Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

System: Gamecube
Release Date: 2004
Published By: Nintendo
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

Mario's Gamecube RPG outing is a humourous, visually stunning, engaging romp that is dragged down only by its lack of depth. Though perhaps the more appropriate term here would be "width" - Paper Mario Y2k's system is not at fault, the fault is with the lack of things to do. Don't get the wrong idea, now, the game provides you with constant progress toward your ultimate goal (I trust it won't be a spoiler if I reveal that said goal is to rescue the Princess). The trouble is that there's nearly nothing to do besides that. There is only one meaningful side quest and only one "optional" area.

The game has its ups and downs, but, on a whole, the ups are very up and the downs are downs only by comparison. The whole of Chapter 3 is fantastic, and will probably leave you jonesing the rest of the game, for example. Story buffs and game buffs alike should be pleased here - the dialogue is reasonably heavy, but always entertaining enough that even those uninterested in talking to the screen won't be too rabidly pounding the A button.

Replay fans won't get off on this game, I'm sorry to say. One play through and you've pretty much seen it all. If you're thinking of going back to find any secrets you missed, well, there pretty much aren't any. If you got all the shine sprites and all the star pieces, and you went to the bottom of the Cave of Many Caves, you got all the secrets. Pokemaniacs may have fun trying to get data on all the monsters in the monster book, but that's about it.

Overall, worth a play, though this probably isn't a renter unless your rental joint gives you many days and you have lots of time to kill, since you'll probably put sixty hours into it before you see the other side.

Buy this game from Amazon.com!