Paper Mario The Thousand-Year Door on Switch has an ESRB rating now
It looks like Paper Mario The Thousand-Year Door on Switch is closer to launch than we thought, as some savvy Redditers spotted an ESRB rating for it. Nintendo announced the Gamecube RPG remake during the September 2023 Nintendo Direct before doing the usual Nintendo thing and saying almost nothing about it in the months that followed.
However, with the recent ESRB rating, it seems likely that the Paper Mario Switch port is closer to being finished than it seemed.
The way the board’s rating system works is that the publisher has to send summaries and footage of anything that might correspond with a ratings tag – fantasy violence, for example, or suggestive material – for review, and the assumption is that the material sent to the board is what will appear in the final product.
"This is an adventure role-playing game in which players help Mario rescue Princess Peach from an alien group," the rating description reads. "As players traverse whimsical worlds, they interact with characters and engage in turn-/puzzle-based combat against paper creatures. Players use various attacks (e.g., boot stomp, hammer strike, fire balls) against cartoony enemies that disappear into stars and coins.”
"A handful of characters engage in brief flirtatious dialogue (e.g., 'Aren't you a fine specimen of a man'; 'Perhaps if I… grabbed you and gave you a little sugar'), and/or are designed with large chests/exaggerated proportions."
There might be some timing leeway with a remaster, depending on whether Nintendo changed much in the new version of Thousand-Year Door, but these usually don’t appear far before a game’s launch. That said, Nintendo does have its own logic when it comes to release schedules, reportedly sitting on finished games for months before deciding when to launch them. Assuming we get the usual early-year Nintendo Direct, perhaps we’ll see more Thousand-Year Door then.
If you're eager for more Mario RPGs on Switch before then, don't let the Super Mario RPG remake pass you by.
