It's too bad that such a beautiful looking game can feel lacking in both gameplay and content

User Rating: 6 | Paper Mario: Sticker Star 3DS
I must admit; I've never played a single Paper Mario game before. I'm sure it has always been a great series but for whatever reason, it just never caught my attention before. That being said, while looking to expand my rather small 3DS library, I looked up information about Sticker Star. I thought it looked interesting and I could use a solid RPG title for the handheld. So as you can see, I went into this game not knowing what to expect or knowing what made this series so good. Unfortunately, as someone who can't compare it to its predecessors and can only judge it as a stand alone game, Sticker Star came up short.

Every year, the Sticker Comet lands in the Mushroom Kingdom, and those who wish on it have a chance to get their wish granted. Mario is attending this festival among the Toads as Princess Peach is presenting the comet's arrival. Just before anyone can make a wish, Bowser crashes the celebration and attempts to touch the comet to grant his wishes. Despite the Toads' efforts, Bowser manages to touch the comet, which explodes, releasing six Royal Stickers across the Mushroom Kingdom. One of which lands on the head of Bowser, who is corrupted by its power, and uses it to kidnap Peach. Mario attempts to jump on him, but gets knocked out, and crumbled into a ball. After regaining consciousness, and uncrumbling himself, Mario begins to explore the festival grounds and eventually finds a Sticker Fairy named Kersti. Together, Mario and Kersti embark on a journey to help recover the Royal Stickers. That's basically the story. Nothing really that special and it basically turns into the usual Bowser captures princess routine.

One good thing about this game are the visuals. For a world that is supposed to be 2 dimensional, it looks great in 3D. I especially like the effects like the Toads rolling the paper land back to its normal state and other cut scenes like that. Even with the 3D off, the game still looks impressive and the world around you looks better than a world made out of paper should look.

Before you can save Peach and defeat Bowser, you're going to have to find the missing comet pieces first. That is basically your goal in every level of this game, though it's basically just reach the goal like most platformers. You select your level on a map like Super Mario World and the actual game plays like a typical Mario platformer. However, the game puts more emphases on item collecting and exploring. By item collecting, I'm of course talking about the stickers littered throughout each level. These stickers can be peeled off and added to your inventory. After that they can be used to battle or solve puzzles or find secret paths. Furthermore there's the paperization mode, where the whole world turns flat and you have the ability to lay stickers down; either revealing a new path or unlocking a secret.

For the most part, this part of the game isn't so bad.....at first. After a while, you'll notice that this game takes a lot of patience and back tracking. The main problem with this are the Thing stickers. These are objects that you find in specific levels, like a trumpet or a fan, that can be converted into stickers and used either in battle or they're needed to advance. Not only do they take up extra space in your inventory, but having to go back to a previous level to locate a "Thing" can be a royal pain. It's annoying that you need a specific item in order to advance and going back to town in order to convert it just makes the whole thing feel like a chore. For instance, there's a sleeping NPC you need to wake up. Unfortunately, only a specific "Thing" will do the job; the trumpet. Don't have it? Well you have to go bak to previous levels until you find it, without any knowledge on where to search. It's a flawed setup and only tacks on uneeded hours to the game.

The worst part of this game is the combat. Playing as Mario and Mario only, the battle is set up like a turn-based JRPG. The only difference is instead of giving you a set of attacks, all you have are the stickers you collected. Such stickers that can be used for battle include the boot (jumps on enemies), the hammer, koopa shell (sends a shell rolling at your opponents), mushroom (heals), and many more. To add to these attacks, touching the touch screen at the right time will cause you to do more damage and some attacks even require it. Here's the biggest problem with these fights though; they're pointless. There is no leveling up in this game and no experience to speak of, and the only way to improve your health is to find hearts in certain levels. This alone makes battling feel pointless and unrewarding. Sure, you get coins for doing well, but as if it's hard to earn coins without battling anyway.

The bosses are even worse. Of course the boss has more health than the other enemies (duh) but stickers will do less damage to them as well. The fastest way to kill these bosses is to use a thing sticker, but the game doesn't tell you that until you enter the battle. It's kind of annoying that you have to sacrifice one of those thing stickers to make the boss easier, otherwise prepare for a long and tedious fight.

I'll admit, I thought Sticker Star was great when I first started it up. The presentation was great and the sticker gimmick was appealing at first. Unfortunately, thanks to the pointless combat and the back tracking, I got bored of it pretty quick. This game had plenty of potential but there were so many design decisions that ended up hurting the experience in the long run. I haven't played the other Paper Mario games but according to most fans, they're all much better than this. I'll take their word for it and say try those out before purchasing Sticker Star. It's not a terrible game, but it's too watered down for its own good.