I've been wanting to work on this soundtrack for a long time now and I'm glad to say that during the past two weeks, I finally got around to it. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door was released on July 22, 2004. The soundtrack's composed by Yuka Tsujiyok. It is the second installment in the long running Paper Mario Series and is still to this day... The best one released(yes, the first PM is a great game but a close second my books). It's been about, nine or ten years since I last played through TTYD and the story of my last playthrough is, unfortunate but a testament to what a great game it is.
So, what happened was I played through the entire game and reached the point where I was about to open The Thousand-Year Door and enter the Palace of Shadow(for those of you that don't know, that's the very end of the game); saved the game and went to bed. The next day after work, I went to load up my saved game and... You guessed it, nothing is there. It was really my fault for using a cheap aftermarket purple memory card(I forget the brand) for the GameCube but everything was gone, including my PM:TTYD saves. As you can imagine, I was not happy about that. I told myself I was not going to do that all over again, especially not anytime soon. A about a week or so go by and I went online ordered a Nintendo Licensed black 251 memory card, popped it in, sat back and played through the entire darn game again. Finished up the Palace of Shadow that I missed, defeated the Shadow Queen, watched the credits roll and I actually enjoyed it just as much as I did the first around. Thought at first it would feel like a chore but It was still fun. Moral of the story, do not rely on cheap knock off memory cards kids.
Now, on to the music..
The soundtrack project was pretty straightforward. I took the stm or stream files off of the .ISO I ripped, converted them, edited and labeled the tracks according to when they play. There were some tracks like evt_mri1 and _mri2 or stgk_fld1_up1 and _up2 that are identical with the exception of a very short intro attached. So I excluded the non-intro versions since there is less audio(which is what I did with Skyward Sword). As for the tagging, the tracks that are recycled throughout the game are tagged based on when they're first heard — such as Magnus Von Grapple Battle that's played again during the second battle with Crump at Keelhaul Key. I used various in-game dialogue to tag some of the events that occur to make the titles sound more original such as "You're Interrupting My Me Time" and "Pirates do not MOAN!"(what a great line..).
This is one of my all-time favorite games and If there is ever a HD Remake(make it happen Nintendo!) I'd definitely give it a third playthrough. I also wanted to say that the newest game in the series Paper Mario: Color Splash is so far, one of the better ones I've played recently and it has some very good music if anybody was wondering. It still doesn't compare to the old school turn-based battle system but It's entertaining.
