it and comparing it to my imaginary pedestal.