How to Beat Hooktail in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

The first big boss you face in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is Hooktail the dragon, and there are plenty of hints about a badge to make the battle easier. Fortunately, it is very easy to get the item and use it to make that fight a lot easier.

How do I find the Attack FX G Badge to help beat Hooktail in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door?

As part of your exploration of Hooktail’s castle, you’ll eventually need to acquire the Paper Mode curse. This happens when players get to the “dungeon” area of the place, past a few cells on the first floor all the way to the east. On your way to the chest to get the ability, you’ll pass one cell with vertical bars and a badge inside. That’s the Attack FX G badge that lets you exploit the fear of frogs Hooktail has to make her fight easier in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.

Get the Paper Mode ability, which involves holding down ZR to make Mario go from essentially horizontal to vertical. Walk over to the Attack FX G Badge cell door before you leave this room and further explore Hooktail’s home. Press ZR, hold it, and hold forward. Mario will slip through the bars and get the badge. 

How do I beat Hooktail in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door?

Hooktail is honestly not all that intimidating. I like to think of her as a tutorial boss. However, equipping that Attack FX G badge can make it much easier to beat Hooktail in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, as I found it will ensure she does minimal or no damage to you and Mario will typically do as much as four damage per hit for some of his special FP attacks. 

Before you go into the fight, equip the badge. It has 0 BP cost, so even if you didn’t put any level up points into BP or have other badges equipped, you can wear it too. From there, only have Mario use hammer-based attacks on Hooktail. I suggest using two standard hammer attacks for the first two rounds, since it’ll drop her stats and defenses twice, then go for Power Smash after that. When she leaps forward, you’ll also reduce her power again by two.

At about the halfway point of the match, Hooktail will begin bargaining with you. This is something NPCs in the castle will have warned you about. First, she’ll offer you coins. After that, she offers a rare badge. Her final offer involves smelling her feet. Say no each time, because saying yes will cause her to attack and deal damage. After being turned down all three times, she will perform an action that heals her for 10 HP. By this point, as a result of the badge, Mario should be doing 4 damage each turn and Koops 2, so basically you have two more rounds to go.

After beating Hooktail, you get your first Crystal Star and Mario learns the Earth Tremor special move.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is available for the Nintendo Switch. It originally appeared on the GameCube.