The SuperDQP Weekly - November 4, 2024

As someone who grew up with the Paper Mario series, I have been FEASTING this year. This week’s newsletter (and also next week’s, why the hell not) will be gushing about The Thousand-Year Door, its remake, and its impact.

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Before all that, though…

A Game Recommendation

This week’s recommendation is well-known, but it’s so bizarre and delightful that I felt the urge to recommend it anyway: Cryptmaster.

Cryptmaster, on the surface, looks like a throwback to old dungeon-crawling RPGs like Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder, but then it asks you to type in your party’s names. And then it asks you to type your attacks. And then it asks you to type just about everything else.

You’ve been tricked. This is a typing test with a thin RPG film over it. It’s Typing of the Dead, but layered over Legend of Grimrock instead of House of the Dead 2.

The game’s writing is suitably sardonic for such a premise, though some of the game’s riddles were too much for my feeble brain. Puzzle games aren’t always my strongest suit, though plenty of people will pick up what Cryptmaster puts down.

If you, like me, spent way too much time in elementary school with a typing tutor program, you’ve got to try Cryptmaster. It put a big smile on my face.

Cryptmaster is available on PlayStation, Xbox, and Windows PC via Steam. Needless to say, a keyboard is strongly recommended.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Heavens be praised, we got a remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door this year!

TTYD is legitimately one of my favorite RPGs – and just games in general. And a part of that is nostalgia. I played this game when I was eleven years old, and it made a big impact on me in ways that I’m still realizing today. But it also holds up in so many ways on its own merit and delivers so many clever and fun ideas through its writing, with a deliciously simple yet crunchy combat system. It’s a delight every time I replay it.

It is not a perfect game. It’s a product of the mid-aughts era that I beleaguered last month as being a toxic boy’s club, and you can see some of that in the subject matter of the game’s jokes, and which ideas were left on the cutting room floor of the game’s initial American release – ideas that the remake partly restored.

Comedy in video games is really, really hard, and while TTYD’s original English localization is sharp and snappy in ways that many comedy-focused games today have a hard time replicating, a lot of it has aged… questionably.

The original ending, while I won’t spoil it, also demonstrated some shockingly immature misunderstandings of abuse dynamics. This was admittedly a lot easier for me to swallow before therapy.

It’s kind of easy to corroborate this game’s writing with a lot of the stories that have since come out regarding Nintendo of America’s work culture.

Even so, I love this game, warts and all. When it’s not being cringy, it’s filled to the brim with smart, funny, and often touching writing that only a few other relatively modern releases can successfully replicate, often incidentally by just being themselves.

(And spoiler, that’s the topic of my next newsletter. Put a pin in that sentence. We’ll get to it.)

This game resonated with me and many, many other Mario and RPG fans, so it was disappointing that, until recently, Nintendo never bothered to re-release it. Until this year, the original GameCube release was the only way to legally play the game.

As the Paper Mario series progressed, rather than build on the mechanics that made the series a success, Intelligent Systems would instead vary each new entry with experimental game design that didn’t always work well. 2007’s Super Paper Mario was well-written but played like a messy and tedious platformer/RPG chimera. 2012’s Sticker Star was a bland trash fire, and 2016’s follow-up Color Splash fared only slightly better, in my opinion.

Thankfully, Intelligent Systems turned things around with 2020’s Paper Mario: The Origami King, which continued to experiment on the combat side of things with more puzzle-focused fights but returned in full force to dramatic and often very tragic writing that actually moved me to tears at multiple moments. Here it is. Here’s the Paper Mario I fell in love with as a kid.

At this point, I was convinced that, as much as fans were crying out for a re-release of TTYD, we weren’t going to get it. Its writing hadn’t entirely aged gracefully, new Paper Mario games were more likely to continue experimenting, and to boot, TTYD features a transgender character, Vivian, who’s widely mocked in the original Japanese release, and outright censored in the American translation. There was, I thought, no way Nintendo would handle this tastefully, given their track record of LGBTQ+ representation in their games.

And then the remake came out. And oh my god. They did it. They actually did it.

They remade Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and they did everything right.

Okay, the game runs at 30 frames per second instead of the 60 it ran at on the GameCube. I’ll concede that. But everything else about the remake made my heart sing.

First off, Vivian is transgender in this release. Explicitly. And she’s accepted by the party and all who see and interact with her, bar her abusive sisters.

Vivian’s character arc of being abused and later welcomed into Mario’s ragtag group, even without the trans context in the Japanese and European versions, resonated a lot with me when I was growing up in many ways I didn’t realize at the time, and seeing that text box where Vivian lays out that she’s the Shadows’ sister rather than brother, just… it moved me. I’m still reeling from seeing it. This was a long time coming.

But beyond that, there are so many other touches that I adore. On top of the shiny new HD Switch visuals, there are lots of new animation flourishes that are small but add up over the entire game to make it look more expressive and livelier. The new music is different, but wonderful. A lot of the edgy jokes have been smoothed over in respectable ways that don’t impact the overall snappiness and bite the original English localization had.

By the time the credits rolled – with a new, flashier credits sequence that shows more of the characters’ personalities – I was over the moon. This weird, funny, beautiful game that I fell in love with as a kid was back, in its best possible form, representing every reason I fell in love with it, for new generations to fall in love with.

It’s a long-awaited celebration of one of my favorite games ever made. This release meant the world to me. And the idea that new players can discover it now makes me genuinely happy.

We’ll talk more Paper Mario next week.

A Wishlist Recommendation

As a non-binary amateur writer, I make it no secret that I’ve disowned J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter/Wizarding World franchise.

I’m not here to relitigate what she’s done or why she and her properties aren’t worth supporting. If you somehow don’t know why at this point, it will not take you many internet searches to find out.

Instead, I come with a recommendation courtesy of John, Evan, and David Szymanski, the latter of whom brought us the excellent DUSK, a boomer shooter that I will certainly be writing about later because it deserves it.

These three bring us the glorious parody Secret Agent Wizard Boy and the International Crime Syndicate.

I think that title pretty clearly lays bare what the game’s subject matter and tone will look like, but there’s more bubbling underneath the surface.

As a kid, I played a lot of the Chamber of Secrets game on the GameCube, and SAWB looks and plays like it on the surface, but after spending some time on the demo, it became clear that there’s some Hitman-esque immersive sim shenanigans under the hood. It’s an emergent, goofy good time.

If you looked at Hogwarts Legacy and wished you could play the Harry Potter game of your dreams without supporting a transphobe, well, I can’t promise that Secret Agent Wizard Boy will entirely fulfill that fantasy, but Szymanski has the chops, and I trust that he and the rest of the team’s take on it will be at least very entertaining.

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