I remember when Paper Mario was a good series, like despite any and all changes it had, it at least had a good story, good characters, and good RPG elements. Even Super Paper Mario with its retooling structure to the formula was still a good game. Sticker Star however, is not that, Sticker Star took out nearly everything that was good in the franchise and turned it into something unfinished, and not true to the source material. There was a lot of talk about Miyamoto changing a lot of the way the game played and worked, and frankly this is one of his biggest mistakes ever. Just everything in this game is a disgrace to what came before it and fans of the past games, well they just aren't going to like it. I know I didn't like this game, in fact I loathe this game for what it is, and that’s a missed appropriate for something great. Because aside from the horrible changes, Sticker Star still looks great, and has great music to it. Everything about the surface is eye catching and looks like a game that is very fun to play, but it's not that.
Sticker Star just changed way too much of the Paper Mario formula to really be called Paper Mario to began with. I understand that the name itself and the way it looks gives it that title, but the essence of what made Paper Mario as a series good, is gone in this game. They removed so much of what was there that gave Paper Mario substance as a series. Partners went away for pretty much no reason, instead of quirky unique characters that joined you along your travels to help solve problems along the way, they are instead replaced by thing stickers.
Thing Stickers are a good idea gone horribly wrong as they could have been a really cool power up for Mario this time around, like a special move that uses flower points, instead they are one time use stickers that are used randomly to solve certain obstacles you encounter in sticker star. I say randomly because for the vast part of the whole game it is up to you and what very little hints the game gives you to figure out which sticker to use in a given situation or battle, and if you don't use the right one or even at the correct time you not only lose your sticker, but are also punished for it by having to get it back by either paying for it or looking for it again. This causes a lot of guess work and a lot of lost stickers and money which can then led to more grinding for coins, which means a ton of your free time is wasted. And while I understand that the thing stickers are often too powerful for combat to keep getting used over and over again, being used for solving a puzzle and losing it whether or not it actually works? That is just some of the stupidest game design manageable, and strongly discourages use of any stickers throughout the entire game. Literally I remember making a thing sticker and being too afraid to use it in case it was used for something else at some point, and still having it at the last battle without using it even once. The game doesn't help either with Kristi, the new helper for Mario in this game, as she pretty much gives very little advice to begin with and what little she does is only based with in the whole level, and not one screen like in most Paper Mario games. To add more to this unhelpful mess, players aren't given information on what stickers do unless they use them. Which as said before, if you use certain stickers to early or incorrectly you are punished by getting the stickers back either through money grinding or backtracking. This mess of thing stickers wouldn't be so bad however if it wasn't for the fact that you are required to use thing stickers in order to beat the boss battles in this game. Thanks to not adding any sort of level up or experience system to the game, boss battles rely more on thing stickers than anything else in this entire game. Making the boss battles less of a challenge on battling and more on problem solving.
Granted a lot of the basics return to Sticker Star's battle system, but it's vastly basic and doesn't even mention the action commands that can give you a edge in battle. It's not like timing matters that much in these battles anyway, as by the end of the whole game I realized that just smashing A constantly would yield the same results as trying to figure out the correct timing. Either way, battles in this game are pretty much all for show. There is absolutely no reason to ever get into any battle in this game unless you are actually required to by the game itself. Not only are you not punished to go into unneeded battles, but rather rewarded by not having to use any stickers you currently have, saving them for when the “real battle starts”. Which in all honesty, I was a bit fine with at first till I noticed that Sticker Star as a lot more enemies than the majority of Paper Mario's do. Usually in the original and TTYD you get about 1 to 4 enemies on screen and that was pretty much it unless it was a unusual situation, but in this game you are normally given 4- 7 enemies to deal with on screen the majority of the time. Thus making it a lot harder to simply run away from battles, as fighting each enemy would be counter productive and waste a bunch of stickers. And this is all not mentioning the fact that the majority of characters and story are not there. Granted there is some story and some characters that talk to you, but Sticker Star vastly comes down to what sticker should I use now and where do I go to use it?
Sticker Star was reduced to the level of a regular Mario game when it came to story, and that above anything else is what made Paper Mario its own series. It wasn't just Bowser just kidnapping Peach, but of a whole world brought down by chaos. It was about Mario traveling around the varies lands, interacting with characters from all sorts of places and getting a rag tag group to defeat a greater evil. Sticker Star just doesn't have that story, it doesn't have that emotion, it doesn't have what made Paper Mario, Paper Mario.
Final Thoughts:
Paper Mario: Sticker Star is a huge disappointment on a franchise that has otherwise been stellar. Sticker Star removes too much of the old, and replaces it too much with broken ideas, and gameplay that just doesn't work. Despite the great soundtrack, and the way it looks, Sticker Star is a terrible game that doesn't understand its source material, and ruins the great formula that the series once had.