Paper Mario: Sticker Star (2012)

I don't think Paper Mario needs and introduction here, it is a really well stablished series.

This was my first experience with any paper Mario whatsoever, so take anything that I'm gonna say with a grain of salt.

The story of this game, well, It doesn't really matters, in my opinion, it's just more Mario stuff; rescue peach, defeat bowser. The core gameplay it's the most important stuff in this kind of games (because we know the characters already, we know what kind of music to expect) and I gotta say, it is fun (for the most part).

The game is divided in 6 worlds, plus a harbor and the main village, wich is used a main hub. Each world has X number of stages, with a final encounter at the end, gaining a piece of a crown and a page for storing stickers. Let's talk about them.

Stickers are the main gimmick of this game. They are used mainly in battles againts enemies. You have a wide range of them (boots, POWs, flowes, mushrooms, shells, etc). Without them you are useless, so you better have a lot of them always with you.

Inside the stages are stickers scattered all around, the enemies sometimes drop them, and you can buy them in the store. But there is also stickers based on real life objects (baseball bat, trumpet, scissors, fan, etc). These sticker can also be used in battles, having a great impact on your enemies, and even with bosses.

Some stages have puzzle in them where you need to use a specific sticker in order to solve it. That part was not that fun in my opinion, it required a lot of backtracking and sometimes even guessing wich sticker was the right one. Even with bosses, you need X sticker so you can deliver the final blow.

Halfway through world 5 I started to notice that the gamas was dragging a little bit for me, especially because I was trying to get all the stickers, so I was repeating stages for money. Maybe it was my fault for trying yo get all the collectibles but by the end I was not having so much fun, not even with the final boss.

I would say, if you have never played Paper Mario, give it a try but don't bother with getting all of the "achievements", just play it and try to enjoy it.

I'm usually a pretty big fan of games like this that blend multiple genres and an esp. huge fan of Mario games, but after about 13 hours (maybe 50% done), I had to put this one down.

• The combat gets repetitious and has few rewards outside of additional coins+stickers (both which you'll be swimming in, after a few hours). Battles are short but also frequent. If I had to re-visit an area, I would do everything in my power to avoid contact with enemies.
• Many of the puzzles are obscure, or just frustrating. In particular, there are blocks that are invisible even when you are Paperized which you need to hit in order to cross gaps, and level areas you have to reach to progress that go beyond "well hidden" to just being annoying.
• The game does a terrible job of telling you what special stickers you need before entering a level or boss, and then punishes you when you don't bring the right ones. Since inventory space is limited, you will basically progress up to a point, realize you don't have what is needed, backtrack (or die, in the case of a boss fight), craft the sticker in town from a 3D object and then return...which respawns all the enemies.
• The writing is close to something you would find on a Saturday morning cartoon. Reading reviews on Metacritic, people seemed to gush over the dialog and humor of this series (including this installment), but it's obviously targeted towards a younger demographic.

Positively, the visuals are well done, the interfaces are simple and I did like the level design to the extent that I played through the game, though I wish the ~8-ish levels in each world were a bit more varied.

This game is has some pretty obscure puzzles to solve which is normally quite fun for me to figure out.

The problem is the solutions to many of them involve searching and backtracking through a game with a pointless battle system. The amount of times I rolled my eyes because I was just trying to get somewhere and got caught in a battle.. this common scenario was aggravating and made me look up a lot of the solutions to puzzles! I would've liked to figure them out but it was more painful to do in a game like this.

My other complaint is out of all the Mario RPG style games, the "action commands" or "timed hits" feel the worst in this game compared to all the others. Colour splash slightly improved upon this system but that's the second worst out of all of them. It should feel more deliberate and clear where the line is between failing, or the nice, great, and excellent ratings.

For the amount of hate this game universally gets by everyone on the Internet, I fully expected to be disappointed by this game, but I wanted to experience it anyway. I was therefore extremely surprised to find that after my first hour of gameplay, I was absolutely in love! It had almost everything I wanted and much of what I craved in a Paper Mario game: excellent graphics with fabulous paper (and cardboard) visuals, hilarious dialogue and story-telling, fast-paced energy, creative use of paper mechanics, puzzles that actually stump me, and non-linear level progression. On top of all that, the music was amazing!

Then there was the battle system. The reason everyone runs screaming from this game without giving it a chance. The whole system revolves around using stickers as your weapons. While you still technically have your hammer, jump, and special attacks, each of these is represented by a different sticker you find on your journey, and they have various levels of power. Furthermore, much like Super Paper Mario before it, you have no sidekicks, aside from Kersti, the sticker that acts as your Navi and helps you solve puzzles. And then, perhaps worst of all, you don't even get to select which enemy you're attacking; each sticker just attacks the next enemy in line. But wait, worse than that, you don't even gain experience from battling, so there's almost no point in doing it!

And that's the real kicker right there. It's not so much that the battle system sucks. In fact, by the end of the game, I didn't mind it too much; I actually kind of like how it made you prioritize your stickers and manage your sticker book, and to be honest I genuinely liked it during boss battles. Again, it's not so much that it sucks, it's just that it's pointless. Other than coins and some enemy-specific stickers, there's rarely much of a reward for going into battle. The result is a game where I'm constantly running away from battles because they're a nuisance.

But that's also why I didn't mind it so much. As much as they were kind of annoying, they also weren't too obtrusive. For the most part, I could just avoid battling altogether, and when I accidentally ran into an enemy, it was usually a really quick battle anyway. So really, I feel like the battle system was more of a wasted opportunity than a serious knock against the game in general.

If the battle system was more competent, however, this would be a near-perfect game, because there is very little else to complain about here. The story is very basic and simple: everyone is happy, then enter Bowser, who ruins everything and takes Peach, so we go and save her, the end. Typical Mario stuff. But I have never played a Mario game for the story. Sure, previous Paper Mario titles have had pretty good stories, but that's not really what I expect from Mario in general. I play Mario games because they're fun, and this game is a lot of fun! You get to knock walls over! There are ancient koopas and goombas! You find random items called "things" (baseball bats, bowling balls, rubber ducks, and more!) that you can turn into stickers and use to whack enemies around! It's awesome! And best of all, there are genuinely challenging and fun puzzles.

Seriously, the puzzles are where this game shines. Not only are they usually pretty challenging and creative, but they're fun. When I finally figure them out, I'm rarely thinking, "You expected me to get that?" Instead, I'm smiling because of how clever and creative the solution was. For a while, I couldn't figure out how to get outside of this mansion. I could see there was stuff outside, but there were no doors. Then I tried hitting a window, and it just popped out and let me through! It's outside-of-the-box thinking like this that I love, and this game is riddled with it. I legitimately got stuck a few times--that has never happened to me in a Paper Mario game before.

The level design was just excellent. World 4-3 was absolutely a better level than anything else Paper Mario has ever offered before. World 5-6 was the inside of a volcano, and walking into it made me genuinely feel like I was walking into a Zelda dungeon. World 6-2 has you going into an airship, a classic location of Super Mario, but never before featured in a Paper Mario game. So many great locations that, for me, completely made up for the lack of diverse characters found in previous games.

I do have ideas about how the battle system could have been improved, but this is getting really long, so I don't want to get into that here. Suffice it to say that it's definitely a flawed system, but it didn't hold this back from being a top-tier game for me. But that's just my preference. I understand that for some people a good battle system is what you crave in a game, and I get that that's part of what made the original Paper Mario games so special. I personally prefer good level design and challenging puzzles, so the lack of a competent battle system wasn't that much of a setback for me. Regardless of preference, I really think those who play this game need to see past the battle system and give this game a genuine chance, because I truly recommend it to all Mario fans.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star is one of the most unusual entries in its franchise thanks to a controversial decision by Shigeru Myamoto. Treating the great volume of story in the previous games as unnecessary fat, Nintendo’s most important developer opted to rip it out from the adventure as much as possible, thereby shifting the focus to its main mechanic: the use of stickers.

The story, however, has not been completely removed from game, being only simplified. In the midst of festivities commemorating the passage of the famous Sticker Star, Bowser performs the only action expressly forbidden by local conventions – touching the star – which results in its shattering and the spread of chaos throughout the Kingdom. Mario then needs to join Kersti, the guardian of the stickers, and collect all star pieces before it’s too late.

The world of Paper Mario is completely built around paper and both the characters and the environment are flat and foldable. The presentation of this universe in Sticker Star is both creative and adorable, with buildings flattened and stuck by tape, enemies bending over in paper airplanes, and crumpled characters hiding in trash cans; all of them always surprising with their possibilities of interaction. Players can just watch Mario’s head bending forward as he enters a sauna to realize that the developers were thorough when working with this concept.

In this fictional universe – the diegesis – the presence of stickers sounds completely natural. Used in both battles and when solving puzzles, they are everywhere in Sticker Star: stickers are stuck on walls, on trees, hidden in caves or behind shrubs, supporting or holding structures.

In combat, they form the main mechanic. Abandoning progression by levels, the combat system focuses exclusively on the different types of stickers and their attributes. At the beginning of each turn during the battle, players must choose a sticker from their inventory to use against an enemy, spending it forever. And each of them has its own dynamics in combat: boots, for example, make Mario jump into enemies’ heads and require the player to hit the A button at the exact time of each jump to trigger the next. Hammers cause damage on more than one opponent, and players can press A at the exact instant, indicated by a flash, to maximize it.

Not only that, as each sticker has its own opposing elements – creatures with thorns do damage if hit by a jump, hammers do not reach flying enemies and fireballs heal fire enemies instead of hurting them. With several different types of stickers – there are boots that can jump on all enemies and metal boots that hit thorns for example – and different levels for each of them – the silver sticker is stronger than the normal one, the gold is stronger than the silver and the largest multicolored one is the strongest of all – this is a very diversified combat system that can dispense progression by levels. In this way, the developers exchange a completely abstract mechanic – levels – for a considerably more concrete one – stickers.

As for the puzzles, stickers are also essential: sometimes they are used in a generic way – blocking acid streams or venting pipes – and sometimes with a specific logic – a fire flower can melt an ice cream revealing a reward, for example. That is, Intelligent Systems elaborates its main mechanic with such elegance and that it serves both for combat and puzzle solving.

On the other hand, a considerably more controversial decision concerns the use of special stickers. Hidden inside each stage are objects of our daily life (taps, pins, batteries, fans) that can be turned into stickers with unique powers. These stickers can also be used both in combat and in puzzles, but since they are rare and expensive to recover, they appear to not allow great experimentation – a factor that led to a fallacious claim about a lack of logic in their use. These special stickers are paramount for overcoming all boss battles and solving specific puzzles. But precisely because they are objects known to anyone, their implementation is inevitably logical. The boss of the second world, for example, is a Pokey – an enemy made up of several balls filled with spines stacked on top of the each other. The fight takes place in a baseball stadium. Players have at their disposal a faucet, a bowling ball, a fan and a baseball bat. Common sense alone is enough to figure out which sticker to use, but even if players had also experimented with the baseball bat in a common battle, they would have realized that the resulting animation is the same as the background of the stadium during the battle against Pokey. Now, in Stage 5-1, players are faced with a cluttered area of ​​paper that needs to be cleaned. They have in their inventory a goat, a refrigerator, a car engine and a vacuum cleaner. Proving not to be arbitrary at all, the developers even made, in addition to the vacuum cleaner, the goat work: it chews all the papers.

The problem may only exist if players go face the boss without the baseball bat, which would prevent them from winning, or enter the 5-1 stage without the goat and the vacuum cleaner. To circumvent this, Intelligent Systems classifies these special stickers into groups, which can be seen both by the color on the bottom of the sticker and in the main city museum, Decaulburg. Besides that, the level design is completely geared towards exploration. Achieving the star at the end of the stages may be the main challenge, but failing to investigate every corner means losing valuable rewards that are sometimes indispensable to progress in the adventure. The hidden place of these secrets is carefully chosen by the developers, who never fail to put subtle visual cues to lead players to their discovery – such as a suspect ray of light deep in the background.

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