As expected, I finished off both Braid and Paper Mario: TTYD today. Some of the later puzzles in Braid are fairly devious, but I wasn’t stuck for too long on most of them. There was one though, in world 5-4, that I had to get a hint for from a forum. I would never have solved it myself, since I wouldn’t have even thought of the trick necessary. The final world was fairly clever, with one long ‘chase’ sequence that winds up being the game’s big emotional reveal.

And the ending is…rather difficult to interpret. You can read in all sorts of metaphors about loss and guilt and experience, depending on your own perspective, but I’m not really enough of a smarty-man to fully evaluate it.

Paper Mario: TTYD took a bit longer than expected, and I almost failed to finish it since I wasn’t really well-prepared enough. Grinding levels turned out to be extremely slow, so I just barged ahead with the final chapter. It was full of the requisite puzzles that require you to exercise all of the skills and use all of party members you picked up along the way, of course, but at the end was a sequence of boss fights that depleted a few too many of my healing items. The final fight was fairly long and had two stages to it, and I wasn’t very confident of success at the midway point since I was almost completely out of items, but I just barely finished the boss off, with stats low enough that I probably would have only survived one or two more rounds. I had a similar problem with the GBA Mario & Luigi game, where I have a save right before the final boss but still haven’t beat him in the few attempts I tried.

But it’s over, at least, even if it’s a fairly traditional everything’s-back-to-normal Mario ending.