You know what’s weird? I didn’t ever write all that much about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door when it was originally released on GameCube. I did a thing where I critiqued a TV Guide review of the game, but that’s effectively it. In retrospect, it’s a bit weird because I think about TTYD all the time. Mostly because the battle victory theme is what plays in my head every time I achieve a personal victory. It’s a bit of a stretch, but it counts!
Anyway, there’s a new Switch remaster that came out a while ago, which I’ve now finished playing. Like Super Mario RPG before it, it’s unfortunately the same game with a new coat of paint, some localization tidying, a few quality-of-life improvements, and a teeny-tiny portion new content. Oh, and also both games have fantastically re-arranged soundtracks. I would actually argue that the new soundtracks are reason enough to buy and play either game, because they are marvelous.
With the TTYD remaster, I’ve finally put in the effort to actually finish the game. And not like, just get to the end of the story. I did that already back in 2004. No, this time I finished the game. I found all the badges, I collected all the star pieces, I made all the recipes, I solved all the troubles, and I beat all the optional bosses. I truly got 100% and earned the special new badge that turns Mario gold.
And it was not at all worth the effort!
To start at the least offensive: collecting all the star pieces and Shine Sprites actually was worth the trouble. Star pieces can be traded for badges, some of them being mighty helpful. Shine Sprites are used to power up your partners, which makes them almost necessary for anyone who doesn’t want their life to be harder than it needs to be. Getting all of these items in any given chapter also unlocks new music and art galleries for that chapter, so there are plenty of material reasons to go out of your way to search for these collectibles. There’s also an in-game hint system to tell you where any particularly tricky ones are hidden, so it’s quite easy to round them all up.
Finishing all the troubles (optional side-quests) is a little more of a slog. As you may expect, a lot of them are “go get a thing from this guy and then take it to another guy” kind of quests. Not great, but a few of them have some fun NPC moments, and some of them have pretty decent rewards, so it’s worth the effort. Using the new warp zone that was added to the remaster, you even get to cut out a lot of the mindless backtracking that was required in the original game. Overall, solving the troubles is probably worth it for the prizes, mostly since they’re much less cumbersome to do this time around.
Making all the recipes, though? I really wish that this had been left as a totally optional thing. Having Zess T. combine your items into (usually) better items is definitely worth doing, don’t get me wrong. What bothers me about the system is that there’s no in-game help system to kind of nudge you in the right direction of recipes you haven’t discovered yet. There are dozens upon dozens of items in TTYD, and a lot of different combinations can result in the same outcome, and even more combinations will end up as a Mistake.
What I’m saying here is basically that if you want to find all the recipes in TTYD and don’t want to spend your entire life doing it, you’re going to need a guide. And even with a guide, you’re still going to be constantly running all over the game world picking up items that can only be found in one specific spot. Having to go back to play Petuni’s stupid guessing game each time I needed a Mystic Egg was an absolute pain in the rump. It’s a massive slog no matter which way you slice it, and I’m glad that younger me didn’t bother to do it without the aforementioned warp zone.
Lastly: the optional bosses. There are three in the TTYD remake, as opposed to one in the original, so that’s good. Kinda pales against SMRPG’s six “new” bosses, but those are really just remixed “hard” versions of existing boss fights. The two new ones in TTYD are completely new, so… I’m not sure how to weight those against each other.
But before I talk about the bosses proper, we must review the Pit of 100 Trials. If you don’t know: it’s a “dungeon” that pits you against 100 floors of battles. And you can’t save while you’re in it, so you have to do the whole thing in one sitting. On every tenth floor, instead of a battle, there’s a treasure chest with a unique item, and a pipe that allows you to turn tail and leave. However, every time you enter the Pit, you have to start from floor 1. So you get to keep all the exp/coins/prizes you’re earned, but at the cost of your progress. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll run into a Puni who will give you the option to skip either two or five floors for a small fee. These guys are absolute lifesavers, and I would have given up for sure if they hadn’t been there.
First up: Bonetail. He’s the OG optional boss in TTYD and resides at the bottom of the Pit of 100 Trials. Which, in itself, is a heck of a slog. But hey, that’s part of the challenge. Once you manage to get to Bonetail, you then get the added pressure of knowing that if you fail, you need to do it all over again. Ouch. That’s probably why I never completed this particular task in the original game. But to tell you the truth, I don’t remember having trouble against Bonetail. I did the fight after completing everything but the other two optional bosses, so I guess I was amply prepared, with all the levels and badges and items and such.
You also win 999 coins from Bonetail, but… what are the odds that anyone who could get this far would even have a need for those coins anyway?
Next, we have Prince Mush. I think he’s the easiest to access, since as far as I’m aware, you just need to get to a certain part of the story to battle him. Just head back to Glitz Pit and choose to go a round with him in an unranked match. Boom. Easy. The fight against Prince Mush is not easy however. In fact, until I looked up some helpful strategies, I considered this fight impossible. He has two battle stances, and either one is immune to either jump or hammer attacks (so pay attention!) and he can power himself up to do a ton of damage. Like, he can actually obliterate Mario in a single turn if things go really poorly.
But all of that is small beans! What really makes the fight against Prince Mush frustrating is his low-HP tactic: becoming completely invincible. The only way to damage him in this phase is to use a superguard to knock him out of his defensive stance (temporarily). Superguarding is pressing the block button three frames before an attack hits out. THREE. FRAMES. I don’t think I managed to get one successful superguard in the 50ish hours that I played the game, nevermind in this one specific fight. So the winning strategy, or at least the one I used, is to simply charge Mario and the partner of your choosing (Yoshi) for like thirty turns, then unleash your attacks and defeat Mush in one turn. It’s slow, and boring, and if you count wrong, you’re boned. What a great gimmick boss!
Lastly, we have Whacka. You may remember Whacka from the original Paper Mario on N64. He’s a friendly creature that you can whack with your hammer to get a really good item (Whacka’s Bump). You’re discouraged from doing this, though, as it hurts Whacka, and like I said before, he’s friendly. You don’t want to hurt a friendly character, do you?
In the original TTYD, Whacka filled the same role. In the remaster, however, he gets a little more screentime. If you can figure out how to make it happen. First, you need to find Whacka on Keelhaul Key, then hit him eight times to make him vanish forever. You’ll also need to have beaten Bonetail, since Whacka can also be found at the 100th floor of the Pit of 100 Trials. The thing I missed is that you have to wait a while after whacking Whacka eight times, until you get an email that directly tells you that he’s been spotted at the bottom of the Pit. I made the rookie mistake of just heading down there right away, getting to the bottom (again), and not finding any superbosses for my troubles. Heading back to the surface, the email immediately popped, and I had to start my third descent down the Pit.
Surely you can see why I got a little sour at the game at this point. At the very least, once you’ve defeated Bonetail, a helpful Puni will show up at the entrance of the Pit and offer to take you to floor 50 for a fee of 300 coins. It’s not a bad deal, but still.
So, I cleared the Pit a third time and fought Whacka. And I’m so very glad that I opted to look up what he does before going into the fight and prepped myself accordingly. You can go read the specifics on the Mario Wiki or whatever, but here’s the short version: every other turn, Whacka will deal huge amounts of damage. Every time you hit him, it’ll give him an additional attack the next turn. The upside is that he also damages himself a little on each rest turn. I used the same strategy against Whacka as I did against Prince Mush, but it still really came down to the wire because Whacka’s assault is relentless and there’s not much you can do about it besides constantly having your partners use defensive items/moves.
In the end, I barely scraped by, with most of my partners knocked out and Mario hanging on by a thread. But it was very satisfying to defeat Whacka with a single hammer blow. So there’s that. For your trouble, you get a Gold Whacka Bump, which is really just a trophy, unlike regular Whacka Bumps, which are terrific healing items. To be fair, once you beat Whacka, there’s likely no more need for healing, so.
After all of this was done, I was finally able to return to Rogueport Plaza and collect my shiny new Gold Medal badge. I equipped it right away, marveled at Mario’s new golden lustre, saved the game, and then shut it down. Possibly forever. After all, I have now done everything that Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has to offer. It should be on its way out of my brainspace for good now, the Ovsiankina effect finally satiated after all these years. Sure, I might play it again at some point in the future, but I know that I’ve achieved 100%, and will never have to do it again.
Aah, freedom. Maybe all that trouble was worth it after all?
