Badges, Part 1: An Introduction.

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For my first official post on the Super Mario Files, I’ll once again revisit my favorite aspect of one of my favorite Mario games, badges in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.

Badges played a massive part in the original Paper Mario, allowing for amazing diversity in strategies, and if utilized correctly, completely mitigating the need for any other stat. Despite the large part badges played in PM64’s gameplay, the system was rather limited, with a set number of available badges and a horribly restrictive maximum BP of 30.  In the Thousand-Year Door, these limitations were all largely removed, with over triple the available BP, a larger number of badges available through normal means, a system for selling and re-buying badges easily, and most striking, a handful of ways that collectively allow one to collect practically infinite amounts of almost every badge in the game. This system is massively improved over the original’s; whereas there were at most three of any one badge in the original game, Thousand-Year Door provides you with the ability to hyper-focus your strategy on virtually any aspect of the battle system. A naïve player that doesn’t realize BP’s potential might reach the endgame with roughly 60 HP and FP; with all but 20 of that HP and FP being put into BP instead (totalling 51 BP), you can:

  • Restore an average of ~8 HP or FP every turn with 25 Happy Heart or Flower badges,
  • Get a straight extra 8 Attack or 10 Defense power for you or your partner with the respective numbers of Power/Defense Plus,
  • Increase ALL of your partners’ HP by 40 with HP Pluses P, giving you 300+ HP’s worth of meat-shields,
  • Gain back over three times the selling price of every item you use in-battle with Refunds,

and so on, and so on; you get the idea.  However, despite all these massive additions, the game makes little to no mention of how to get infinite copies of badges, or exactly how wearing multiple badges of the same type changes their effects. That’s where my research comes in; in the next couple of posts, I will pin down the effects of every badge in the game in single and multiple copies as accurately as they can be conceivably known, as well as detailing the exact methods for obtaining extra copies, whenever possible.  Stay posted for these updates in the near future!

For more info:

Part 1 – Badge-Hunting Introduction
Part 2 – Badge-Gathering Strategies
Part 3 – Badge Effects and Stacking

4 thoughts on “Badges, Part 1: An Introduction.”

  1. Pingback: Placing Pins and Tiering Trinkets: A TTYD Badge Tier List | The Super Mario Files

  2. Pingback: Badges, Part 2: Badge-Gathering Strategies. | The Super Mario Files

  3. Pingback: Badges, Part 3: Effects and Stacking. | The Super Mario Files

  4. Pingback: TTYD Battle Bits #024: Banking Badges | The Super Mario Files

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