I managed to do all of Chapter 2 in Paper Mario: TTYD today, after doing some more exploring in town and finding some better shops, a minigame room, train and blimp rides, and another section of the sewers with more people, a cola bar, and an even better shop.

The next star was in the Boggly Woods area, a kind of snowy forest though it never said it was actually snow at any point. A small creature (called a puni) there took me to their Great Tree, but it was locked, and we went to get help from someone named Flurrie, but she wouldn’t help us until we recovered her necklace. It turned out to have been taken by the three Shadow Sirens we saw earlier on, and after beating them I got the necklace back, returned it to Flurrie, and she joined our party, adding some wind-based abilities.

We got into the Great Tree via a secret entrance and discovered X-Nauts like the ones that kidnapped Peach there, and had to find a couple keys to rescue the rest of the punis that were locked up. This involved having to drag a group of them around, getting over some spots by using Flurrie to blow them across, and fighting some mosquito-like critters that had also invaded. There was also a simple puzzle that earned me the spin jump boots, which lets me smash through boards on the floor.

I found the crystal star, but Lord Crump (leader of the X-Nauts here) stole it from me and set off a bomb timer. I had to escape, dragging all 101 punis along behind me, and it was frustrating and caused me to fail the first time since the framerate suffered a lot and that made me keep failing jumps at a couple points. I caught up with him at the exit though, he stopped the timer (maybe I didn’t need to drag those damn punis back with me after all), and a boss fight ensued that wasn’t really too difficult, and I got the star back from him.

This ended the Chapter and I got another Peach scene, where the computer ‘observing’ her wanted her to teach it to dance, with a hologram of herself as a partner. Yes, computers can be creepy… And there was also a Bowser scene that played out just like the original Super Mario Bros for a short stage, except with Bowser in control.

Back in town I explored a bit more with Flurrie, since she could blow away certain torn pieces of walls, and found the Pit of 100 Trials, though I don’t think I’ll be doing that anytime soon. And I popped back to the door and discovered that the next star is in a place in the sky called Glitzville, and I’ll need to ask the mob boss for a ticket for the blimp to get there.