Paper Mario The Thousand Year door is an interesting turn based RPG brought to us by the talented studio being the Fire Emblem series, Intelligent Systems. On the surface to an outsider this game may look nothing more than a basic, watered down JRPG fare, but it is in fact more than it let's on. The game sees Mario receive a mysterious map from Princess Peach which takes him to a mysterious harbor town called Rogueport full of shady characters, and dark secrets. When he arrives he discovers that Peach has been captured (obviously) by a mysterious new foe called the X-Nauts. And it's up to Mario and his new band of misfit friends to save not only Peach, but the world from a mysterious force. The game plays like a standard JRPG on the surface having you encounter enemies in dungeons, or in open areas, where you then take a series of turns plotting your attacks to take down the enemies. This game however takes an interesting approach to the turn based formula by adding interactive button prompts for each move making it more engaging to fight through encounters. The game also rewards the player for pressing hidden timed prompts during attack animations to get various stylish bonuses or continual damage to an enemy. This level of subtle but engaging interactivity tossed in to the Turn Based Format really adds a unique wrinkle to the well established genre. This style of gameplay has it's origins in Mario RPGs of the past, but this game in particular uses them to their full advantage. The character building system in this game is also pretty unique for the time only giving the player 3 levelable stats to pick from such as HP, FP (Mana), and BP which acts as your stash of points in which you can equip badges to make your build. Each badge has their own effects, and BP requirements to equip which allows for a lot of build diversity when it comes to making your character. So while the story isn't anything particularly amazing, the characters, and the RPG systems this game presents are some of the best you can find in the whole turn based genre and I stand by that 100%. Even if you aren't a Mario fan I highly recommend giving this one a shot.