Paper Mario: Sticker Star

Pierre, the purist, doesn’t like change. Every day, he cooks two boiled eggs with three crispy strips of bacon for breakfast, with just a touch of honey, because this was the way his late mother did it when he was little. He takes comfort in the repetition, in the idea that things can persevere, remaining the same, unspoiled by the brutal passage of time. Pierre extends this philosophy to every facet of his life. When The Legend of Zelda series dropped its Ocarina of Time template and went open world, he was there to complain about the lack of proper dungeons. When The Wheel of Time show released and profoundly changed most character arcs, he was there to display his outrage at Perrin being now consumed by guilt for killing his wife. When men of great status stopped wearing wigs and makeup in public, Pierre was there, of course, to foretell the fall of civilized society (for Pierre is an 18th-century French Vampire; he cooks that breakfast every day for his human slave, Guillermo). And when Paper Mario: Sticker Star came out, Pierre, immortal as he is, was once again there, on the accursed internet, to complain about the heretical changes made to his beloved RPG series.

You see, Sticker Star is not your typical Paper Mario. This is not a story-driven RPG filled with quirky characters and situations, much like the original one, The Thousand-Year Door, and Super Paper Mario were. No, Sticker Star is different. This is a story-deprived adventure game focused on puzzle-solving and mostly nothing else. If Pierre had a soul, it would be screaming.

The plot is pretty simple. Amid festivities celebrating the passage of the famous Sticker Star over the city of Decalburg, Bowser – that rascal – performs the only action expressly forbidden by local conventions – touching the star – which results in its shattering and the spread of chaos throughout the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario, then, needs to join Kersti, the guardian of 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. Sticker Star leverages that to build a whimsical, adorable atmosphere, where buildings are occasionally flattened and stuck by tape, enemies bend over to form paper planes, and crumpled characters are found hiding in trash cans – even Mario’s head bends forward as he enters a sauna, with his body becoming wobblier with the humidity. Pierre has no qualms with the game’s presentation, though; it’s everything else that fuels his anger and propels him to prowl Paris’ rooftops at night, looking for some innocent soul to pay for humanity’s sin of putting Sticker Star into the world.

He especially abhors the stickers. Oh, the stickers. In this papery world, their presence at least feels completely natural, which is great because they’re everywhere: there are stickers 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 system of gaining experience points and leveling up (Pierre murdered four people for that, and he only drank one), the combat system focuses exclusively on the different types of stickers and their particular attributes. Under normal circumstances, Charles, the snob, would argue that this is actually great because it replaces an abstract, generic mechanic (XP), which is everywhere in gaming, with one that’s more concrete and feels bespoke to the Paper Mario universe, but this time, Charles will remain silent, as he fears for his life.

He won’t say, for example, that at the beginning of each turn, we must equip a sticker from our inventory to use against an enemy, which leads to a brief “quick time event” of sorts (Sticker Boots make Mario jump into the enemies’ heads and require us to press the A button when we’re about to hit them to trigger the next jump), or that Stickers have their own weaknesses (creatures with spikes on their backs naturally damage Mario if we try to jump on them, while hammers fail to reach flying enemies). He won’t dare mention that by offering variations for each type of sticker (metal boots can hit spiked enemies, for instance), Sticker Star encourages us to think about what’s best to use in each situation, especially since each attack permanently spends the equipped sticker, just like Pierre spent the life of little Marie, who was coming home from school unaccompanied in a fateful Friday after having bullied her disable friend all week (Pierre is a vampire of principle).

As he laid dozens of pots full of garlic near the windows of his home, Charles was thinking about how stickers serve multiple functions here. Outside of battle, for example, we use stickers to solve puzzles: we can apply any sticker to block acid streams, but also leverage the properties of specific ones to get rewards, such as using a fire flower sticker to melt some ice cream and reveal what’s inside. 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 (and elaborate animations), which are crucial to overcoming all boss battles and solving even more puzzles.

Precisely because they are common everyday objects known to anyone, their implementation can be 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 (hint: it’s not the faucet), but if we had tried to use the baseball bat in a common battle before, we would also now recognize the Pokey stadium as the same one from the resulting animation. In Stage 5-1, meanwhile, we come across an area cluttered with ​​paper that needs to be swept away. 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 up all the paper.

But it’s possible to arrive at these crucial moments without the necessary stickers, if we are not careful. So, when Pierre went to face Pokey without the baseball bat and entered the 5-1 level without the goat and the vacuum cleaner, Paris was struck by a brutal string of murders that lasted for weeks and remain unsolved to this day. To circumvent similar tragedies, the game classifies these special stickers into groups, which can be identified both by the color on the bottom of the sticker and in the museum in Decalburg. A rolled-up newspaper and a toy bat share the same class as the baseball bat and, therefore, can be used to defeat Pokey, too. However, especially early on, it’s not always possible to acquire alternatives to the main required stickers, leading to some frustrating moments.

To remedy that, the level design is completely geared towards exploration. Achieving the star at the end of levels may be the main challenge, but failing to investigate every corner means losing valuable rewards that are sometimes indispensable to progress in the adventure. And these secret places are always carefully hinted at with subtle visual cues – such as a suspicious ray of light in the background of a certain area.

Charles secretly believes this is one of Sticker Star’s greatest strengths, as it goes against the industry’s norm, trusting in the players’ capacity to explore the levels by themselves after letting go of their hand in World 2. 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 important items are hidden. We’re free to explore on our own terms, and we’re punished if we fail to do it properly. Charles thinks this is nice, but Charles is going to keep his opinion to himself. After all, Pierre just hissed and slit the throat of a man who was just folding paper planes to show to his son. But the guy was secretly a right-wing politician who financed extremist groups; Pierre is a vampire of principle, after all.

It’s true that Sticker Star could have made these special stickers just a boon in battles, instead of a necessary item, so that players who don’t want to explore could still beat the game, but with greater difficulty. But Sticker Star doesn’t care about your wants and needs; it doesn’t take it easy on you just because you come from a different historical period and drink blood: those who follow the most direct path to the boss are inevitably going to come across an impassable roadblock, having to backtrack to get the required sticker. You either play Sticker Star in its own terms or you murder French people in frustration. There’s no middle ground here.

Avoiding battles is punished even more than failing to explore, since instead of providing experience points, each victory congratulates us with coins, which we can spend to buy new stickers and retrieve the special ones – thus guaranteeing the necessary experimentation with them. They also 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.

But Pierre doesn’t care about any of that. He’s pissed off that Sticker Star ushered in a new era for Paper Mario, turning his beloved RPG franchise into puzzle games. But most of all, he can’t forgive Sticker Star for lacking an engaging story, proper characters, and creative set pieces. And he’s right: just the fact that I’ve been referring to levels as “5-1” instead of a proper name is a clear indication that the game never even attempts to develop its world beyond the basics.

In World 3, the huge worm Wiggler has its body broken by one of the villains, and we must find its many parts. In other words, the plot is as barebones as it gets, and it still is the most complex narrative situation we can find in Sticker Star. But does this lack of story elements hurt the game? Well, narratives hand context and meaning to the players’ actions, making situations more memorable, but they’re not necessary for every experience. Super Mario 64 is not brilliant because of its story, and no one plays Mario Kart for the lore. But great stories are always welcome, especially when it comes to adventures.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star is a merciless, puzzle-oriented exploration game that lives up to the series’ good reputation, even if it abandons everything it stands for. But yes, it could have benefited from a more ambitious narrative. I said the thing, Pierre, please, spare my life. Please! Pierre, I meant it! Please, Pier

January 11, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 15, 2015.