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The Great Wall of Text
Before I start, let me reiterate that Braid is a modern masterpiece of indie game design. It's got a beautiful visual style, stirring soundtrack, and unique game mechanics that play into the plot. It's a one-of-a-kind satire of Super Mario Bros. My criticisms that ensue are meant to see how we as a game design community can learn from some of the best.
With that said, Braid has no idea how to tell a story. Jonathan Blow weaves an intricate tale of loss and regret, conveyed mostly through... walls of text.
Braid is moving games forward as an art form, right? That message comes off a bit stale when his own magnum opus relies on another medium to tell its story.
I'm not against writing in games. Gaming's history is built on text-based adventures like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork. Even in modern games, text is often a better choice than the medium's notoriously abysmal voice acting.
 But in my humble opinion, modern games should only rely on text (and cutscenes) when it's absolutely necessary to convey points that couldn't be accomplished through gameplay itself. We canonize Valve's games because Half-Life and Portal are so good at weaving storytelling and gameplay together. Braid, however, uses copious amounts of text to give itself meaning. It wouldn't be nearly as bad if the writing weren't mediocre. The story is cliché and the characters bland--one could say it's because it's a satire of games like Super Mario Bros, but then again, Mario didn't use walls of text.
What if Blow got rid of this? The "loss and regret" themes are still captured in essence through Braid's flowing gameplay. The game would be much more ambiguous, but would perhaps capture Blow's intended emotions in a more pure form if he had avoided the Great Wall of Text.
 An example of this in practice is Danish developer Playdead's Limbo. Both Limbo and Braid are indie 2D platformers initially released on Xbox Live Arcade, and both tell the melancholy story of a silent boy searching for a girl.
But perhaps due to their roots in Scandinavian design, Playdead created a much more moving experience with their game. Limbo features absolutely no text, and there's no HUD. None of the characters speak. The minimalist visuals are in silhouette and even the music is dissonant. Through this, the game conveys pure emotion in a way no other art form can come close to, because the audience is completely involved. It's not static, as text is. Braid, on the other hand, relegates the majority of storytelling to text.
The 'A' Button
One of the single most frustrating parts of Braid's design is in its opening moments: teaching players the game controls. Tutorials are notoriously tough to do well in games, and Jonathan Blow had noble intentions of letting the player learn the controls on their own instead of flashing "PRESS 'A' TO JUMP" across the screen. Instead, he did this:
 A box near a ledge with a picture of the Xbox 360's 'A' button on it. The player can't jump over this little ledge without pressing the correct button, so it forces them to learn that 'A', in fact, makes the character jump.
But this helpful box is completely unnecessary. It's the 'A' button--the most cardinal of all video game controls. Even the original NES featured the 'A' button to jump in most of its games. Braid itself is a satire of the most iconic "press 'A' to jump" platformer on the NES, Super Mario Bros.
Suffice to say, I doubt many people savvy enough about video games to purchase Braid need to be told to press 'A' to jump. This would be like a novel telling the reader "turn the page to read more." I understand explaining more complex control layouts to players, but 2D platformers like Braid have the most basic and intuitive of all video game control schemes.
Even if someone were playing a platformer for the very first time, when faced with this small ledge to jump overin Braid, they could most likely figure out. The 'A' button is prominently displayed on the Xbox controller; when one holds it, their right thumb naturally rests on 'A'. Not only that, but the button is green--the universal indicator for "press this button."
My second big issue is that the 'A' button onscreen is in a box. In most platformers (including Mario), boxes are something you destroy to reveal a power-up. When I played Braid for the first time, the first thing I did upon seeing this 'A' box was jump on it and try to open it, to no avail. The three other people I've watched play Braid for the first time have done the exact same.
Not only is Blow's 'A' box redundant as a tutorial mechanism--it's outright unfaithful to the genre whose conventions it's attempting to emulate for dramatic effect. I expect many commenters below are going to complain that I'm nitpicking. But if we could nitpick a little, we could improve on one of the greatest games of the past decade. Jonathan Blow underestimates the intelligence of his players in Braid, but he also underestimates the quality of his own game design, muddying it up with unnecessary boxes and walls of text.
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So it's when something deviates from expectation, well that's the whole point.
That said, Braid is not a satire of anything. Braid is a universe of itself. It represents itself, and nothing more. Consequently, the wall of text, to me, is perfectly fine. Braid's universe is almost like a person's thoughts. It's action and pictures accompanied by textual narration. You're not playing in a world so much as what someone remembers what happened in a world and how that person interprets what happened.
Text serves its own purpose depending on the game. Some games are better without texts, others are better with text. Braid creates this synergy of textual narration accompanied by mechanical narration. Leaving any part out would reduce the experience from what it is.
Blow talks about revealing truths behind the game design universe, and I think that's exactly what's going on in Braid. He's not thinking in terms of making a game to serve a genre, he's thinking in terms of a universe and what truths are within it. If those truths just so happens to what players have come to define as genres, then so be it.
I also can't agree with the implication that reading text is not fun and that games should not include large amounts of text. Maybe some people have too-short attention spans these days, which is why text is so commonly relegated to optional backstory, but I think text is often the best way to deliver the game's story in conjunction with other methods. Braid succeeds at this fantastically, as it has just as much environmental and gameplay storytelling as it does text - each piece complements the other.
As for the A button prompt, I found it a bit tacky too, but honestly, only in retrospect (and on the PC, you get keyboard keys, which look even worse). The first time I started the game I was totally fine with it... sure, it could have been done slightly better, but it's nothing that stuck with me past the first level. Considering Braid also does things like pause the game and wait for the player to learn how to rewind time after his/her first death, I'd say the big A button sign isn't even the most heavy-handed of the game's tutorials.
This is a very interesting article, and your take on the shortcomings of Braid give food for thought! For that I thank you. But I'm inclined to believe that Blow envisioned the game with the written narrative, included the A box as an afterthought, and not at the outset, and put it in a box to draw attention to it because some playtesters still weren't getting the hint.
Which is to say, "fail" is a strong word. I found Braid's written narrative to be an interesting companion material to make each level's theme more obvious and philosophical beyond the simple puzzle mechanics, and while it certainly isn't going to win awards from its writing, it was very beneficial and I wouldn't really have preferred to have it "worked into the game" as part of the experience. The literary preface tickled my literary fancy, and that's my opinion, much like I feel your perception is a valid opinion.
And considering 3 lines of text THE GREAT WALL OF TEXT is something that a guy that is not accustomed to book reading would say.
Book issues aside I must remind everyone that reading a text can be a better experience than listening to someone else reading it to you. You give meaning to the text, not the actor that reads it for you. This gives a chance for everyone to have it's own version of that particular text.
But hey books aren't something as popular these days so I guess some people prefer to have everything handed out to them.
2) The wall of text is an evocative piece of clarity in a confusing world. The players need to buy the premise so they know where they stand in regard to the rest of the game. If you can evoke a clear message through game experience, great, but I've seen players who were previously crinkling their eyebrows in confusion visibly relax as they were given some idea what their purpose was.
That said, this is *too much* text all at once. And way too overwritten. It should have said just enough to establish the setting and the metaphor of undoing mistakes... In as few words as possible. Otherwise it gets eye-rollingly over-dramatic and less people read it.
THE HORROR.
Not to mention that it's not 15 lines all at once...
You're criticizing the characters and plot, but that text isn't there to tell a story about characters or plot. It's a device for introducing themes and ideas.
The fact that it resembles a jumbled-up story is incidental. The fact that this story is cliche and bland on the surface is, I think deliberate. If the story were more interesting, it might obscure the more important ideas under the surface.
I think it works beautifully.
I need to finally bite the bullet and purchase this game myself.
That said, I found the final sequence of the game was brilliantly done and a great example of using the game itself to tell a story. That one sequence for me, however cheesy it was, was way more impactful than all of the text in the game.
No.
Excreting layers of misdirection is not a laudable narrative goal, and anyway metaphor is a strength of narration which is odd to put effort on in a game that is trying to stand strong as, well, a game. I loved Braid, bought it twice (on 360 and PC) to show my support, but it definitely had some baggage that came off as amateurish in comparison to the masterpiece feeling that many other parts of the game had. I even loved the narrative as it fit with the themes and emotions of the levels -- when I thought it was about a princess metaphorically representing a desire lost in the past. When the atomic bomb was brought to the front, and then those hidden books, and then stars that were never hinted at and sometimes exercised mechanics not essential to the time manipulative gameplay (such as aligning puzzle pieces or waiting for a cloud for two hours), I felt the game started feeling weak. He created a thing of beauty, and could have created a thing of perfection if he knew when to stop.
But it is Blow's game and he can do whatever he feels is right. And he got a lot right.
Especially the control introduction is good game design. You seem to come from a hard core gamers perspective that everybody knows how to play a platformer. But this is not the case.
There was a member blog article on Gamasutra last year in which a designer asked his game illiterate mother to play a point and click adventure (I think). It is an eye opener when you let play nongamers your game. You NEED to explain controls. Otherwise you limit your possible audience.
Braid tells its story through gameplay way better than Limbo.
You mentioned Limbo tell its story through gameplay, but you are actually talking about VISUALS and SOUND. You could tell Limbo's "story" with an animation, it didn't need to be interactive.
Braid's use of text (and the jigsaw pictures) with gameplay is a far more convincing approach to narrative. Actually, I would say it is a story that could only be told in a game. It is written in linear form, but you discover it in pieces (each one of them tied beautifully to a gameplay theme). The non-linear structure of the game allows you to layer the facts that you find in a way that makes its flow unique to you.
The amazing ending also ties the gameplay and story beautifully, and all the "extra" information you can find through more gameplay after the game is done continue to add to the story. Like I said, even though the story can be considered linear, the way it is presented, and the fact it can provide a satisfying closure at different points, makes it a non-linear narrative in my opinion.
I think it is absolutely fine to criticize Braid (I'm far from being a John Blow fanboy), but I believe you should take a look at the game again with a fresh perspective on this regard. Also, I didn't get your points about the "A" button, just seemed very silly to me, I'm sorry.
Its really more of a painted sign instead of a box anyway... but this is how Braid teaches you everything. It puts you in a situation where you NEED to use a button, and then tell you want button to press and lets you figure it out from there. In the level with the ring, for instance, it doesn't tell you how it works, it just invites you to press the right button. Even more interesting, you learn how to use the time rewind mechanic by dying. The game says, "Oh, you died? Watch this." and then you realize you can do this as much as you want whenever you want... and the game opens up.
That said, I agree about the text bits. Only core Braid fans trying to figure out what is going on will read through all/any of the text.