Free from nostalgia towards one of the few Mario RPGs that I still had yet to play I tried understanding what made this one so special, and to be honest, it's not as clear cut as I had hoped for.
Maybe Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a good example of how your memories of playing a game might some times be a little misleading, and to be honest I had an experience not unlike that with Super Paper Mario.
Thinking back on that game, I have nothing but love for all the bizarre and obscene turns the story would take, really making it stand out next to the much more conventional video games you'd normally expect from Nintendo. But going back and reading the thoughts I had on the game when it came out, it is clear that I did not appreciate it as much as I recalled. It is very easy to forget the tedious treks between high moments, when those high moments are the ones that are memorable.
And TTYD is not short of memorable moments, I will give it that. I think I can see why some people hold it in such high regard. Every chapter stands out simply due to the creative ideas that fuel them, as well as the careful balance between relying on tropes and subverting them.
But it's a great concept moreso than it's a great video game.
For every chapter, Mario travels from the central hub of Rogueport to a new adventure, each of them adding to a vigorous gallery of silly and colorful characters. They all form individual stories which serve to make the adventure feel like a grand one, but also function brilliantly as a setup for the inevitable end of the journey, where they all come together in support of their hero. In one chapter, Mario's identity gets stolen when he becomes unable to use his own name, and in another he solves mysteries aboard a luxury train.
Most of these bits are enjoyable, even if they don't all pay off equally well. Between each chapter you get to play small stories from Princess Peach's experiences in captivity, or Bowser's adventures following Mario's trails. But the former never gets to do anything useful, and the latter's inability to ever make any progress before the game is over is almost frustrating. I do enjoy it when the Mario RPGs turn Bowser into a goofy side character, but simply refusing him to even play a role in the story (despite being briefly playable) feels like a wasted effort.
This is a minor nitpick though, and the game has notably worse issues, usually manifesting in its endless, kafkaesque backtracking between the same two points in a chapter, which are often designed as a singular horizontal hallway between those points (which makes sense for the train chapter I guess, but nowhere else). This is especially confusing considering how well designed the hub area is, with many fun nooks and crannies to explore, and a complete underground area with branching paths. To make it even worse, the game's sidequests - which are all picked from the same bulletin board, strictly limited to only doing one at a time, for no reason aside other than annoying the player - dial this aspect up to 11, being designed entirely around revisiting old areas and doing nothing there.
In one really egregious example you're tasked with returning to the game's first chapter and going all the way through the first dungeon to the place where you fought the boss only to open a chest there and then go all the way back again. This would have been a good excuse to add a new spin on some of the locations you've visited, or at least sprinkle in some new enemies so you don't waste your time with the old ones. Or maybe something happens along the way that you didn't expect. Or at least maybe just have a character say something? But there's nothing, and unfortunately that's how most of the backtracking in this game works - you just go back and forth for the sake of doing so, and the game's mantra seems to be "What the hell, I was JUST there!"
It's essentially padding out the game to a massive degree while adding no real new content. But after a while you realise that maybe the game generally just enjoys wasting your time?
There's a piece of dialogue in the game where a character tells her fiancee to say that he loves her 100 times, and you have to punch through 100 identical speech bubbles. I'm not making this up. One sidequest has you visit a character to ask him what he wants to eat, you then return through the main hub to a hot dog stand in another area, back through the same hub and back to the character again. After eating the hot dog the guy sends you to grab another one, and if you listen closely you can hear the developers giggling to themselves "Hurh hurh, look at this guy, he should have gotten two in the first place". But no one else is laughing with them.
And that's not even the worst example of this behavior - I'm sure vets of the game will shudder in unison if I mention the name of General White. I could go on for hours, because the game is violently littered with this, but in all fairness it is one of only few real issues with the game. It's just an extremely prevalent one.
So, what do we want from a Mario RPG? Although the Paper Mario series especially has veered off into directions that could and has made people argue whether it's really an "RPG" anymore, some features were cemented in the original SNES game, and have remained fairly consistent throughout both this and the parallel Mario & Luigi series.
It raised the stakes to new heights, created an enjoyably goofy world around Mario that provided a brand new perspective on the mushroom kingdom world, mixed platforming elements into the overworld exploration and spiced up the battle system with real time action prompts. Oh, and somehow Mario using a hammer to wack enemies has been a staple in every single one of them as well.
I think the first Paper Mario dialed back that formula a little. The Japanese title "Mario Story" only underlines the fact that they were going for a cutesy storybook format, which is also that game's primary appeal. Bowser kidnaps the princess, and we're back on another comfortable adventure. Between this and Super Paper Mario's interdimensional extravaganza, TTYD forms what I guess is a middle ground that's attractive enough that most people tends to gravitate towards it as their favourite. It sees Mario going beyond what the Mushroom Kingdom typically has to offer, but never strays too far from the familiar. For fans of the original Super Mario RPG, this game is probably the closest they will ever get to a genuine sequel (again, the Japanese title "Paper Mario RPG" sort of exposes this).
Among its strokes of actual genius is the improved partner system, in which the friends Mario picks up along the way will help solve puzzles in the overworld, or tackle combat in well thought out ways that make nearly all of them feel equally useful and never redundant. Compared to the first game, their abilities often involve more creative situations that feel engaging, as opposed to simply being a key to progress.
In trying to pinpoint exactly what causes people to put TTYD on a pedestal above its successors, I'm guessing this system more than anything is missed. Especially considering it feels like it would fit really well into Origami King, it's almost surprising that it isn't there.
The "badges" that you can acquire to customize your combat style are another popular element, shared only between the first two Paper Mario games. Effectively they tend to fall into either no-brainers, superfluous, or gamebreaking, but the fact that they exist at least opens up a potential that keeps the otherwise somewhat tedious turn-based battles from going stale.
Outside of these two, however, I struggle to think of anything else this game does better than the latest outing in the series. The strong points about the story and world building that I liked the most about TTYD are present in Origami King, and honestly stronger than ever.
Playing the two games back to back, it makes it really obvious how much Origami King relies on its presentation in order to cement the versatile experience that is at its core. The game is a visual feast that never ceases to be creative in the way it utilizes the papercraft world in new, weird, and consistently satisfying ways. Its budget is massive, and it is being put to work in the best way it could.
TTYD is a lot more modest. It establishes its format almost to a rule very early on, and never strays from it. Its most prevalent gimmick is the recurring trick of having literally hundreds of individually moving objects on screen without slowdown - something that, to be honest, still feels kinda impressive today. But the contrast between these games makes it very clear that between the two, TTYD is the traditional and grounded adventure, while Origami King is the one that truly goes off the rails. I don't want to spoil everything, but it definitely threw me off guard more than once by changing its structure. And I feel like... that's the kind of stuff I want from Paper Mario. I want the traditional RPG tropes challenged along with the tight and protected Super Mario universe, and I want to be surprised. The best parts of TTYD is definitely when the game surprised me, and I think Origami King takes this aspect to a new level, which deserves recognition!
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