Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (2004)

There was a period in my teenage life where my ADHD fixation tendencies zeroed in on this game and I played it obsessively back to front like three or four times in a row. I know. It's weird. You don't have to tell me.

What can I say? It is THE starter RPG and beyond that, a perfectly constructed game. Top to bottom. Delightful and strange and brimming with creativity.

What I gleaned from this playthrough, however, is that someone (many people) obviously did not even want to make a Mario RPG! They just made an RPG and filled it with Mario cast! What the hell is a Rogueport! Who the hell is a Shadow Siren! I absolutely love it. Tender and dear to my heart.

I'm not sure if Paper Mario was ever about deep gameplay mechanics, but returning to this game now as an adult who has played my fair share of JRPGs, the game doesn't play very well (discussion has possible spoilers, so it'll be below). The charm is there, just as you experienced it as a child, but it's held between dungeons which aren't that fun to complete. At least they aren't that long. I like the battle system, the action prompts while fighting gives the turn-based system more interaction, but It definitely works better in the Mario & Luigi series where dodging has varying commands which can allow you to take no damage (compared to this game where you just press A when you get hit to negate 1 damage [a relatively small amount later in the game, although blocking will prevent infliction of status effects])

When you level up in tTYD, you get to choose whether to upgrade hit points (HP), flower points (FP, essentially mana), or badge points (BP). Badge points allow you to strengthen Mario and get new attacks, so you'd obviously choose BP unless you felt threatened enough by enemies to warrant an HP increase. Thing is, enemies die really quickly if you build a BP character, which lets you sail through the game with minimal opposition, even with little health. You then get to the final boss fights, which out of nowhere have enemies that can hit way higher than anything you've seen before, and you might be at an impasse. There's a respec service available, but that's back at town, which is a long ways away. If the game was built a bit better, the need to get more HP would have been more evident earlier and this would not be a problem. That said, the bosses still aren't that difficult, but require a little bit of luck to get patterns that won't OHKO you.