Wow, that was quite the shock, wasn’t it?

Yep, at the end of today’s Nintendo Direct, the company announced that Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door would be remastered for Nintendo Switch with enhanced graphics. Here’s the trailer for the remake of this fan favourite:

As you can see, it’s everything we’d ever want to see in a Paper Mario 2 remake. The graphics look better with higher quality textures and better lighting, the character sprites look better than they ever did, and the game’s charm has been recaptured perfectly in the new style.

With the latter being perhaps the most surprising thing of the bunch. Why? Well, for better or worse, Paper Mario has gone through a bit of a rough patch recently. Indeed, with Sticker Star onwards dispensing with most original characters based on traditional Mushroom Kingdom inhabitants and other remakes bringing everything in line with the ‘modern’ style because of a mandate, there was always the worry that remakes of the original games would be severely limited as a result.

But that’s not the case. Nope, every character looks exactly the same as they did in the original game, complete with all the unique design traits and costumes they originally had. The Toads are wearing unique outfits and don’t just look like the same character pasted two hundred times now, the enemies and bosses actually use their original off brand designs rather than the ‘safer’ ones from Sticker Star onwards, and every single new character and location introduced in the original game has been maintained in all its glory.

It really is just Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door as if it was made in the Switch era, and it’s all the better for that.

So yeah, check out the trailer if you haven’t seen it already, then get ready to return to Rogueport when Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door makes it onto Switch in 2024!

Source:

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door – Nintendo Direct 9.14.2023 (YouTube)