Paper Mario: Sticker Star

Paper Mario Sticker Star Review

Paper Mario Sticker Star

Our Rating:

Great

Sticker Star is a merciless puzzle-oriented exploration game that would have benefited from a more ambitious narrative.

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Paper Mario: Sticker Star is one of the most unusual entries in its franchise thanks to some controversial design decisions: treating the great volume of story in the previous games as unnecessary fat, Nintendo has decided to rip it out from this adventure as much as possible and shift the game’s genre from RPG to puzzle-solving.

Amid festivities celebrating the passage of the famous Sticker Star, Bowser performs the only action expressly forbidden by local conventions – touching the star –resulting in its shattering and the spread of chaos throughout the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario, then, needs to join Kersti, the guardian of the stickers, and collect all the star pieces before it’s too late.

The world of Paper Mario is completely built around paper, with the characters and environments being 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 to form paper planes, and crumpled characters hiding in trash cans – even Mario’s head bends forward as he enters a sauna, with his body becoming looser with the humidity.

In this paper world, the presence of stickers sounds completely natural. Used in battles and puzzle-solving, 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’re the main mechanic. Abandoning the classic progression by experience points and leveling up, the combat system focuses instead exclusively on the different types of stickers and their attributes, replacing a completely abstract mechanic (XP) with one that feels more concrete in that universe.

At the beginning of each turn, we must spend a sticker from our inventory to use against an enemy: Sticker Boots, for example, make Mario jump into enemies’ heads and require us to hit the A button at the exact time of each jump to trigger the next one, while Hammers damage more than one opponent but ask us to press A at the right instant, indicated by a flash, to maximize the damage.

Not only that, but each sticker has also its own weakness: creatures with spikes damage Mario if hit by a jump, hammers fail to reach flying enemies, and fireballs heal fire enemies instead of hurting them. With several different types of stickers – metal boots can hit spiked enemies, for example – and different levels for each of them – the silver sticker is stronger than the normal one, and the largest multicolored sticker is the strongest of them all –, Sticker Star encourages us to think about what’s best to use in each situation, as each attack permanently spends one of our stickers.

Stickers, however, serve multiple functions, especially outside battle, where they’re necessary to solve puzzles: we can apply any one to block acid streams, for example, but also use them with a particular purpose, such as a fire flower sticker to melt some ice cream and reveal a reward.

Hidden in each level are also objects of our daily life (taps, pins, batteries, fans) that can be turned into special stickers with unique powers, which are crucial to overcoming all boss battles and solving some particular puzzles. But precisely because they are common everyday objects known to anyone, their implementation is pretty intuitive.

The boss of the second world, for example, is a Pokey, an enemy made up of several spiked balls stacked on top of each other. The fight takes place in a baseball stadium and we have at our disposal the stickers of a faucet, a bowling ball, a fan, and a baseball bat. Common sense alone is enough to figure out which sticker to use, but any player who experiments with the baseball bat in a common battle will also realize that the resulting animation is the same as the background of the stadium during the battle with Pokey. In Stage 5-1, meanwhile, we are faced with an area cluttered with ​​paper that needs to be cleaned. We have in our inventory a goat, a refrigerator, a car engine, and a vacuum cleaner. In a humorous touch, in addition to the vacuum cleaner, the goat also works, chewing all the paper.

The problem only comes if players try to face Pokey without the baseball bat, which would prevent them from winning the battle entirely, or enter the 5-1 stage without the goat or the vacuum cleaner. To circumvent this, Intelligent Systems classifies these special stickers into groups, which can be identified both by the color on the bottom of the sticker and in the main city museum, Decaulburg. So, a rolled-up newspaper and a toy bat have the same class as the baseball bat and can therefore be used to defeat Pokey.

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 hinted at with subtle visual cues – such as a suspicious ray of light in the background of a certain area.

Intelligent Systems, therefore, goes against the industry’s norm and simply trusts in the players’ capacity to explore the levels by themselves, letting go of their hand after World 1. From that point on, when we already have a basic notion of the main mechanics, we’re set loose in the levels without arrows pointing to the goal or characters indicating where the items are hidden. We’re free to explore on our own terms but we’re also punished during Boss fights if we have failed to do so. Sticker Star could have made these special stickers a boon in battles, instead of a necessary item, so that players who don’t explore could still beat the story but with greater difficulty. But it chose instead to double down on the design: those who follow the most direct path to the boss will be suddenly roadblocked and have to backtrack to get the required sticker.

Avoiding battles is an even worse crime than failing to explore, as instead of providing experience points, each victory congratulates us with coins. These coins are needed to buy new stickers, and retrieve the special ones – thus guaranteeing the necessary experimentation with them –, and they even allow the use of more than one sticker per round in battle, an essential tactic late in the game that can cost more than 90 coins.

The game’s shortcoming, though, is certainly its story. Just the fact that I’ve been referring to levels as 5-1 instead of a proper name is a clear indication that Sticker Star never even attempts to develop its world beyond the basics. But, as World 3 proves – where the huge earthworm Wiggler has its body shattered by one of the villains, with each part fleeing aimlessly throughout the levels –, a World having its own plot, however simple and silly it may be, helps to make it more memorable, as it gives meaning to the players’ actions. So, if World 3 has Wiggler, and the fourth one, the story of the Haunted Mansion, the first, second, and fifth levels are completely devoid of any semblance of a plot, which unfortunately prevents them from having even the pun-filled dialogues so common in the franchise: “May your days be ever toadful.”

Paper Mario: Sticker Star is a game that lives up to the series’ good reputation even if it abandons everything it stands for. It’s a merciless puzzle-oriented exploration game that would have benefited from a more ambitious narrative.

January 11, 2025.

Originally published in Portuguese on March 15, 2015.

  • Developer
  • Director
  • Writer
  • Composer
  • Average Length
  • Played on
Intelligent Systems.
Naohiko Aoyama and Taro Kudo.
Taro Kudo.
Masanobu Matsunaga, Shoh Murakami, Yasuhisa Baba, Hiroki Morishita, Saki Kurata, Yoshito Sekigawa, Masanori Adachi, Kiyoshi Hazemoto, Tomoko Sano, Kosei Muraki, Hiroaki Hanaoka.
25 hours.
3DS.

About Rodrigo Lopes

A Brazilian critic and connoisseur of everything Jellicle.

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