Last week on my Twitch channel I spent two streams working through my favorite chapter of the Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remake. Chapter three – Of Glitz and Glory – tells the story of Mario’s journey to the floating city of Glitzville. Glitzville plays host to the Glitz Pit, a fighting arena where combat sport fans come to watch athletes from across the Mushroom Kingdom punch the shit out of each other. Part pro wrestling and part MMA, the fights are real (by which I mean not fixed) but are accompanied by high levels of showmanship and focus on charismatic personalities. On the surface the fights are good clean fun, but Glitzville has a seedy underbelly of corruption that Mario slowly uncovers as he competes at the arena to try and find the third crystal star of his adventure.
Just as the release of the TTYD remake had me thinking a couple weeks ago about why Paper Mario is my favorite game, playing chapter three got me reflecting on why this chapter in particular resonated so much with me – and still does. As a kid I feel like the explanation was pretty straightforward. “Fighting is cool!” I always enjoyed the combat systems in video games as well as watching battles in tv shows and anime, so anytime a tournament arc came around my young self was seated and ready to go. But surely as an adult with a more nuanced perspective on the world and more refined taste in media I have deeper, more thought-out reasons for loving the Glitz Pit, right?
Eh. Yes and no.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a video game fundamentally about fighting, at least from a mechanical perspective. When you look at the game’s systems and think about which ones involve the most complex player inputs and the most interesting choices for the players to make, it’s combat all the way down. There’s other stuff going on in the game, of course. Paper Mario has a solid story with witty dialogue and lots of simple but effective characterization that makes the game memorable. There are puzzles to solve in every chapter and lots of goodies to hunt in the environment like shine sprites and star pieces. This stuff is all good fun! But it’s also pretty straightforward. Your dialogue options almost never matter and instead railroad you down a scripted path. Puzzles are short and generally have one given solution; you can’t build a version of Mario in your game who solves all the puzzles differently than my Mario.
Combat is the primary system in the game where the player is the most engaged. Time slows down and focuses on discrete actions, turn by turn. You handpick each move that Mario and his partner make, and it’s your choice what to do based on the tools available to you. Do you hammer the spiked enemy or switch Koops in front and have him hit them with his shell? Do you use star power or an item here? Are there any badges you’re wearing that change how your moves function, limiting or expanding your options? When it comes to the player expressing themselves and making their unique mark on the game, combat is where all of that happens.
Despite this being the case, not every chapter of the game places the combat front and center all the time. In fact, the structure of many chapters is such that there are sequences where combat fundamentally hinders your progression. Walking back and forth through Boggly Woods there are many narrow paths with enemies who are looking to block your progress as you look for Flurrie, find her necklace, take it back to her, and bring her to the Great Tree. When I played that section of the game there were multiple times where I was trying to avoid combat because it didn’t necessarily contribute to my forward progress, but instead slowed it. Chapter Three is unique in that structurally, because it is a tournament arc, the battles aren’t just an avoidable obstacle – every fight contributes to your forward progression through the story of the game. It takes the most involved system and makes it the core progression system of the chapter.
Placing the focus of the chapter squarely on the battles alone wouldn’t necessarily elevate the Glitz Pit. There are a couple of other choices here that help those battles – and thus the chapter as a whole – to shine. The first is the enemy variety. Most chapters in the game have a limited number of unique enemy types that you are dealing with; three, maybe four distinct enemies per section of the chapter with each chapter having maybe two unique sections. In chapter one for example, you primarily fight the three different types of goombas when outside of Hooktail’s Castle, introduce koopas on the way to Shwonk Fortress, fight some fuzzies inside Shwonk Fortress, and then add dry bones and parakoopas to the mix at Hooktail’s Castle. That’s a total of about seven unique enemy types across the entire chapter – not counting one-time encounters like the gold fuzzy or the bristles in the fort on the way to Shwonk Fortress. In Boggly Woods, in the woods you fight piranha plants, ruff puffs, and clefts, while inside the Great Tree you deal primarily with x-nauts, yux, and piders.
The limited enemy types mean a few things. For one, the battles only have so many unique challenges they can throw at you. Take the path to Petalburg for example. About the most involved challenge you can deal with there is running into a fight with two spiked goombas because Goombella can’t fight spiked goombas, so you need to either wait a turn for Mario to be able to attack again or use an item. In the Great Tree there is functionally no reason to ever use your hammer – there are maybe two encounters inside the tree with piranha plants and everything else can just be jumped to death pretty effectively. As long as you’ve got a fire flower or some star power saved up there’s no reason to switch off of a strategy of using Goombella and Mario’s jumps to win the day.
The Glitz Pit is unique in that it brings fighters from all over the world to one location to compete. This does mean you’ll fight some enemies you’ve seen before or some you will see again later. But the sheer variety across the chapter gives you a lot of different types of battles to have to figure out. Even teams that seem to have overlap aren’t as straightforward as they seem. In the minor leagues one of your first battles is against the KP Koopas. They are palette swapped koopas – their shells are yellow but their stats are identical. Nothing fascinating happening there. But once you make it to the majors you face another team called the Shellshockers. The team composition is the same – two grounded koopas and one paratroopa. However, these are the shady variety, which means knocking them over makes them stronger instead of making them defenseless. These fights take different approaches in order to secure victory, and in between you fight all kinds of different monster types from lakitus to fuzzies to bob-ombs to spiked buzzy beetles.
On its own, a larger variety of enemies means there are more choices for you to make and more strategies to consider. But the Glitz Pit adds yet another wrinkle that further challenges you to customize your approach to each fight. In order to progress in the Glitz Pit you can’t simply win your fights. You also have to meet a condition set by the fight promoter. During the chapter Grubba may do things like restrict your jump or your hammer, forbid your partner from fighting or making them the only one who fights, require you to take damage or limit how much damage you can take, or give specifications about the number of turns you can spend in combat. The combat conditions are mostly random – there are specific story-based moments where you are always given the same condition but otherwise you and I can both play this chapter at the same time and each have a very different experience based on what conditions we get.
The imposition of conditions means that you need to have multiple solutions on deck for any given battle in order to progress. Take bristles for example. Bristles cannot be jumped or hammered, meaning none of Mario’s basic attacks function against them. You could use the quake hammer badge to beat them, but that’s not an option if Grubba says you can’t use hammers. So what else does Mario have in his arsenal? Well, you could use the special move Earth Tremor. It takes two of your three star power dots but it is pretty much guaranteed to do the job. Alternatively, you could use an item like a POW Block to inflict the damage. No star powers and no items are also conditions that exist, though, which means if you only know one solution to the fight, you’re going to have to learn one of the other ones or otherwise fail to rank up because you are unable to meet the battle conditions. You won’t always be allowed to use the simplest answer, so the Glitz Pit rewards you for knowing multiple solutions to a particular combat puzzle – or teaches those solutions for the first time through trial and error.
A side effect of this approach is that the Glitz Pit pushes you to engage more deeply with one of the most interesting and unique systems in the game: the badge system. Paper Mario’s badge system is the game’s alternative to something like level-up moves or a skill tree. Badges let you switch your loadout on the fly, building a customized Mario that functions differently depending on the situation. You can unlock new moves, change your stats between fights, or give yourself restrictions in exchange for bonuses. In most chapters you can pretty well get away with running the same set of badges for the majority of the chapter – there’s not a lot of incentive to switch them up outside of discovering new ones mid-chapter. But all of the factors that I have described here, from the larger variety of enemies to the artificially-imposed conditions, make it so that changing your badge build is a lot more important during chapter three. Experimenting with badge combinations is a unique part of Paper Mario that makes it stand out from other RPGs; the Glitz Pit gives that system an opportunity to shine.
All of these factors work together to make chapter three sing. It is a chapter where the most involved systems with the most player choice are brought to the forefront and made into the key systems of story progression. The battles are elevated by giving you a larger variety and by imposing conditions that challenge you to develop a deeper understanding of your toolbox, learning multiple solutions to the same problem in case one isn’t possible at any given time. While a chapter full of fights may sound simplistic on its face, it successfully highlights the parts of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door that make it unique compared to other games. All of this makes Of Glitz and Glory my favorite chapter in the game, even now, twenty years on.
In other words, if you ask me why my favorite chapter of the game is chapter three, my answer ultimately boils down to…fighting is cool! Some things never change.