Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has many tough bosses populating its story, but itsbiggest challengelies outside the quest to collect the Crystal Stars. Below Rogueport sits the foreboding Pit of 100 Trials, an endurance that gets more challenging the deeper one descends. What’s more, it must be completedtwicein order to experience everything the game has to offer.
Review: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a near-legendary RPG these days, but does it still hold up after all this time?
Delving through the Pit of 100 Trials’ depths need not be the monumental task it’s presented as, though. So long as one stocks up, keeps their best badges at the ready and takes each fight seriously, they’ll make it. See our tips below for all the details.
10Bring Lotsa Cash and Lotsa Snacks
Mario can’t fight on an empty stomach, and resupplying costs money!
There are no save points, Toad Houses or healing blocks in the Pit of 100 Trials, so the only ways to heal up are items, special moves and Ms. Mowz’s “Smooch” ability. Special moves are better used for offense and Smooch costs a whopping ten FP, so it’s best to bring as many powerful healing items as possible.
Item vendors will occasionally show up on safe floors in the Pit, but they charge a premium for their items, so having extra cash to top up the inventory can help. Making use of Ms. Mowz’s “Kiss Thief” ability will help the team reach the end too.
9Snitches Get Stitches
Sometimes it’s better to just focus on the fight.
Goombella’s Tattle is great because it reveals enemy HP bars and highlights weaknesses. That said, there are times when it’s best to end the fight as quickly as possible. There are a lot of hard-hitting enemies in the Pit of 100 Trials, especially on the latter fifty floors. Giving them chances to attack should be avoided as much as possible, so it’s not a good idea to spend a turn on revealing a health bar.
Most enemies have eight or less HP in the Pit, so it’s just a matter of hitting that number as fast as possible most of the time.
8Ignore Enemy Defenses With Piercing Blow and Quake Hammer
Adjusting your badges for each fight helps a lot too.
There are more than a few enemies with low HP but high defense and attack power. Getting rid of them can be tricky with normal attacks, which can be especially troublesome if Mario’s star power is low. That’s where Piercing Blow and Quake Hammer come in.
The 10 Best Badges in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Mario has a lot of badges to choose from in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. These are the best of the bunch.
Both badges allow Mario to attack while ignoring enemy defenses completely and serve different functions. Piercing Blow is great for individuals, while Quake Hammer does good work against groups. There’s an argument for Power Smash since its +2 attack works on both high-defense enemies and normal ones, but Piercing Blow is just better against high-defense enemies.
7Clear The Screen and Do It Quick!
Eliminate groups as quickly as possible!
There are many times in the Pit of 100 Trials where players will find themselves confronted with a full squad of powerful enemies. The impulse may be to try and power through it and conserve FP and star power as much as possible, but doing so can cause problems later on.
Granted, FP is just as limited a resource as HP, so one will need to do some saving here and there. As much as possible, use items and star power to clear groups and tackle smaller groups by using more normal attacks. Basically, the goal is to limit the enemies’ opportunities to attack.
6If You Get the Chance to Skip a Few Levels, Do It!
It doesn’t matter how you get to the end, so long as you get there.
Sometimes players will encounter Movers: punies that can move Mario down two to five floors. They appear randomly, and there’s no guarantee Mario will encounter one at all on a Pit run, so it’s wise to take advantage of their services when possible. Skipping floors means saving resources, after all.
Moving down two floors costs ten coins, while moving down five costs thirty. Usually, there’s no good reason not to do it, but if one is unlucky enough to encounter a Mover close to a milestone floor (Floor 10, 20, 30, etc.), then it’s better to not skip and collect the goodies instead.
5Put Those Crystal Stars To Work!
Star power regenerates quickly, so don’t just save it for emergencies.
One of the great things about star power (SP) is that it regenerates. Even if it’s depleted, all Mario has to do is wait a minute and it’s ready to fuel more attacks. Special attacks are always powerful and always hit all enemies on screen, making them ideal for clearing enemy squads.
The normal temptation is to save SP for “emergencies,” but this always results in these moves being underutilized. Sure, save the SP attacks for the really beefy baddies, but low-cost ones like Earth Tremor should be used regularly. Constantly hitting stylish moves will help keep those meters filled too.
4Power Up Your Partners
Those extra points of damage and defense can make all the difference.
Mario is the anchor of his party, so it makes sense to focus on him when choosing badges. One shouldn’t entirely neglect his companions, though. Enemies in the latter half of the Pit of 100 Trials are truly nasty customers, so much so that dealing with them is going to be difficult if only Mario’s been buffed up.
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Mario puts together a very talented crew in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, but some are more capable than the others.
Spending five or six BP to give allies an attack or defense boost might not seem worth it, but that one point really adds up when it’s applied to every attack. Seriously, ending fights more quickly or taking more hits makes a big difference.
3Quick Change Breaks The Game
The ability to swap partners as needed is too powerful to ignore.
To put it simply, Quick Change should always be equipped in the Pit of 100 Trials. Sure, it’s expensive, but being able to freely switch to just the right partner for a battle at any time is 100% worth it. With this on, it doesn’t matter what enemies are weak to, since it’s easy to address them.
It’s almost tempting to say that Quick Changetakes a decent chunk of the challenge outof the Pit; that’s how much of a difference this badge makes.
2Only Go Halfway For The First Run
Optimizing the first fifty floors makes the next fifty go that much smoother.
This isn’t great advice forspeedrunners,since it already takes a minute to get down to Floor Fifty, but it helps out otherwise. For starters, on Floor Fifty, Mario gets the Strange Sack item, which increases his inventory to twenty slots. That’s a lot of extra space for powerful items, and one is going to want them for the second half.
Also, getting a feel for the first fifty floors will improve the next run and help save items and HP for the rest of the dungeon. Yes, it takes more time, but time spent on research is never wasted.
1Get Those Stats Up!
Wait to attempt the Pit until Mario is at least level 20.
In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, dedicated players can level Mario all the way up to level 99. It’s a pain to do it, but then the Pitwouldbe a breeze at least. While one does need a fair amount of power to make a comfortable attempt at The Pit, they needn’t go so far.
At the minimum, players should not attempt the Pit of 100 Trials until level twenty at the earliest, as that’s about when Mario’s HP, FP and BP stores become decent. Anything past that is a bonus, with level 25 being just about right and level thirty possibly making it too easy.
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