Paper Mario: Star Nova is the Biggest Romhack for this Classic RPG YET!

Step aside from your PC Ports, a real-deal romhack has returned!

The Paper Mario romhacking community has recently seen it’s most ambitious work yet. The mod author know as NicTube has released a brand new campaign for Paper Mario called Star Nova - a mod they’ve been working on for over four years.

You can find the project on the creator’s itch.io page here: https://nictuber.itch.io/paper-mario-star-nova.

If you can’t get enough of Star Nova, NicTuber has released another shorter mod called Paper Mario: Mystical Missions while working on the main project. Mystical Missions was made for the Water Jam Contest for one of the Paper Mario modding Discords. It even was featured in the F3 2025 showcase!

This mod and others like it were made possible thanks to the Star Rod rom editor, a toolset that lets you customize just about every element of the base game. The creator, z64a, has been maintaining it for over 10 years, making it one of the longest running tools I’ve seen in the N64 romhacking community. I love tools like this. They practically turn whatever game they’re made for into a creation platform versus a coding project!

The recommended emulator to play Star Nova is Parallel Launcher which can be ran standalone or through RetroArch. According to the devs, it’s, “faster and more accurate than Project64 [and] comes with all graphics plugins built in so you don't need to manually install and update them.”