Written By: Michael K.
Welcome to CKDJ’s new blog series, “Summer Game of the Week!” I’m your host Michael K, and I’m here to review games that I believe are perfect for playing during the summer, either by yourself or with friends! To start off, here I’ve got what I think is the best game on the Gamecube, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door!
This is the second of the Paper Mario games, coming off the heels of the original game on the N64 in 2001. Three years later, Intelligent Systems released The Thousand-Year Door to massive critical acclaim. It is widely regarded as the best in the series for a reason, but what is that reason, you ask? Well, allow me to tell you the tall tale of my experience playing the game for the first time in 2020.
The Covid-19 lockdowns had begun. Small businesses were about to be shut down, and it was all scary. Just before the lockdowns, I purchased the game from a local used game store, and it was the best 100 dollars I ever spent!
At the beginning, the player’s told a story about the game’s hub world: The rough and crime-filled harbor town of Rogueport, which was once devastated by a great cataclysm a thousand years ago. We cut to the present, with Princess Peach speaking to an old woman only to vanish.
Typical Mario game setup, right? WRONG! After this, Paper Mario travels to Rogueport where he’s forced to flee with the help of a Goombella, a college girl goomba! If that ain’t enough, when you talk, you can see a mafia movie-esque gang war between two groups of Mario enemies in the background! Then Mario and his new goomba friend are told that they have to stop a cyborg cult called the X-Nauts from unleashing that ancient cataclysm from behind the Thousand-Year Door!
If that wasn’t a good way to showcase how different this game is, I don’t know what is! The Thousand-Year Door has Paper Mario exploring a castle with a seductive dragon, a tree with tribal war among bugs, a giant boxing arena park in the sky, a horror movie forest, a pirate island inhabited by ghosts…gosh, so many different locations! It feels like playing through a Mario equivalent to Indiana Jones or the Neverending Story.
Add to that some really great turn-based battles! Paper Mario can rely on brute strength, or receive help from one of his many partners who joins him on his adventure, from the Goombella college girl goomba, to a Yoshi you get to name whatever name you want, to a Admiral Bobbery, a bob-omb who served in the navy!
And this game has a perfect mixture between silly comedy and some surprisingly mature themes! We’ve got a computer falling in love with Princess Peach, to getting a hot dog from a pig, to sad tales of loss and regret, to scary moments that’ll make you shiver! It’s these kinds of games I love, as they don’t talk down to the player and let them feel for the characters!
Finally, why should you play it in the summer? The game is separated into different chapters, and every chapter can take as long as a weekend to finish, so you can have a great pace in enjoying this game! Or, you can explore every nook and cranny, get hidden items, play minigames, it’s all up to you! Win prizes in the Pianta Mafia Casino, listen and read about Luigi’s adventures in the Waffle Kingdom, try to win the happy lucky lottery, all at your fingertips!
I will say, though, that this game is difficult! There are a lot of tricky puzzles throughout each area that you’ll probably need a guide to help you complete if you’re really stuck. Also, this game has a lot of backtracking, which I usually don’t have a problem with in games, but in this case, it takes so long that it can really get on my nerves at times.
But those are just small complaints for what is otherwise a terrific game! Sadly it is harder to come by, as you can usually only find them on Ebay for massive prices or in used game stores. I was really lucky to get my copy when I did! Hopefully one day, Nintendo chooses to release this game again! I’m sure a lot of people would love this game remastered with the modern visual style of the new Paper Mario games, or to have the game re-released on Nintendo Switch Online with restore points to help with difficult parts of the game.
In the end, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a classic. It expands on everything the first game did right, creates a completely new world and story that differs from Mario’s typical adventures, and provides a difficult but satisfying RPG experience that will keep you invested the whole way through!
So that’s it for CKDJ’s Summer Game of the Week! Stay tuned every Friday for the next game to play during the summer months!
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