TASaturday #2: Paper Mario – The Thousand Year Door

For the second TASaturday, we chose to go with a radically different TAS from last week’s (which was about Brain Age / Brain Training, on the Nintendo DS). Indeed, today’s TAS is about a game beloved by many players… Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, on the GameCube! This is quite a hefty TAS (it lasts over 4 hours total), because even in a Tool Assisted Speedrun, Paper Mario TTYD still remains a really long game.

If we chose this particular TAS, it’s for several reasons. The first one is that it’s a popular game, meaning lots of people have already played it. It’s much more fun and interesting to watch a TAS (or even a regular speedrun) of game you’ve already played and know quite well. If you know the game, then the various techniques used are even more impressive. You might even learn a few things about games you thought you knew well, which makes watching the run even more worthwile.

The second reason is that it’s radically different from the Brain Training / Age run, but also from other speedruns/TAS. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is, after all, a turn-based RPG, so the techniques used to save time are not the same as in a platformer or an action/adventure game for example. Taking an item and saving it for use in a later chapter, manipulating RNG (random number generator, which determines the “randomness” in the game), playing with fire by putting the main character in peril to increase attack… those are some of the techniques/tricks used in this TAS of Paper Mario TTYD.

Finally, the third (and probably most important) reason we picked up this particular TAS is because of the commentary. Watching a TAS is always entertaining, but it’s even more fun and interesting when you can actually understand what is happening. In this TAS of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, the author of the TAS actually explains every single trick used in his run. Not only it allows you to understand how the run was made to work, but it also helps to grasp just how the game itself works (or at least, some aspects / parts of the game). Just make you sure you activate the subtitles!

So here’s the TAS for Paper Mario – The Thousand Year Door:

For more information about this TAS, please click here!

For next week’s TASaturday, we’ll have a really different TAS, kind of similar to the Brain Age / Training one.