Coming as a surprise to exactly no one who has ever heard me deride the artistic fruits of Japan, I don't like JRPGs. To me, they aren't even RPGs. An RPG is a game that lets me play a role, let's me create a character and live a life based around choices, actions, and consequences that aren't scripted or dictated to me. JRPGs are just action games that let you pick which weapons/figthing style you use and has your attacks do more damage as the game progresses. You play as a set character, doing set actions, in a set world, with a set story. You aren't playing a role in the same sense as western RPGs like Morrowind or Mass Effect. Also, those stories are very often bad, those characters extremely shallow or annoying, and the action painfully drawn out and prioritising style and spectacle over whether it's fun or satisfying. I'm not a fan of the genre. That's just me.
That said, I have a special place in my heart for Paper Mario: Thousand-Year Door. I think the game came along at the exact right moment for me. My auntie was going on holiday for two months and so my mum offered to run her pub while she was gone, which meant I got to spend the summer away from all of my friends sat alone in a flat over a noisy pub. Hooray! I had my GameCube with me, though, so it wasn't all bad. In fact, it was pretty great. This was the summer when I first played through Resident Evil 4, and since I had the Zelda Collector's edition it was the first time I'd replayed Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. Obviously, I also had TYD, too.
I don't think I'd have ever stuck with TYD if it wasn't for the fact that I was away from home with only a handful of games. I wasn't sold on the idea of a non-platformer Mario game, and I wasn't a fan of JRPGs. I only had the game because a friend of mine, who was a bit of a weeb, was so insistent that I play it. So I did, and I stuck with it mainly because I didn't have anything else to do besides replay those other games and watch Teen Titans (Raven best girl).
I really loved TYD. It's got such a wonderful charm to it that other JRPGs simply don't have. When I think of JRPGs I think of either over-the-top, cringe-inducing melodrama or cheesy, inappropriate """humour""" that seems to have been written by a computer program trying to study human comedy. But with the Mario setting, the game couldn't get too serious, and its humour felt like it belonged since everything was a goofy cartoon anyway. The music helped a lot, too. Christ, just thinking about the Rougeport theme makes me want to go on a globe-trotting adventure.
I think the way the game is structured in chapters, each with a distinct theme and aesthetic, really helped, too. Going from the surreal monochrome of the Boggly Woods to the bombastic glamour of the Glitz Pit before trudging through the dark creepiness of Twilight Town was akin to the TimeSplitters games, of all things, in that you constantly had a refreshing change of pace and scenery without anything feeling jarring or out of place. The interludes with Paper Peach (a cute) were also nice, and it was good to see Peach get some character development and take a proactive role in her own situation, too. Moments like TEC, the bad guy's supercomputer, projecting a hologram so it can 'dance' with Peach are touching and stick out in my memory.
There was also a fun cast of party memebers, like Goombella, who gives you info on enemies, Vivian, the purple ghost who doesn't want to be a bad guy, Ms Mowz, the delightful femme fatale, and Admiral Bobbery, Sean Connery in Bob-Omb form. The game kept showing me new things that were just plain fun and imaginative, and the turn-based combat that actually made style a mechanic and not a crutch was engaging enough to keep things from getting boring on the gameplay side.
I could never get into the original Paper Mario for the N64. I got it on the Wii Virtual Console and tried to play it three times, but I kept getting to the desert region and giving up. Super Paper Mario was fun, but it was totally different in its deisgn, being a platformer/adventure hybrid thingy. Sticker Star on the 3DS was pretty good, with a lot of what I liked about TYD in terms of interesting and fun locations (plus it was one of the best looking 3DS games by far), but its lack of party characters and a frankly dreadful combat system stopped it from being up to the same standard as TYD. I feel like the potential for another really good Paper Mario game exists and just hasn't been realised. Maybe one day, eh?