The beloved GameCube classic from 2004, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, was deemed worthy of a new release on the Nintendo Switch a full 20 years later. At the helm is original developer Intelligent Systems, who have substantially overhauled its visuals, rearranged its soundtrack, and added a set of bonus extras via a new gallery section. It’s a fittingly rich upgrade for a game that still holds up today, with a charming paper and card aesthetic, an interesting combat system, and captivating level design. Unfortunately, the visual upgrades come with a harsh framerate penalty, with the original 60fps target on the GameCube dropping to 30fps on the Switch. Was it the right move or is it too strong a cut? We tested the opening chapters to give an early verdict.
To top it off, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is one of the most unique RPGs on Switch. Of course, its paper aesthetic is a huge part of its appeal, and it also directly influences the game’s design. Once Mario lands in the very first hub area, Rogueport, each location you enter contains a background that unfolds and folds like a pop-up book. Everything is rendered in full 3D, but the conceit of building the world out of thin material creates this amazing diorama effect. It’s a miniature paper playground operating according to its own logic, allowing you to flip, bend and fold its world – and even Mario himself. Aesthetic and game design combine into a beautifully cohesive whole.
This visual overhaul of the Switch Edition goes much further than I expected, though it largely retains the basic gameplay loop, level layout, puzzles, and dialogue of the GameCube original. In the Switch version, reworked textures are in almost every visible place in the world, while UI elements are reworked to suit modern TVs. The geometry is rebuilt from scratch for each level – and even the 2D sprites are swapped out for full 3D replacements, often to accentuate the cardboard cut-out effect. There is a huge amount of additional detail layered in here. Crucially, though, what’s here is still true to the spirit of the original, even if the textures and geometry have been reworked.
Bringing The Thousand Year Door into modern times, we’ve added two screen space rendering techniques to the Switch release: Screen Space Reflections (SSR) for reflective surfaces and Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) for shading in the corners of the screen. world. Neither of these techniques were present in the GameCube version, but the Switch release goes to great lengths to take advantage of both new visual features.
SSR is widely used around the world to give wood, grass and stone a glossy sheen, with Mario, his allies and background elements often visible in the reflection. However, the logic of where SSR is used is unusual and does not always fit the topic of the paper. Sometimes it makes sense and other times it seems screwed up. You might not expect a thoughtfully lacquered look over green grass, for example, but that’s true of thrift store wood floors. I would suggest that the original GameCube version, without SSR, often looked more “papery” as a result. Still, it’s a substantial change, and where it works, it makes the most of the three-generation jump to Switch hardware.
SSAO, ambient shading, also has a big visual impact – especially in low-light interior shots like Professor Frankly’s study. In comparison, the GameCube original appears much lighter, with the absence of any real shadow elements beyond simple character shadow maps. At this point, the Switch uses much more detailed shadow maps across the board. Every shadow cast by characters and objects has a nice diffused edge. Even objects in the environment, such as floating platforms, benefit from accurate dynamic shadows and improved lighting, and light shafts are even added to some scenes.
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To accommodate all these visual features – updated textures, lighting, shadows, SSR and more – the Switch runs at a native resolution of 1600×900 when docked. In manual mode, this drops to a lower native value of 1138×640. As we’ve often come to expect from Nintendo titles, there’s limited anti-aliasing, so you may notice a slight shimmer through the white outlines of characters. Despite the relatively low internal resolution numbers here, the game still looks beautiful on modern displays – it’s a proper widescreen adaptation with a cleaned up UI and text to boot.
Finally, let’s deal with the drop from 60fps on the GameCube to 30fps on the Switch. The visual upgrades are extensive and generous, but the performance cost is noticeable. The question is: is this too steep a sacrifice for improved visuals, or a reasonable trade-off for the game to run at this level of visual fidelity? In the developers’ defense, frame delivery is at least consistent at 33.3ms with almost no variation, giving a near-locked reading of 30fps during our testing.
Looking back at the GameCube original, it’s refreshing to see the game running at 60 frames per second. Of course, this version’s claims are much lower, running at native 480p, and it’s worth remembering that the GameCube was a more powerful home console than Nintendo’s handhelds of the time. For its time, it was perfectly optimized for 60fps and target spec.
Jumping onto the Switch today, running at 30fps affects gameplay in two key ways. First, there’s side-to-side 2D movement while running through towns and dungeons. When playing on the Switch’s smaller screen in portable mode, the 30fps refresh rate honestly doesn’t stand out. Blown up on a larger TV, however, there is a noticeable difference in the fluidity of movement compared to the original, running through the game’s dungeons, towns and meadows. On the other hand, the drop to 30fps isn’t as noticeable in combat, given its fixed camera position, but the game does require a certain amount of timing – for example, pressing A just as you hit will add a critical hit. In general, most attacks require holding and releasing input at the right moment to do the most damage.
The 60 frames per second of the GameCube original inevitably gives you faster visual response to respond to those timing-sensitive attacks. The mitigating factor is that Nintendo’s window of time to acquire these abilities is often quite generous. I haven’t had a problem with attacks on Switch yet, but long-time fans of the game may go through an adjustment period.
Retaining the 60 frames per second of the original GameCube would of course be ideal, but what we’re left with is still a great adaptation – Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door has never looked better. I’m also surprised by the extent of the visual overhaul. Intelligent Systems really exceeded my expectations for the Switch update by rebuilding so much of the game from scratch. Although it is a compromise in performance, its ambitions cannot be faulted.
For context, this new Paper Mario remake has several parallels to the Switch release of Super Mario RPG. John looked into it late last year and found it to be an impressive fully 3D remake of the pre-rendered SNES original, albeit with an unlocked framerate that could drop from 60fps to the mid-30s at some points – and he might benefited from a similar 30 frames per second frame rate limitation. With this in mind, Thousand Year Door developer Intelligent Systems’ decision to opt for a locked 30fps is understandable. Giving users choice might be best of all, but we’ll never be too upset about consistent performance.