5/5 ★ – DarrensTrashBag's review of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.

Easily the best Paper Mario game with the best combat, writing, and environments. The combat is very addictive with the added stylish commands and strategy. It is insane to me that the sequels decided to take away what this game did right just to stay unique. One nitpick is that some party members are basically useless, if you just use Vivian, Bobbery, and Yoshi for the whole game then you should be fine. Goombella, Koops (after chapter 3), Flurrie, and Ms. Mowz are just not as good. I think that Super Paper Mario has a better story with better antagonists, but the writing in this game is very witty and humorous. The Peach segments are great with Tec being an incredible character. The Bowser segments makes him the best character in the franchise from how hilarious they are. Here are my thoughts on each chapter: Prologue: Good Start, not much happens. Chapter 1: I think this is the worst chapter because all the other ones are just much more creative and fun to play. I did like the fight with Hooktail and the quiz with the thwomp. Chapter 2: Best looking chapter and I like the whole pikmin mechanic with the punies. The writing was not as good as other chapters. Chapter 3: Incredible, love the concept of winning WrestleMania. The backstory with Jolene and Grubba, King K, Rawk Hawk are all great. This is my second favorite chapter in the game. Chapter 4: Hate all the backtracking but the whole bit with Doopliss was very good. Chapter 5: also a lot of backtracking but I really like Bobbery's backstory and the whole presence of Flavio. Cortez is very cool as well. Chapter 6: My favorite chapter, you just get to solve crimes on a train. The writing is fantastic in this chapter and I really like how we get the train ticket. Chapter 7: The General White gag was actually funny to me despite everyone hating it. The launch sequence to get to the moon was glorious. The X-naut Fortress has boppin music, and Tec's sacrifice at the end was great (don't worry about the end of the game). Chapter 8: I really like what Grodus's plan was the whole time and also the fact that he gets brutally killed. Incredible final boss and great "friends we've made along the way" segment. I do like the "where they all are now" segment except for the part where Tec is still alive. Nintendo, make more RPG's like this. 95/100