Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 1 (Patreon)

Welcome, everyone, to the first issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, the new series of daily exclusive articles for subscribers! If you have come across this article before reading about the restructuring of the Supper Mario Broth Patreon tiers and rewards, you can do so here. If you do not wish to read the entirety of the announcement, please see the infographic summary of the main points of it here. 

Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone is a daily in-depth look at a single topic from across the Mario franchise. You can think of it as an extended version of a regular Supper Mario Broth post. Today, we are taking a look at the partially very obscure and partially entirely unused content hiding in, and behind, the room Gloomtail is fought in in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.

Time to get Groovy! Let's take the Star Road to the Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone.

The Secrets of Gloomtail's Room

(Spoilers for the final location of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door follow.)

In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the final location, lying beyond the titular door, is the Palace of Shadow. The dungeon consists of three parts, each with their own musical track; the first part of the palace with a more elegant aesthetic, the Riddle Tower focusing on puzzles, and the final part that is filled with moving mechanisms and is activated by completing the Riddle Tower. By activating the final part, some of the hallways in the palace change shape as the mechanism reveals additional paths and in general makes the floor of the hallways go down several dozen feet from its previous elevation.

It is precisely this fact that makes the room discussed here so hard to find for the average player. There is a room at the end of the part that is changed by the mechanism, the door to which is rendered completely inaccessible for the rest of the game due to the floor leading up to it receding. That room is the one that one of the palace's several bosses is fought in, Gloomtail the dragon.

The room itself is circular and almost entirely featureless, only large due to having to house the giant dragon:

It is exactly the type of room design that would commonly be expected from a location that is rendered inacessible soon after completing it. There is obviously nothing here to explore and it serves only as a place to hold an event. In addition, the usual understanding is that Mario games do not allow the player to permanently miss any collectables. Thus, if the room is only accessible once, there cannot be any secrets there as that would violate that principle.

However, there is a secret in this room. Take a look at the wall on the right side of the screen:

Even zoomed in like this - several times further than would normally be visible in-game - the crack in the bottom part of the wall is hard to see. The texture for the crack is taken from Hooktail's Castle early in the game, where is it seen on a light-colored wall. It is also meant for a flat surface; instead of adhering to the wall, it is floating slightly in front of it here:

Note how Mario can get "between" the crack and the wall, which common sense dictates should not be possible.

Consider that the room is only available for a brief time between defeating Gloomtail and activating the final part of the palace, and the other reasons outlined above together with the hard-to-see crack, and it becomes apparent why discovering this secret without a guide is extremely unlikely. Here is what happens when the crack is blown up by Bobbery:

There is a small passage flanked on both sides by dark gradients leading out into an extremely plain rectangular prism-shaped room where the floor and walls have the same texture. 

The room has nothing inside except two Question Blocks, the one on the left containing an Ultra Shroom and the one on the right a Jammin' Jelly. These two are the most potent and rare healing items in the game outside of recipes, and definitely worth obtaining if you know about the room's existence, but there is something else here as well which normal players can never see.

The above footage was recorded with noclip.website, an excellent tool for researching the 3D spaces of certain games including most Mario-related games for the GameCube and Wii. Zooming into the floor in the middle of the secret room shows a pit below the floor with walls that are shaped as though someone broke through the floor. The pit is not normally accessible, so it is in essence a hidden part of an already hidden room. However, there actually may be a story-relevant reason for it to be there. Let me explain.

During the cutscene that plays when the final boss battle starts, many locations in the game are shown. One of them is a nondescript room inside the palace, where Professor Frankly is seen. This is odd as he is never actually encountered when exploring the palace, so it may be assumed that the room is a special cutscene-only room that is normally inaccessible.

However, that room is actually Gloomtail's room - it may simply be hard to recognize this as it is usually not possible to see the room without Gloomtail blocking the view of the far wall. So, it is established by this scene that Gloomtail's room is more important than it seems - not only was it housing the dragon, it is also where Frankly is kept (after being presumably kidnapped by Doopliss to not interfere in Doopliss's plan to impersonate Frankly). How it is possible that Frankly is there without Mario encountering him, and where Gloomtail went for this scene, is not explained.

There is another piece of the puzzle shown extremely briefly before the battle against Bowser and Kammy Koopa, after Grodus is defeated:

Bowser falls from the ceiling onto Grodus, taking a chunk of the ceiling with him. Look very closely at the debris around Bowser. It has the exact same texture as the floor of the secret room. Now here is where it all comes together:

I believe that the hidden cracked part of the hidden room was intended to be used in a cutscene shown before the Bowser battle. Bowser and Kammy would be shown in the secret room and presumably out of frustration, Bowser would stomp the ground and fall straight down onto Grodus. If the layout of the palace is taken into consideration, then Gloomtail's room is directly above the music-less room with the large pillars to the left of the throne room, making the hidden room exactly above the throne room in the precise position for the cracked floor to match up with Bowser falling.

In addition, the fact that Frankly is in Gloomtail's room as well makes me believe - however, this is purely speculation - that he would have also appeared in that hypothetical cutscene. Perhaps, and this is the most logical explanation I could come up with, he would have told Bowser something factual about the palace or the situation they were in that would cause Bowser to become frustrated and stomp the floor. The reason I keep mentioning stomping the floor is because Bowser is shown to do so when becoming angry several times in the game. 

Of course, none of this is confirmed and there are no unused cutscene files in the game's data to corroborate this - at least not to the current knowledge of data miners. However, the way it all fits together seems to indicate that there was some major content cutting going on here, at least. Perhaps as data mining becomes more sophisticated, additional clues to the nature of the cracked floor can be uncovered.

This concludes the first issue of this column. I hope that you can find the format to be more digestible than the previous Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels articles, which were often dozens of pages long. A new issue will be released every day, so please stay tuned!

Thank you very much for reading.