Paper Mario: Legend of the Aeon Gate: Controversy over transsexual character flares up again after 20 years

As an RPG spin-off of the mustachioed plumber’s classic platforming games, the Paper Mario series comes with a whole host of its own characters and a somewhat more complex story than “Save the princess and don’t fall into the lava!” on. However, one of these characters already caused confusion in the original GameCube version and that doesn’t seem to be changing in the current remake.

Specifically, it’s about Barbara, a member of the Shadow Trio who are out to get Mario. Later in the game, however, Barbara leaves the group and joins the plumber on his journey. In the original Japanese version, Barbara was clearly planned as a transsexual character, but in the English translation, any reference to this was removed.

In the original, Barbara is asked by one of her sisters how she can call herself a “shadow sister” and then accuses her of actually being a man. At another point, she herself says that it took her some time to understand that she is not a brother, but a shadow sister.

When localizing it into English, they decided to completely ignore this part of Barbara’s story. For example, instead of making fun of her gender, her sister makes fun of her appearance and calls her ugly. While in other countries the original meaning of the statements was restored, in Germany they decided to follow the English version.

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So the question is how the remake that is now being released will deal with the whole situation and Barbara is actually transsexual, as originally intended, at least in the English Switch version (her name is Vivian there). However, the translators of the German version have again opted for the alienated version in which Barbara is insulted and blamed for all sorts of things, but her sexuality plays no role.

In his test, colleague Denis was very impressed by the now released remake of the Paper Mario game, which will be playable for everyone from May 23rd.