Nintendo's Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remake is largely faithful to the 20-year-old GameCube original, aside from a few key differences. Those changes include making one essential move - the Power Bounce - way harder.
As with most Mario RPGs, The Thousand-Year Door is largely turn-based, but you can deal (or avoid) bonus damage by completing certain timing-based actions in combat. Tapping a button right when you jump on an enemy, for example, lets you bounce on that foe to deal extra damage.
A special attack called Power Bounce, unlocked by equipping a certain badge item, lets you bounce on an enemy's head near-infinitely - with some exceptions for boss creatures - as long as you can keep up with constantly shrinking timing windows for your button presses. As speedrunner Glan notes on Twitter, the original game gives you an eight-frame window to hit the first bounce, seven frames to hit the second, and so on until you eventually have to hit single frame inputs repeatedly in order to keep dealing bonus damage.
"Several TTYD runners, myself included, have had difficulty hitting power bounces in the remake, we all struggled to get past 4 hits," Glan says. "So I did some science. And... yea, they're gatekeeping us. The frame windows for the inputs seem to be: 7, 7, 6, 1 (!!), 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, …" In contrast to the smooth progression of input windows from the original game, here there are two seven-frame inputs, one six-frame input, and then a frame perfect input - something even speedrunners can have difficulty doing on command.
There's an extra caveat here, too: the remake runs at 30 FPS, compared with the 60 FPS of the original game. That means a seven-frame input window is actually much more generous than an eight-framer in the original - you'd have 14/60ths of a second versus 8/60ths to do the input, to bring in some unreduced fractions. A frame perfect input, then, is twice as easy to do at 30 FPS, but the fourth hit in the Power Bounce chain is still way harder in the remake than it was in the original.
You can equip the Simplifier badge to make your inputs a bit easier, but it doesn't solve the problem here. "Using Simplifier lengthens the windows by 1 frame... except the 4th," Glan says. "The 4th input is still 1 frame even with Simplifier. lol, lmao even."
Now I'm here wondering if this change is a bug, an oversight, or an intentional design change in order to make getting a big Power Bounce chain feel like much more of an accomplishment. The remake is otherwise very faithful to the original, right down to the old lottery guilt trip, so it's tough to guess what the reasoning is here.
