They say you don't change a winning team, and it is incredibly hard to find a team more successful than the first two Paper Mario games. Born in the shadow of the doubt that surrounded Nintendo's ability to produce a worthy sequence to Super Mario RPG, the two initial installments in the Paper Mario saga were nothing short of stellar; featuring great combat mechanics, fantastic plots, undeniable and irresistible charm, and very sharply written dialogues. Super Paper Mario abandoned the amazing combat mechanics in exchange for the simplicity of a 2-D platformer, but kept the other qualities nearly intact. Paper Mario: Sticker Star takes Super Paper Mario's stripped down level progression as its starting point, and from there it proceeds to change the series to its core, making both good and very bad decisions along the way, and leaving us with a title that is easily dwarfed by all of its better predecessors. Paper Mario: Sticker Star is neither boring nor without charm, but it lacks two core things that made the series so fantastic: a heart, and a purpose.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star begins during an annual Mushroom Kingdom holiday when its inhabitants gather in a square in order to celebrate a festival to witness the coming of the Sticker Comet, which is said to grant wishes. Naturally, Bowser promptly shows up to take control of the comet, and since the Mushroom Kingdom is plagued by poor security planning, the big beast obviously overpowers the three Toads protecting the piece and crashes into the thing. The comet then splits into six pieces: five that end up falling all over the kingdom, and one that lands right on top of Bowser's head, making him ridiculously powerful in the process. As it has been the case with all Paper Mario games until this point, the silly simple central plot is supposed to serve as a trampoline to an underlying number of storylines and mysteries that Mario will have to unwrap in order to reach each of the pieces he is after. Sticker Star, however, in a mind-boggling poor design choice, is extremely thin in the plot development department, as each of its chapters feature no storylines whatsoever.
Both story and dialogue have always been a central element to the success of the series, as they worked as masterful supports to the great gameplay of Paper Mario. Their sudden removal leaves players solely with one heartless central tale, and branching chapters that play more like a New Super Mario Bros. game than another entry in the Paper Mario series, due to their one-dimensional nature born from the sole exclusive focus on gameplay. Encounters with weird and well-developed supporting characters are so rare they border on being null. As a consequence, dialogues become infrequent and stripped down, and the locations players will visit are neither curious nor surprising, as they are simply paperized versions of settings found in all other Mario games, such as a desert, a jungle, icy mountains, a beach and a volcano. As it turns out, a Paper Mario without its plots becomes as hollow as a book that exclusively contains scenario descriptions, and forgets that those scenarios would gain a lot if they had been populated with easy-to-love beings.
Without the plot, the game's spotlight ends up falling solely on the shoulders of its gameplay. Sadly, though, in spite of the fact that its gameplay utilizes concepts that, more than any other game in the series, embrace and make use of the paper-nature of its setting; Sticker Star's playing style presents way too many holes in it, which stop it from fully rescuing the game. The game features chapters which are divided in a series of levels which can be navigated through an overworld of Super Mario World qualities. All of the levels are relatively short, and some of them even provide secret exits that are either optional, opening up paths to hidden locations, or mandatory, blocking the way to proceeding stages. It's an approach that neither does the game any good nor harms it in any considerable way, but that aligns itself quite well with the underlying gameplay.
The biggest conceptual change in Sticker Star, as its title points out, is the presence of stickers, which adds a lot to the great charm of the game and provides a whole new level of thematic cohesion. Mario no longer will battle foes with a predetermined set of attacks. Instead, it is imperative that players collect stickers in order for them to be used in battles. The nature of those consumable attacks is nothing new, as they include different kinds of jumps, hammers, fire and ice flowers, POW blocks, Koopa shells and etc, and the ways on which they must be used keep the battles very engaging, as players need to interact with the usage of those stickers by pressing the action buttons in a timely manner to increase the power of the stickers or protect Mario from enemies' attacks. Collecting and using stickers is undeniably a lot of fun, and in addition they provide an extra strategic element, as players must do some inventory management in order not to be without more powerful stickers once the time to face stronger enemies comes.
However, Nintendo's choice to make stickers more powerful as the game progresses has completely nullified the need for a level system, and - as a consequence - it was naturally removed. Unfortunately, that removal causes a bit of a conceptual problem to the game. As level points are no longer acquired or necessary, the sole reward for battling comes in the form of coins, which in turn are used to buy more stickers. This create the odd situation where players are battling to defeat enemies, to get coins, which are then used to buy the very same stickers that were just used to defeat those enemies. Once players notice that futile cycle, and they most certainly will, one thing becomes quite clear: in Paper Mario Sticker star, battles have no purpose. And when an activity comes with either no reward or a pointless one, which is the case here, performing it becomes one extremely dull affair. As fun as using stickers and pounding enemies is, it will lose its charm after a few goes, as players will just be overwhelmed by the pointless nature of it all.
In addition, the battle system features yet another problem: it has no difficulty balance. When it comes to regular enemies, given how stickers are everywhere just waiting to be plucked from the walls, Mario will more often than not be completely overpower those foes, blowing them away in a few turns. Things become even easier given that Mario can increase the number of stickers he can use in a single turn by spending a few dozen coins, which are also very commonly found in the game, in order to spin a roulette that can grant him the power to use up to three stickers in a single round. In the end, the equation is quite simple: add the unshakable feeling that battles are blatantly pointless with the fact that most of them are a piece of cake, and you got a great engaging battle system that was not very well executed by the folks at Intelligent Systems. While the attempt to change the series is certainly commendable for both how addictive it is to pluck and collect stickers, and how the concept falls right into place with the game's paper world, it is impossible not to see that it was not perfectly implemented.
Boss battles do not suffer from the same lack of challenge, yet they present a different flaw. Bosses are ridiculously powerful, possessing HP bars that are invariably in the hundreds, and defense stats that make most stickers have their power of attack reduced to one, which means that defeating a boos through traditional methods would require almost as many stickers as Mario can carry, incredible defensive abilities by players and a lot of luck. In other words, it is almost impossible, but doable. The alternative is figuring out what is the boss' weakness, which means finding a "Thing Sticker" that will harm it in a significant way. "Things" can be found all throughout the game's stages, either in plain sight or very well-hidden, and their nature is completely random, ranging from objects like a fridge, a radiator, a lucky cat to a goat. When used in battle each will cause a curious, sometimes easy-to-deduct, effect - for example, the fridge will freeze enemies in place - so players must find out which "Thing" will properly work with the boss and cause him huge amounts of damage, turning the battle into a winnable affair.
The problem is: sometimes it is not quite clear which sticker must be used, and - in addition – there is always the chance that, upon coming across a boss battle, you haven't found the right "thing" yet, which will mean Mario will have to face him taking tiny chunks of HP little by little and extending the battle for over twenty minutes, or backtrack and aimlessly look for the "thing" that is just right. The same problem occurs in certain parts of the game's stages, where Mario must use a "thing" sticker to overcome an apparently impossible obstacle. Sometimes the usage of those sticker is obvious, like using a heat-based sticker to melt ice, but on other occasions it is random and nearly impossible to figure out.
Needless to say, in Sticker Star, flaws and issues are as aplenty as stickers. However, the game still manages to be enjoyable to a certain level, and that is mostly due to its level design. The game, when outside battle, offers a nice mix of the traditional Paper Mario exploration and puzzle-solving with interesting platforming sections. Mario will interact with the world in a quite unique way, going into paperize mode, which will allow him to either slap stickers onto scenario elements, allowing him to proceed with his exploration, or plucking pieces of the scenario and scraps in other to glue them in another angle or place. Those puzzles are smartly designed, and quite rewarding to figure out, providing players some truly impressive moments. Other than that, Mario's ability to stick and pluck builds an interesting bridge that connects scenario and gameplay into one cohesive package where gameplay elements walk side-by-side with the game's very charming paper world, which here is presented as gorgeously as ever, especially given the addition of the system's 3D effects, which fall perfectly into place in a world consisting of paper pieces.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star is by no means comparable to its predecessors in terms of quality. Not only are some of its gameplay elements flawed to the point where the game feels underdeveloped, such as in the poor difficulty balance and the lack of purpose on the battles, but it is also lacking tremendously in the storyline category, as none of the characters, settings or mysteries that made the previous Paper Mario games can be found in this installment. Its world, as a consequence, ends up being extremely paper-thin, featuring no sidequests - aside from a museum where a collection of all of the world's stickers can be displayed - and barely no characters that can be interacted with. The game is, however, still worth a try due to its full embracing of its paper-made world and because a few of its newly found gimmicks are interesting, even if it is for a little while, and its technical aspects are absolutely stellar. As part of a series that has been nothing short of spectacular, Sticker Star is still quite a disappointment, though.