Paper Mario: Sticker Star Review

My first Paper Mario game was The Thousand Year Door, and it remains my favorite Mario RPG out of all of them. I would say it was the first RPG I ever fully enjoyed, and I use it as a point of reference when judging other RPGs. Despite this, however, I was not a fan of the Paper Mario series when its successor, Super Paper Mario, was released. I became a fan some time after, and by that time, Sticker Star was on its way. Many fans criticized Super Paper Mario for not being enough of an RPG and too much of a platformer, so many were excited to know that the series would return to turn-based combat with Sticker Star. I was never in the camp of people who hated Super Paper Mario, but I was definitely excited about Sticker Star for the same reason as most; it was exciting to think that another game like The Thousand Year Door was going to come out - on 3DS, no less, where it would have sweet 3D graphics to drive home how papery everything is. Ironically, however, Sticker Star turned out to be even less of an RPG than Super Paper Mario, despite the return to turn-based combat. It has taken up Super Paper Mario's position as the most hated game of the series.

The way that Sticker Star's combat fails to hold up to past games is not necessarily in it's mechanics, but rather lack-thereof. The basics are there: choose an action, pull off action commands to increase its effectiveness, don't jump on spiked enemies, et cetera. However, this is about as much of the Paper Mario experience as you'll get. There's no Badge system, no real items, no Star Powers, nor even a level-up system - you know, the thing basically every RPG has that was even present in Super Paper Mario. Sticker Star even lacks the major mechanic that separates the Paper Mario series from the Mario & Luigi series: Partners. Well, that's not entirely true. Mario does indeed have a partner, but she can't attack, and her only ability in battle is to give Mario more actions per turn.

To further explain the battle mechanics, Mario's actions are limited to what Stickers he has in his Sticker Book. No Stickers means no attacks. Should the player run out of Stickers, they can run from battle, which always comes without penalty. Though, since battles yield no experience or really any sort of meaningful reward, one could simply run from pointless battles to save Stickers for unavoidable fights. To restock on Stickers, the player can find them randomly scattered about each level - yes, Sticker Star is a level-to-level game - find them as random enemy drops, or buy them at shops. Purchasing Stickers is only outright required once in the entire game (more on that later), so it's perfectly possible to go most of the game only using free Stickers. Though, that's not to say that shops are entirely pointless, as they serve as a method to easily stock up on your preferred Stickers.

As mentioned previously, the Badge system from previous games is completely gone in Sticker Star. Instead of acquiring passive abilities and new attacks by equipping Badges, every new attack is a new Sticker. Similarly, instead of leveling up, you simply start finding stronger variants of other Stickers. This doesn't sound bad in theory, but the balance is completely off in practice. Rather than giving the player a resource to manage that special attacks all use, like Magic in other games, the attack itself is the resource to be managed. Again, this doesn't sound so bad in theory, but this system makes things needlessly clunky. Normally, the way RPGs limit the use of powerful abilities is by making them consume a high amount of energy, which will not only limit said ability's use but also punish the player for overusing it by using up the same resource that other abilities use. This way, the player must choose between more uses of less expensive abilities or few uses of a powerful ability. The Sticker system lacks this sort of balance. With the attack itself acting as the resource, its use has no effect on other attacks, thus making selection more mindless. Why think about what attack to use when if the attack you choose has no effect on the availability of other moves? You could spam all of your strongest Stickers without much consequence - especially if you know a place to get more.

Furthermore, each individual Sticker takes up space in your Sticker Book, and every regular Sticker takes up the same space as any other, so it's not like you can just keep weaker Stickers around for when you run out of stronger ones. This also means that some of the attack variants become pointless. A Slaphammer and an Eekhammer take up the same space and deal the same damage, so the only real difference between them is their Action Commands, and thus, both of them existing makes very little sense. Likewise, the Hopslipper outdoes the normal Jump Sticker in damage, so the normal Jump should just do the damage of the Hopslipper to eliminate that variant altogether. Some of the more powerful Stickers take up more room than normal Stickers, so a balance must be struck between the large and small Stickers. Really, though, I've gotten through the game just fine without using any Stickers larger than normal - save for Thing Stickers, which are special.

Overworld

Battle

Level Select

Gauntlet Pond

Basically, every fight is the same: you choose your Sticker, execute its action command, then try to time presses of the A Button to "guard" enemy attacks - which is supposed to reduce the damage you take, but never by very much. Honestly, it feels more like the game was balance around guarding ever hit rather than not guarding at all, so it feels more like a necessity rather than a reward for playing well. If you've played The Thousand Year Door, you may recall the "Super Guard" command, which would let you counter-attack enemies when timed precisely right; that's completely absent in Sticker Star. The closest the game has to that would the Tail and Spike Helmet Stickers, which are both one-round use Stickers that only work on attacks from the front and above respectively. Status Ailments do exist, and there are Stickers that inflict some, but they're really not all that helpful or reliable, so they're very forgettable.

Boss fights basically boil down to "Do you have this Thing Sticker? No? Sucks to be you." The final boss was no exception; in fact, it is the biggest offender of this issue. Most bosses take reduced damage from all normal Stickers, and some bosses are near impossible without the appropriate Thing Sticker. Remember when I said that purchasing Stickers is only outright required once in the entire game? About half way through the game, there is a boss fight that demands you have a particular Thing Sticker to defeat it. That Thing can only be found behind a Secret Door, which can only be opened by using a Secret Door Sticker in a certain location. These Stickers cannot be found anywhere else but at one specific shop. Thus, this is the only time in the whole game where a Sticker must outright be purchased to progress, and the game does not do a good job of indicating how important this is. It is very much possible to pass up the Secret Door Stickers and never find the Thing you need to defeat a required boss.

Rather than having some tactics being more viable than others, boss fights in Sticker Star have blatant right and wrong ways of approaching them, which is always to use a particular Thing Sticker. The big issue with this is that you can never know ahead of time what Thing Sticker you'll need, so most bosses require trial and error to succeed. You could, in theory, carry around lots of Thing Stickers all the time to have them for when you need them, but most pf the required Thing Stickers take up large portions of the Sticker Book, making this very impractical. In addition, the way the game pushes the use of Thing Stickers removes any freedom to experiment with strategies, which is half the fun of a good turn-based combat system.

Oh, but it's okay that the battle mechanics are so very watered down, because people don't play Paper Mario for the deep battle system, according to Nintendo. No, people actually play for the platforming action. It's a good thing the developers poured their hearts and souls into the platforming mechanics. Oh wait, that's right, they totally didn't do that. The game's platformer elements are just as lackluster as its RPG elements. Sticker Star is a platformer insofar as jumping up on your kitchen counter is considered Parkour; it technically is, but its not as spectacular or involved as something better. The strange thing about this is that Sticker Star has a bit more of an emphasis on platforming than previous games - save for Super Paper Mario - yet there are no attempts made to make the platforming more enjoyable. In fact, one could argue the opposite, since Mario never receives new overworld abilities beyond jumping, hammering, pulling on things, and the new Paperize mechanic, which is used to peel and place specific parts of the world or Stickers for puzzle-solving purposes.

Okay, so the gameplay as a whole is not good, but surely the story is the saving grace, right? Paper Mario has always had good stories, so surely Sticker Star has a good one too, right? Here's an explanation of the whole story: Bowser kidnaps Peach. Mario beats Bowser. The end. You may think I'm joking, but I'm not leaving out a whole lot. Nothing really major happens along the way. It's not until World 3 that anything of note happens in terms of characters, and even that part is terribly uneventful. Don't keep up any hope of meeting fun and interesting characters along the way, either; aside from a handful of exceptions, every character is just a Toad. Every. Single. One. Compared to other games in the series, which all have fun and quirky characters all throughout the game, Sticker Star's cast of unique and memorable characters is small to the point of almost being insulting.

With all of that said, Sticker Star gets a 3 out of 5. It's not truly a terrible game or even that unpleasant, but it's not very good any of the things it tries to be. I can appreciate the Sticker mechanic for what it tried to be, but it was not executed well enough to be what it should have been. There are worse games you could buy, but Sticker Star is not worth paying full price for. For $40, you're better off buying Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, Bravely Default, Etrian Odyssey, or one of the many 3DS Pokemon games for a better RPG experience. Heck, even for $20, you could still just get the Nintendo Selects version of Mario & Luigi: Dream Team or an older Etrian Odyssey game instead. If it's a platforming experience you're looking for, well, why the heck are you looking at a Paper Mario game for that? There are plenty of better Mario platformers to play instead.

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Unofficial Mario Wiki: https://www.mariowiki.com/Paper_Mario:_Sticker_Star