A “Now Playing” article is a quick snapshot and thoughts on a game that I am currently playing. In this case, I am looking at Paper Mario and the Thousand-Year Door (2024 remake). This is a role-playing game with turn-based combat. The characters are depicted as flat and made of paper, which allows them to move through narrow spaces such as gaps between walls and storm grates. The environments are 3D and scroll side to side, but fade in and out as you reach boundaries to the current area. There is also some light platforming.

Quick Stats

Time Played: 20 hours
Amount Completed: Currently on chapter 4 out of 8
Platform: Nintendo Switch with pro controller
Plan to Complete: Probably not

Things I Like

• The mechanic of your character being made of “paper” is fun and makes for some unique gameplay. You need to keep an eye out for crevasses and things like storm grates on the ground that you can turn the character 90 degrees to slip through. When you seem stuck in a level and unable to progress, it’s usually because cleverly placed
• Combat is interactive. Attacks and blocks highly encourage using well-timed button presses or movements to increase or decrease the damage delt or taken. So-called special moves, which cost “flower power”, (of which you have a limited supply), pretty much require interactivity to make any sense for using them.
• The game caters to different play styles without being over-complex. The items you can upgrade over time are hit points, flower points, and badge spaces.  Flower points are used in combat to perform “special” moves and badges are things you collect in the game that give you various perks. I like badges the most as there are a wide variety of them, including ones that can raise your other stats such as hit and flower points. Different badges take different numbers of badge “slots”, and I find it fun to figure out which badges to use and how to make them fit in the number of slots I have. Flower points are my second focus and I will only occasionally add more hit points.

Things I Find Not So Hot

• There is a learning curve to the timing of certain button presses during combat. While I am used to having to employ well-timed actions in games, I am more trained to take action just before things make contact. In Paper Mario, you have the requirement to really time your button press within a short window, that opportunity occurs earlier than I would expect. So for example, if I am trying to block an attack, I press the appropriate block button a few frames before impact, but in Paper Mario, the window is several frames before that. While it does not seem like a big deal, I have decades of conditioning that make it difficult to react earlier than I would expect. While I could practice and learn the timings, it is not something I want to do especially if it then carries over into other games I play.
• The dialog has become annoying to me. I do not expect an earth-shattering narrative journey in a Mario game, but, at least in my view, the writing is a bit too verbose. To make things worse, you are unable to press a button to fast-forward the dialog. In many other games, while text is appearing on the screen a letter at a time, you have the option to press a button and instantly have all the text appear, (and then another button press will take you to the next bit of dialog). As I can read pretty quickly, I can fast-forward the dialog in a game and still read it all so as not to miss out on the story while saving a lot of time in dialog-heavy games. With Paper Mario, I do not have that option, (although I should probably check the settings as it would be embarrassing if there was a “fast-forward” option that I did not enable).
• I find that there are too many “low-level” combat encounters especially when revisiting areas I have already been. While the animations displayed when entering a fight are very nice, they do take time. When I am trying to get somewhere such as a secret area in a level that I could not reach earlier in the game, I do not want to enter multiple battles with low-level enemies that only last a round. Later in the game you do gain the ability to defeat enemies with a well-timed button press totally bypassing the combat screen. You can also use the 3D space to just avoid enemies. However, even with those tricks, I find myself in more battles than I would like. (And to be clear, I am mostly talking about when revisiting levels and not going through a level for the first time.) I would not mind as much if the enemies kept some sort of ratio between my character’s level and theirs, and thus gave more “experience points” when defeating them. However, I start to get annoyed when the animations to enter a battle and perform actions takes more time than the battle itself, and results in basically no experience for my character. On the other hand, when entering a new area or in a “boss” fight, combat can be challenging and rewarding. I would just prefer either more of that, or when you clear the enemies out of an area they do not reappear the next time you visit the area.

Closing Thoughts

I really like the design of this game especially the “flat” mechanic that has me carefully scanning environments for hidden pathways. The fact that combat takes some skill to perform well keeps me more engaged than some other turn-based combat games that have less interactivity when attacking and defending. The badge system allows a wide number of things to tweak to fit my play style, and can be re-organized at any time without penalty, which I enjoy. The main problem I have with this game is it moves too slow for me without being able to fast-forward dialog and skip some frequent animations. Strangely enough, you are able to skip some animations after seeing them once, such as when you sleep on a bed to restore your stats. While this may seem like a minor annoyance, over time I have started to dread long in-game conversations or re-exploring past areas. When parts of the game feel tedious, it brings down the entire experience. I thoroughly enjoyed Super Mario RPG (2023 remake), which is a similar game. While I like some of the mechanics of Paper Mario more, I found the flow of Super Mario RPG more my speed. I may come back to this game at some point, but at the moment it has gotten more tedious than enjoyable. That could also be due to the fact that most of my time playing was compressed into a single weekend, so taking a break and then playing only a couple hours at a time may renew my excitement for the game.