Paper Mario: Sticker Star

[Forte 0]

I picked this up for my birthday completely forgetting that I didn't quite trust it since all they showed us at E3 was "hey look no partners, no leveling up, just limited amounts of attacks". Once again, however, Nintendo proves that there is literally no way to go wrong when buying one of their games, and it took me almost zero time to realize that. (As of this post, I have only completed the first world).

 

I guess that's a great place to start, huh? Worlds. In direct opposition to the first two Paper Mario games, and as more of a continuation of Super Paper Mario's style, this game uses a world map (over a hub town like Flipside) and has levels much like Super Paper Mario. In a way, it feels like Super Paper Mario was Super Mario Bros, and Sticker Star is Super Mario Bros 3... except nothing will ever be Super Mario Bros 3. The idea is pretty much the same though, in terms of progression of game design.

 

The battle system acts as a hybrid of Super Paper Mario and every other Paper Mario game, except you get no experience from the battles, and often times it's best to just flat out avoid battles altogether... no, it's always best to avoid battles. The game does little to reward you for battling enemies who aren't bosses or minibosses, outside of the occasional sticker drop, which will normally turn out to be a hard to use special enemy weapon. Don't take this as a complaint, since I'm glad a game is asking you to just figure out what to do with your items instead of holding your hand the entire way and explaining exactly how to use each item down to unmistakable details. There's very little punishment involved in trying to use these stickers, and anyone with patience (read: a true gamer) will try to learn how to use them or just go for using the more predictable weapons.

 

Interestingly enough, the staple of Mario RPG games, timed hits, is a concept that exists but is barely touched on by tutorials, unless I missed that. I even did the tutorial fight to make sure I understood the sticker concept, and there was very little mention of how you should time hitting the A button with different stickers differently, or wait for that little flashy star thing to appear as an indicator of when it's time to press A. The game feels almost as if it was made with veteran players in mind, which is great as far as I'm concerned. They couldn't get away with something like that, of course, if the game weren't pretty much incredibly easy. Harkening back to the battles, it's not hard to one shot all the enemies on the screen if you have the right stickers with you, but the boss enemies (and even the one sub-boss I've encountered) are on a level all of their own, the boss of the first world having a massive 90 HP and being nearly unbeatable unless you tried out the "thing" to sticker conversion machine back in town (which, again, in the game's defense, it makes incredibly obvious to you since the stage before that makes you escort a toad back to town, and you can't actually progress through that stage after going back unless you turn a "thing" into a sticker and use it in the right place. Again, overall, the game feels like NES levels of "figure out what you're doing because I'm sure as hell not going to tell you", and I love that feeling.

 

So... stickers. They're everywhere. Everywhere. And they respawn, no matter the rarity, when you leave the world and come back to it, so any doubt you may have about the game based on a perceived lack of attack opportunity should be alleviated by that. There is never going to be a shortage of attacks for you to use, and as long as you remember where good stickers are at, you can fill your entire album with incredibly overpowered stickers and go to town. Just to note though, that might not actually help you at all, since when I fought the first boss, even my best stickers did embarrassingly low damage to him (anywhere from 1 to 3 where they would be doing high teens against normal enemies), so if that trend continues, boss beating is more of a question of if you brought the right "thing" sticker with you than if you brought an album full of flashy or shiny stickers. Worth noting here is that the game allows you to run from bosses so that you don't feel like you got unfairly trapped against a boss you could never beat, at least, it allowed me to run from the first one. If later bosses expect you to have learned your lesson by then and brought an album full of "things", so be it.

 

All in all, it's a great game, and I can say that from only just over 2 hours play time. The game takes extra care to remember that it's a paper world, just like the other Paper Marios before it, and of course that adds a charm to it that just screams "you're playing Paper Mario". If you're looking for something worth playing on your 3DS, this is definitely a necessity.