Spoiler warning for the recently re-released twenty-year-old video game, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. They’re casually sprinkled throughout, so best skip this post if you want to remain unspoiled for some reason.

I finally beat Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. It took a while, thanks to the intrusion of the Dragon Age franchise and my own previously-unrecognized hang-ups centered around the game, but I finally put in my last little tidbits of time, cleared the final boss, and started messing around with the post-game stuff. It was fun to get to the end, occasionally recognizing some little thing or another as events of the game triggered memories and then finally being able to put an image to the mental notion that Peach got possessed by the final boss. I’ll admit that I struggled a bit against the first phase of the final boss, since my whole battle strategy up to that point amounted to dealing tons of damage, getting my action commands perfect, and defeating each boss before they could pull of their worst moves more than once or twice, which didn’t work great against the invulnerability phase. I’d even kicked it all up a notch for this battle by tossing in Goombella’s final Flower Point move, Rally Wink, to let me double-hit the boss or hit the boss and heal or hit the boss and all the underlings, none of which worked during that same invulnerability phase. In general, I had a very specific style of play built around bosting the hell out of Mario’s Jump damage (but never taking the Hammer off the table, of course, because sometimes you really need to Quake or Hammer Throw some little guy you can’t hit any other way) and that worked out great for the final boss once I cleared the invulnerability phase. I’m curious to find out, eventually, if that will work for the post-game battles, but I think that’s going to wait a while. I need a break from this game, given my somewhat fragile emotional state from not sleeping, and I’ve got so much Unicorn Overlord to play through still. I’m sure I’ll go back to it eventually, but I’m ready to do something else for now.

Normally, I’d like to wrap up a game that hit me as heavily as this one accidentally did by reflecting on my emotional state and how I feel about it all now that I’m through it, but I’m having a difficult time dealing with the anxiety of going to sleep at a normal time (because I’m not sure I could handle waking up from back pain prior to my alarm going off) and don’t really have any energy left for digging into my reaction a game I cleared. I gotta deal with all of this stuff in order of importance, you know? Get my sleep anxiety back under control, get a few good nights of sleep (not even necessarily consecutively!), figure out if I’m going to need to change mattresses again, and THEN maybe I can dig into processing all my decades-old trauma and the way my anxiety ramps up when I find myself in similar situations to the worst years of my childhood, despite all the therapy I’ve been doing. That said, I’m not sure there’s a lot there to uncover or work through. Some things are just true and you either accept them and move on or you fight against them until you or they give in. Not every weird emotionally response to something adjacent to your trauma gets dealt with quickly or cleanly. It’s not like there’s a huge demand for me to play through this game in an environment I don’t control or in a position that would somehow leave me feeling vulnerable. It’s a video game. A fun one, sure, but I’ve got dozens of those and no real need to revisit every single one of them. I could just move on, leave this game behind, accept that I’ve done what I can by playing through it again as an adult, and let it go. It’s a great game and the last entry in the Paper Mario franchise that I really enjoyed, but I’m not sure it’s worth the stress, you know?

The thing that might get me back into it, though, is what the post-game promises. Tons of battles. Consistently, the most fun I had in the game was the battle mechanics, experimenting with my battle style, and getting the action command timing down. I was experimenting with my badge combinations right up to the very end of the game. I literally swapped my badges around a bunch in the final boss’ foyer because I’d had an idea about how to handle some of the annoying battlefield shifts during my fight with Grodus (the third to last major battle in the game’s story) and that wound up paying off in a huge way during this last battle. It’s so much fun to swap some badges around and see my battle experience vary so wildly. Sure, most of my Badge Points were assigned to badges that increased my attack damage or decreased my damage taken, but it’s really difficult to result the lure of being able to toss out twenty-plus damage for a single FP. The trade off for this style of battle was, of course, that my Hit Points and FP were kind of low. Sure, I boosted them by using badges that increased my HP and FP (and a lucky find that decreased the FP cost of my moves), but there were a few harrowing moments in the last few major battles that made me glad that I kept couple Life Shrooms in my inventory (they revive you when you get knocked out in battle). The flow and pacing of battle was always a joy, which mean even the grindiest parts of the game were still at least somewhat tolerable as I worked through them to the parts I actually wanted to do.

The goal, should I choose to return to the game, will be to do all the final post-game boss battles, collect the rest of the badges, experiment more with my battle style, and reach at least level thirty so I can get the final battle stage upgrade. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before, at least not in a game file I’ve worked through, so it would be quite the accomplishment if I managed it. I’m sure going through the Pit of 100 Trials will help with all of that, though I might have to look up some guides on where to find badges or star pieces since I’m not sure I have the patience to amble through every part of the game again if I decide to actually clear the whole thing. There’s just so much little stuff to do, aside from all the extra bosses, and I’m not as excited for all that as I would be to do more fighting. It’s just so mechanically fun and intellectually rewarding to see a battle build come together. Which, you know, kind of sums up my overall impression of the game. I enjoyed playing it immensely, had a good time going through what it had to offer, but struggled a bit with some of the minutiae (the difference being that the minutiae in this case are my personal issues rather than finding a hundred or so star pieces). It really is a great game that just has the misfortune of being associated with the worst period of my life. I may never be able to fully claw the game back from that time, but at least I got to find joy that I’ll actually be able to remember this time around. And who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to reclaim it completely someday, if the right circumstances come up. I’ve got no idea what those might be, but I’m willing to consider that they might someday exist.