Paper Mario the thousand year door is excellent. It has a fantastic story with a large variety of characters and places that arn’t just your average mario. You don’t meet a goomba who is ‘just a goomba’ very often. Instead, you meet a nerdy goomba who can figure out an enemies stats just by looking at them and a bunch of bully goombas who make fun of the nerd goomba for hanging out with people like mario. The places that you go are very interesting too. Sometimes they are similar to a mario theme level, like the first world, which is a green covered land with a castle at the end, but they change it up in so many ways that it doesn’t feel like ‘another world 1’ did you know the castle is in the background, so you can’t reach it? Did you know the only way to reach it involves winning a quiz show with a robot? Did you know the boss of the first world isnt bowser??
There are also levels that are nothing like anything that is in a normal mario game, like the floating battle arena in the sky where you must win a tournament to win the prize, but some people don’t exactly fight fair, and the locker room you are sent to after each fight is pretty shady..
The combat system is also one of the best i have ever seen. If you know the mario and luigi games, you mostly know what this games like, but instead of luigi, you can choose between many different characters all with unique movesets, as well as each having a different team Attack with mario. There is also the crowd system (something i have never seen done in any other game) where sometimes the crowd watching the fight tries to change the outcome by throwing in a mushroom, or sometimes, a stray hammer. If you don’t like what somebody in the audience is doing, you can hit them with a hammer to stop them, but this scares away some of the audience. The more of a crowd you have the faster your special moves charge, and you get more of an audience by performing attacks well.
