The Unbearable Wait for My Favorite Game of All Time to be Released... AGAIN
Have you ever watched the trailer of an upcoming game and liked it so much you felt certain it’d become one of your favorite games of all time? Well that’s how I’m feeling about a specific upcoming game too! ...except I already played that game. Yes, I’m talking about the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. I made a whole video about why this game is so special to me, even including some footage of 12 year old me playing it in the late 2000s, so if you haven’t watched it yet, I’d be very happy if you did!
So recently they revealed the release date for the game, being May 23. That is VERY CLOSE! Basically just 2 months and I’ll be playing this remake that still feels like a dream that’d never become a reality, especially given how faithful it is and how gorgeous it looks. You’d imagine they’d change the game a lot to adhere to the modern “Mario bible” and just do a simple upscale for the graphics, but no, all designs are intact, all the weirdness of its world, and all assets are rebuilt from the ground up, with a stunning lighting work that is doing wonders to how the game looks. Just look at all these comparison screencaps:
But even though it’s close, it feels SO FAR AWAY... I keep thinking about this game 24/7, rewatching the reveal trailer, looking at the screencaps over and over again, overanalyzing every little bit of content... Hell, I was even analyzing A DIALOGUE BOX of all things! I should be doing stuff for work, but here I am procrastinating by rambling about how pretty a freaking dialogue box looks.
To make matters worse, I thought they would drop a new trailer on Mario Day, but no, they just announced the release date and dropped a few screencaps, along with some silent footage found on the Japanese website. I NEED to see more of this game in motion, how the menus look, need to hear more of the arranged soundtrack that, based on the first trailer, is sounding GODLY...
And perhaps most importantly, I need to see what’s new. That’s the most worrying part, because no matter how faithful the remake is, they always change things and add new content. With the Super Mario RPG remake, they improved it with a bunch of quality of life changes and new boss rematches, but the game was made considerably easier and they didn’t add a hard mode to make up for it. Nintendo has confirmed that the TTYD remake will feature new gameplay elements and changes to “make the game even easier to enjoy”, but we’ve no clue as to what that entails yet, which is why I WANT A NEW TRAILER NOWWWWW!!!
I honestly don’t think this game needs any balancing to make it easier because it already is an easy game for the most part. Its battle system is already tightly designed in a way that doesn’t leave much room for tweaks, unlike the Mario RPG battle system. I’m hoping they add some quality of life improvements that simply enhance the playing experience without making it easier. An example of that would be something that’s already confirmed to be present: the button to check the tattle log, now present at all times during the battles, meaning you don’t need to use Tattle with Goombella everytime anymore to check an enemy’s info.
As for new substantial features, just the fact we’re getting a remake this faithful should be enough for me to feel satisfied, but if you allow me to indulge in my own selfish yearnings... I finished The Origami King last year and had a blast with it, and there’s some elements I would love to see being carried over from it, like the variations on the main battle theme for each of the main areas. It’d be lovely to see new arrangements of TTYD’s battle theme for each chapter as well, like a rock-centric version for the Glitz Pit and an absolute techno banger for the X-Naut Fortress.
I’d also be super stoked to see a place like the Musée Champignon (pictured below), which houses the sound room, trophies (for achievements), collectibles, and concept art. You can be 100% sure I’d try to do all achievements in this game if it awarded me for them, and a concept art section would be the coolest thing in the world, especially because they’d be able to include old concepts from the original version as well, dated back from the early 2000s.
Another Paper Mario game that could serve as inspiration for extra content would be Super Paper Mario, a game that has two Pit of 100 Trials. That’s the coolest challenge of TTYD, so having a second, even harder Pit would be phenomenal. Though realistically I imagine they’d go the Mario RPG remake route and have a way to rematch the bosses in the postgame, maybe by returning to their arenas. It would be super neat to return to the Shadow Queen room expecting a Dried Shroom like in the original game, just to be met with an even harder version of the final boss (and the reward for beating her is still a Dried Shroom).
Another piece of extra content that’d be really cool to see being added is the one that most fans are hoping for: Luigi’s side quest being playable. In case you didn’t play TTYD, you can find Luigi hanging around the main hub area with a new partner each chapter, and he’ll tell Mario about this zany adventure he’s having with these partners (who all hate him btw). You can also find books about that adventure in a store nearby, telling even more details. So the fans really want that quest to be playable, which would surely be lovely, but I’m not sure if they’d go the extra mile to design and implement all those regions, bosses and partners Luigi talks about, it’d be a lot of work.
But my actual craziest wish that’s DEFINITELY not happening is being able to visit an area of the first Paper Mario game during the postgame. That’d be the ultimate fanservice for me. The only reason I even remotely consider this wish is because the first trailer for some reason features the title screen theme of the first game, even though it never plays in TTYD, so it gives me the faintest glimmer of hope for something related to that game to be present in this remake. Seeing Toad Town (pictured below) with the updated visuals of this remake would genuinely make me cry. Maybe you could even explore the sewers and that’s where you’d find the second Pit of 100 Trials! …Hey, let a man dream, ok?
We’ll only find out what’s the new content they’re alluding to when we get a new trailer, which I sure hope it’s very soon. Don’t make me wait until an overview trailer, because those usually just drop like 2 weeks away from the release... And that’s it for today, I just wanted to ramble about this game because I just can’t stop thinking about it. I need to keep talking about it. After I post this write-up I’ll probably keep doing useless analysis on Twitter that no one cares about until new content drops and the cycle repeats itself...
Oh wait, before I wrap this up I just want to talk about the boxart. Given how the Super Mario RPG remake boxart mimicked the original Japanese art and they used that art for all regions, I had a feeling they’d do the same with TTYD, and sure enough they did! Even though I love the American art, I can’t complain about this change because the Japanese art is superb too.
It’s incredible how even that is absurdly faithful to the original, they recreated it EXACTLY like it used to be, so much so I had my doubts if the renders were even redrawn at all and just updated with the cardboard outlines. It’s beautiful. I wish so badly I could buy this game physically, but where I live it’s hard to get Nintendo games day 1 and I surely wouldn’t be able to wait, so I’ll have to go with digital.
But yeah... JUST LET ME FAST FORWARD TO MAY 23, PLEASE!!!