I beat Paper Mario:TTYD yesterday. It was my fourth attempt at the final boss, the shadow queen. Annoyingly, every time you reach her, a 10 minute narrative plays and you have to sit through lots of dialoge and scenery. If you lose against the final boss, game over and you have to watch the narrative again.

So after losing three times, I spent a week leveling up and finishing the major side events. For example, a 45 minute gaunlet run called “The Pit of 100 Trials” or something like that where you fight enemy after enemy non-stop in a pit of doom. After completing it, you get some cool badges (badges do different things in the game) and it was a good way to train up to guarantee a victory in my 4th attempt to wrap the game up.

Paper Mario feels like an interactive pop-up book. Things animate and shift as if they are made of kid-papyrus. But the game mechanics are so classicly turn-based RPG, the older crowd can’t help be excited by the Final Fantasy training wheels. While riding a Barbie bike,

The styling is very original, borrowing from the Nintendo64 version. And it looks like the Wii version (Super Paper Mario) looks like a worthy sequel. I’m sure it’ll be fun but I think I might try to finish up Super Mario Sunshine on the GameCube before moving on to a new title. I never finish anything, turning over a new leaf has lately meant lots of reading on Gamefaqs and burning the motivation oil to a crisp until the tedious last hours of a game (long after it feels like it should be done) is finally gone and a The End sign signals closure.

Paper Mario is underappreciated but at the same time there are dark corners of the web that house fanboys (and girls .. fanpeople?) so extreme that I wonder if they know narratives and character development can be found in more mainstream forms. Instead of writing that fan-fiction piece that only 20 people on usenet read, how about doing fantasy football or NFL fanfiction, oops nevermind NFL fanfiction, it’s already been done. What:

John Elway knew immediately that something was amis when he walked into his study.

But disregarding the eerie fanatasicm over an obscure Gamecube title, it was an enjoyable story with toddler-RPG game mechanics so adorable that you could help but eek out a girlish yelp when you see “Happy Heart” is really a Regen spell, “Power Lift” is a buff and the best way to grind is fighting Amazing Dayzees on the Twilight Trail.

At the end of it, I was level 40 and put in about 50-60 hours over 3 years. Yes, 3 years … very, very sporatic and occasional.