There are all kinds of affluent characters aboard the train such as a Toad pop star, and a penguin who just so happens to be a “master” sleuth. It’s a dark, creepy mini-story, especially for a game as bright and colorful as this, and it works entirely as its own tale about the dark side of entertainment.Īnother great premise sees Mario take a trip on the Excess Express, a train bound for a place called Poshley Heights. He gets mysterious emails from an unknown sender about the many dangers and mysteries of the place. Mario can hear voices in his room through the vents. Fighters seemingly disappear or are taken out of commission. The thing is that Glitzville, underneath all the glamour, is a place filled with dark secrets. The Crystal Star Mario needs to get is on the fighting champion’s belt, which means that Mario and friends must enter the ring and fight their way to the top. One of the game’s highlights is the third area, a city floating in the sky on a giant blimp known as Glitzville. While these start off straightforward enough (fighting a dragon threatening a small peaceful town, wrangling a bunch of little creatures inside a great tree), it isn’t long before the game plays its hand and goes all out with its wonderfully unique setting and ideas. Kind of similar to the Dragon Quest series, Thousand Year Door has a very episodic format, telling a new mini-story in each area. It takes the opportunity offered to give us a look at a whole bunch of unique settings. One filled with bandits and sleaze balls. It’s a side of the Mushroom Kingdom we hadn’t seen up to that point. Rogueport, in sharp contrast to that, has a noose in its town square. The Mushroom Kingdom is typically a bright, colorful, almost painfully cheerful place. According to stuff I’ve read online, the game technically takes place in the Mushroom Kingdom, but Rogueport is so different from everything we’re used to with Mario. The wonderful elements lie in the way it executes its adventure story. Like other Mario RPGs, the broad strokes are familiar to anyone who has played any game in the series before. It isn’t long before she’s kidnapped by a mysterious bunch of space travelers called the X-nauts, and Mario must set out across the land searching for a bunch of Crystal Stars to open up the eponymous Thousand Year Door on Peach’s treasure map, all while finding a way to save the princess. The reason being Princess Peach purchased a treasure map leading to ruins underneath the shady town. ![]() Coming just a year after the seminal handheld title, Thousand Year Door continued that trend by taking players to Rogueport, a shady town filled with criminals and mysterious surrounding areas. ![]() ![]() The also-great Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga took players to the hilarious and wonderful Beanbean kingdom. Thousand Year Door was not the first Mario RPG to take place in an entirely brand new setting. The Other Side of the Mushroom Kingdom Rogueport is a decidedly shady setting for a Mario game. Join me, friends, as I take a look at what makes The Thousand Year Door so good. ![]() This is the only Super Mario spin-off we will be covering in our retrospective of the series, and that’s because not only is it arguably the best spin-off in the franchise, but it’s also a shining example of creative ingenuity, and stands tall as one of the all-time great JRPGs. The thing is, its follow up on Nintendo’s wonderfully purple little hunk of joy the Nintendo GameCube, was even better. Who could have guessed placing 2D characters in a 3D plane and giving the game turn-based RPG mechanics would work so well? Any way you slice it, the original Paper Mario is a great, charming little game. As a follow up to the surprisingly awesome Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, it took everything that worked about that game and added a wholly unique, too-cute paper art style to the proceedings. The original Paper Mario on the Nintendo 64 was a surprise hit.
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