Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

You start out as Mario in a rundown port town called Rogueport, and the first thing you notice is that everyone here is flat, like a piece of paper cut into a person. You walk around with the stick, hop on enemies with A, and swing your hammer with B, and soon you find a magic door that pulls you into a stage-play battle screen complete with a curtain, spotlights, and an audience that cheers or throws things at you. Fights are turn-based: you pick attack or item from a menu, but you also press a button at the exact moment you hit or get hit, which either boosts the damage or blocks it. A talking book explains the story, that a legendary treasure lies behind a thousand locked doors, and a badge system lets you swap in new moves as you find them.

Most of your time goes toward chapters, each one a self-contained adventure in a new location like a jungle village, a haunted mansion, or a wrestling arena, where you recruit a new partner character who has their own field ability, such as a flying paperfan-bug or a floating shadow girl who lets you pass through walls. You solve simple puzzles by turning sideways to slip through gaps, folding into a paper boat to cross water, or curling into a tube to roll through pipes, then fight your way to a boss with a defined weakness. Chapters take a few hours apiece and the whole story runs somewhere in the twenty to thirty hour range, with the difficulty staying gentle until an optional super-hard basement dungeon late in the game.

Session to session it feels like reading a funny, warmly written book that occasionally asks you to fight something, since the jokes and character writing carry as much weight as the combat. One chapter involves a lot of backtracking across the same map hunting a hidden villain, which can wear thin if you dislike repetition. If you enjoy turn-based fights with a timing trick, likeable oddball characters, and a story with real heart under the jokes, this is a comfortable, funny way to spend a few weeks.