If you’ve been playing Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, we’ve got the full rundown on how to upgrade partners.

Partners are sort of the cornerstone of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and its battle system. Each one has their own unique set of attacks, and swapping between them at the right time can make or break a tough boss battle. Mario can constantly level up and increase his stats, but the same isn’t true for partners. Instead, you’ll need to collect and use Shine Sprites to initiate a partner upgrade. Every partner can be upgraded twice, and doing so increases their attack power and grants them access to a new move. There are just enough Shine Sprites to fully upgrade all of your partners, so don’t worry about having to make any difficult choices. 

Partner upgrade guide

You’ll find Shine Sprites scattered throughout the world as early as Chapter 1. To upgrade a partner once in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, you need three Shine Sprites. Once you’ve got that many, you can head over to Professor Frankly’s house in east Rogueport. A wizard named Merlon lives directly next to Professor Frankly, so you can enter his house to initiate a partner upgrade. After clearing Chapter 5, you can take on a side quest that will let you upgrade each partner again. This will require another three Shine Sprites, and there are seven total partners. This means there are 42 Shine Sprites in total. As we mentioned earlier, every time you upgrade a partner, they unlock a new move. Each partner has two hidden moves, and we’re going to go over each one and which is most useful during a standard playthrough.

Goombella unlocks two moves via partner upgrade: Multibonk and Rally Wink. Multibonk is essentially an upgraded version of Headbonk, her standard attack. It retains its weakness to spiked and fiery enemies, though, so it’s not useful for every situation. Rally Wink, however, is best used against bosses. Thanks to Badges, Mario’s damage output is generally much higher than his partner’s. Sometimes, against powerful enemies, you’d just rather take a second turn with Mario, and Rally Wink lets you do just that – in exchange for 4 FP. The FP cost means you can’t give Goombella’s turn to Mario forever, so you’ll need to use it when it counts.

Koops unlocks two moves through partner upgrades, Shell Shield and Shell Slam. The former works well against bosses with high attack power – particularly certain postgame ones – but nothing too crazy otherwise. Flurrie unlocks Lip Lock and Dodgy Fog, which generally aren’t as useful as some of the other partners’ attacks. She’s definitely lower priority compared to Goombella and Vivian, whose extra moves are some of the best.

Yoshi unlocks Mini-Egg and Stampede via partner upgrade, which actually aren’t all that useful either. Stampede deals 1 damage to opponents, but several times in a row. Unfortunately, this also means enemies with any kind of Defense stat will simply take no damage from the move under normal circumstances. Yoshi is useful enough with Gulp, so this is another low-priority partner upgrade in our opinion.

Vivian, however, has one particularly excellent move: Fiery Jinx, which is her third attack. It hits every enemy on the screen except for fiery ones and deals good damage, making it great for wiping out hoards of opponents all at once. Her second unlockable move is Infatuate, which has a chance of confusing the target. It isn’t as useful as Fiery Jinx, generally speaking.

Bobbery unlocks Hold Fast and Bomb-ombast via partner upgrade. Hold Fast has him enter a counter stance that deals damage to enemies that touch him, but it isn’t particularly useful since you’d generally rather be attacking anyway. Bob-ombast is quite strong, however, and it attacks every opponent on the screen. The only drawback is that it costs a lot of FP, burning 9 points every time you use the move. Finally, there’s Ms. Mowz, who unlocks Tease (makes opponents dizzy) and Smooch (restores Mario’s health).

Overall, we’d recommend prioritizing Goombella and Vivian when it comes to partner upgrades. If you’d like to read more of our guides on Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door while you’re here, you can access a full archive of them right here.

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