The best Badges in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

There’s a wide variety of Badges to use in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and today we’re going over a list of some of the best ones you can get. Badges are extremely helpful, and when Mario levels up, you can choose to increase his HP, FP, or BP. While most players understandably aim for a balance between the stats, BP is actually so useful that you can focus solely on increasing it and still be fine.

Best Badges List

One of the best Badges categories is evasion-based Badges. There are several ones that, when equipped, increase the likelihood that Mario or his partner will dodge an incoming attack. You can even stack these to drastically increase that chance! Lucky Day is certainly the best of these Badges (one can be obtained from the Pit of 100 Trials, and the other from winning the Happy Lucky Lottery), providing a flat evasion boost with no drawback. The Pretty Lucky Badge does the same thing, but with a slightly lesser effect.

Quick Change is one of the best Badges in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door as well, though it comes at a somewhat high cost of 7 BP. It’s especially helpful if you’re trying to 100 percent complete the game, as it lets you swap your partner any time in battle without wasting your turn. This lets you easily swap to and from Goombella so you can work on getting all the Tattle Log entries. Perhaps more importantly, however, is that you can easily rotate between your partners during tough battles to use them as damage sponges. If you’ve stocked up on Life Mushrooms, Quick Change also helps prevent your partners from dying and wasting the Life Mushrooms you’d want Mario to use instead.

If you invest a ton of your level-up points into BP, you can also build a neat Danger Mario setup. You can pair Pretty Lucky and Lucky Day with Close Call, a Badge that increases Mario’s evasion when he is at 5 HP or less. Close Call also stacks with itself, and you can pair it with Mega Rush to drastically increase Mario’s attack power when he is at 1 HP. Add on All or Nothing to increase Mario’s attack even further when you get the action command input correct. There’s a degree of randomness to this build, but that variance goes down if you’re good at superguarding. If you’ve still got BP yet to use, add on a few Power Plus Badges.

One of the best Badges for general use is the Money Money Badge. It’s tough to get, as you need to grind out Piantas in the Pianta Parlor. We’d definitely recommend obtaining and equipping this Badge prior to taking on the Pit of 100 Trials, however, as it significantly increases the Coins you earn from defeating enemies. Speaking of the Pit of 100 Trials, the Feeling Fine Badge you obtain from the X-Naut Fortress is important against its boss fight. It makes Mario completely immune to status conditions, which will help prevent him from being worn down during fights. Bump Attack is a Badge you can find in the Pit of 100 Trials, and it lets you walk into weaker enemies to immediately defeat them.

There are tons of Badges to choose from in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and these are just a few of our top recommendations. What does your Badge loadout look like? Feel free to let us know in the comments below.

If you’d like to read more guides for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, check out our archive of them right here.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is out now for Switch. You can find the official website here.