Paper Mario: Sticker Star (3DS)

[Your Vest Friend]

...you don't believe breaking bad news gently do you... :V

 

At the very least, there is Hit it or Snifit to look forward to (even though the name of it seems a little wrong to me for some reason...).

 

Nope. :3

 

Also it might seem wrong because it's different from the American version. When Komodin plays it, he'll find it's called Snifit or Whiffit instead. 

[JezMM]

Holy crap, 5-1 actually had a reference to a previous Paper Mario game.  That made me happy.

 

One of the pieces of trash in the western area is a report on one of the ruinsy places from World 2 that is written by a certain student from the University of Goom.  <3

 

Though uhh, have to say... in the area of 4-1 where you get the Goat...

 

What the hell was up with Birdo's cameo out of nowhere.  I thought that was the start of a recurring joke/character thing or something but it hasn't amounted to anything lol.

 

 

On World 6 now, so figure I'm near the end.  Hope the finale is cool despite all the lack of story.  D=

[Kamicciolo]

I just finished the game today, the final battle is definitely sweet, though as a forewarning I'd recommend stocking up on Hammer stickers more than anything else. I ended up wasting all my stickers because Jump ones are useless on Bowser (oops spoilers ), and had to rely on the pity stickers given out when you block an attack (did make the battle more intense though, so try that if you fancy the challenge~). The actual story finale ain't much itself though, sadly.

 

Also I have to say, I really found the last Kamek battle before Bowser to be a right dick. It horribly abused the way battles were set up in this game to only let you attack the enemy in front of the group, which kinda bugged me from the start of the game anyway, nevermind that you're locked to the ground based sandals and Kamek keeps floating up to avoid them... Really don't like that fight. Why was that changed anyway? what difference would it have made to let you pick which enemy you targeted when it asked if you were all set? End of the day it seems like a really dumb change for the worse.

[Your Vest Friend]

Maybe it was to better accommodate certain sticker mechanics such as the Koopa shell (which works by sending the front Koopa in its shell through the rest of the enemy line)?

[Solkia]

>Use boom box

>Remix of the Space theme from Super Mario Land 2

 

10/10

 

I'm at 4-1 of this game. I don't know what to say. at some points I find myself having fun with it, at others I just get annoyed.

Edited January 21, 2013 by Underaged Hot Anime Girl

[JezMM]

Also I have to say, I really found the last Kamek battle before Bowser to be a right dick. It horribly abused the way battles were set up in this game to only let you attack the enemy in front of the group, which kinda bugged me from the start of the game anyway, nevermind that you're locked to the ground based sandals and Kamek keeps floating up to avoid them... Really don't like that fight. Why was that changed anyway? what difference would it have made to let you pick which enemy you targeted when it asked if you were all set? End of the day it seems like a really dumb change for the worse.

 

I wouldn't even mind this if they didn't make it so you HAVE to choose a sticker to waste on your turn.  Several if you happen to have the benefits of the battle spinner still active.

 

 

To be honest I'm on the final boss and not enjoying it.  Firstly a non-spoiler tip to any first timers - after the first thing you do on 6-3, leave the level to save as there isn't a save point before the final boss.

 

So yeah.

 

I spent almost all my coins buying a ton of super good general stickers (mostly flashy) and was all ready to go, but you can't even get past the first Phase without a few Things.  I discovered this after dying of course (and referring to the Hint Guide) so ended up selling most of my stickers for half the coins I paid for them, and am currently trudging around all the old levels grinding coins and collecting Things.

 

And, as my tip above there implies, I of course had to fight Kamek again which was a pain and a half.

 

The final boss is just the culmination of all the trial and error gameplay up to this point.  Needed to retry to get past Phase 1, then with the Whomp I saw the telling mark on his back and was all "aha!  scissors!" and watched as they did nothing and my scissors were wasted, not realising you had to do a certain amount of damage first to knock him over (something strongly discouraged by the consistent 1 damage you do to him every attack).  I managed to beat him anyway with a High Heel once he was down, but everything about that was non-intuitive.

 

Made it to the phase where he's surrounded by lava and uses Podoboos to attack you.  Correctly figured out to use a cold Thing (Shaved Ice in my case) but I had loaded up so much on Things that my regular stickers were in short supply and I basically ran out of stickers so died (though not after the game mocked me by handing my two Flashy Jump pity stickers (completely useless) a Flashy Mushroom sticker (just in the nick of time, I was about to die), then two more Flashy Jump stickers before giving up and just not giving me anything.

 

 

 

I wouldn't mind the Trial and Error gameplay if the game actually encouraged it, but sending you back to your last save point (which is a good 10 minutes ago unless you're clever enough to leave the course to save after Kamek) and making you watch all the cut-scenes again before having another go is completely against that idea in terms of curbing player frustration.

 

 

I get the feeling that like Skyward Sword my entire feeling of this game is gonna be marred by this shittily unintuitive final boss and I'm never gonna want to pick this game up again once I'm done.  =\  No major loss, I'm due for another TTYD playthrough anyway.

[JezMM]

Little bump to say I finished it and okay the final boss ended up being pretty damn cool in the end.  It was a pain preparing myself for it and I still stand by my comments on the game not being "experiment and die a bit to do so!" friendly but overall I am happy with this game.  Not as happy as I could have been but yes.  It is a more than satisfactory entry into the Paper Mario series.

 

But not MUCH more.

[Diogenes]

I wouldn't even mind this if they didn't make it so you HAVE to choose a sticker to waste on your turn.  Several if you happen to have the benefits of the battle spinner still active.

You can press...X, I think, to start attacking without a second or third sticker. You can't avoid wasting one, though, as far as I know.

 

And yeah I'm at the final boss and I just...can't...be assed to bother, really. I've gotta ditch a major portion of my album because they're useless in this fight and I need the space, I've gotta go get a bunch of Thing stickers that I'd have no way of knowing I needed without trying to brute force the fight to guess what the gimmicks are and then die, or just say fuck it and read a FAQ...it's just a pain. There's good ideas here, but it just isn't put together in the right way.

[JezMM]

For the final boss, you only NEED the following:

 

 

- A few that do generic damage to all enemies (for Phase 1)

- Some Hammer stickers (for Phase 2)

- Scissors (though first time the High Heel did the exact same job for me) (for second part of Phase 2)

- Two ice-damage dealing Things (I got by with one but two is recommended) (for Phase 3)

- At least one Raccoon Tail (I was given these thankfully by pity drops so I think they're absoloutely essential) (for Phase 4)

 

Aside from that bring plenty of strong hammers and iron jumps, as well as plenty of high damage Things to fight Bowser generally between using the Things for their specific purpose.  For Phase 1, 2 and 4 don't use any Things that only attack one enemy unless Bowser is very clearly alone.  A handful of general stickers are good (don't worry about them being strong) since there is one point where you will want to try out many things on him.

 

I also would recommend bringing some favourite stickers for the very end, regardless of what attack type they are.  You'll know when the very end is.

 

Finally, bring about 400-500 coins for Battle Spinners.  Triple Attacks are very useful for Phase 1, and Double Attacks are essential for Phase 2.

 

Kept the above as spoiler-free as possible but obviously it will be pretty much saying "Fuck It" and reading an FAQ as you said you didn't want to unless necessarylol.

Edited January 22, 2013 by JezMM

[Kamicciolo]

...actually for phase one you can use

thumbtacks, tape or stapler to seal the door shut. Bowser can't call up any more enemies after that

 

Also if you do decide to do the battle, don;t bother with jump stickers. They're useless on Bowser (crown and everything).

[JezMM]

...actually for phase one you can use

thumbtacks, tape or stapler to seal the door shut. Bowser can't call up any more enemies after that

 

Also if you do decide to do the battle, don;t bother with jump stickers. They're useless on Bowser (crown and everything).

 

Oh wow I never even thought of that.  I'm pretty sure though that...

 

Jump stickers work on the final form, since you're jumping on his hands and nose respectively rather than the crown.

[Conando]

Wrong. Iron Jump stickers is where it's at (Hammer sucks). You can even buy giant shiny iron jump stickers.

Edited January 23, 2013 by Wreck-It Ralph

[JezMM]

I swore I used non-iron jump stickers at the end.  Humm.

[Conando]

You can't use normal jump stickers on his head. I know, I tried. Now, you can destroy his hands with them, and that's just what I did. Flashy InfiniJump for over 100 damage. So satisfying.

[JezMM]

That must have been it then.  Maybe the target order just timed nicely so I ended up exclusively using Iron Jumps on his head at the end by coincidence.

[Solkia]

SO I just finished Sticker Star.

 

This is the biggest fucking pile of shit I have ever olayed in my entire life.

 

... is probably what you're expecting me to say.

 

On the contrary, while there are a lot of trial and error shit, I found this game pretty enjoyable.

 

The best way I can describe this game is Paper Mario with an Ammo count.

 

The Sticker mechanic is pretty fun, and I will say if you know what you're doing, you will never run out of stickers.  But that's ONLY if you know what you're doing.

 

Making the Thing Stickers being the boss weaknesses was a poor choice, I must say. I completely missed the fish hook the first time around, so I had no idea how to beat the stupid fish. and even when I did get the fish hook, you only have a certain amount of time before it explodes. (seriously, what the hell)

 

The writing was pretty funny at some points too. 

 

Kertsi is fucking useless, don't even bother asking her for help, just google it.

 

I would list more positives, but a lot of them would be spoilers.

 

Overall, I found it to be a really fun game, I'd say it's worth a rent just to see what you think.

 

EDIT: OH I forgot to mention, the soundtrack in this game is awesome, especially the Mini-Boss music.

Edited January 26, 2013 by Underaged Hot Anime Girl

[JezMM]

EDIT: OH I forgot to mention, the soundtrack in this game is awesome, especially the Mini-Boss music.

Haha oh man yes. I get that theme stuck in my head all the time, it's so friggin' catchy.

[Your Vest Friend]

I would disagree with the sondtrack remarks, personally.

[Swiss]

So far, I'm finding that the soundtrack is the only part I'm really enjoying. The game's quite fun, but it's shortcoming are just too frustrating to me, unfortunately.

[JezMM]

The only thing I dislike about the soundtrack is it's too overused.  Four out of Five levels on World 1 all use the same grass theme for example.  No matter how good the music is it loses its impact after hours of listening to it.  Each of the frequently used songs could have done with some form of variation.

 

World 3 in particular was awful for this.  I got really goddamn bored of the Forest theme and it's probably the weakest gameplay theme to begin with.

[Swiss]

Yeah, I think you hit the nail right on there head there! I love the normal battle theme though, probably the only part of this game I think I like better than the previous PM games. 

[JezMM]

Yeah I can't fault the battle theme.  Hell all the boss themes are brilliant.

 

 

Though if we get another Paper Mario game I would love to see instrument variations that reflect the location (though the same actual melody, I like the Paper Mario series having a single memorable battle theme for each game).  I think all the series' battle themes are on par with each other though.

 

 

More than anything though I love that this game's soundtrack (at least sounded like it had) live instruments.  Why didn't NSMBU have a soundtrack like this blaaargh.

 

I'm actually sort of tempted to put the TV on mute and replay NSMBU with this game's soundtrack lol.

[Salamander]

Time for another of my long and unbelievably late to the party reviews for games that nobody cares about any more. Context: This is the first Paper Mario game I've played and this may affect my opinions.

 

To start with, the graphics. I understand that this is the first game where they really threw themselves into the whole paper aesthetic rather than it being an odd excuse for a quasi-2D art style. In that respect it's a great success and I don't think they can ever go back to something more limited. The papercraft, cardboard, literally two-dimensional sprites and so on are beautiful and gloriously inventive. How it works out in the gameplay is another matter that I'll come to shortly.

 

The story, or rather lack of it, is... interesting. Because while the broader plot is as thin as the paper it's made of then the game is brimming with characterisation, even if it's characterisation of a very limited set of generic Mario figures. I can respect the job they did at that, although they fail significantly at the bosses in this respect, and I think it's easy to see why: By nature, the bosses come closest to being individual and particularly unique characters. The boss Pokey, Blooper, and of course Petey Piranha get no characterisation at all, while for the Goomba and snowman chap it's minimal. The game doesn't even play with their status as generic figures of their type. For Petey I guess there's precedent in him being utterly silent (although bizarrely he gets more lines than Bowser, which I think is a mistake), but they could definitely have done more with the bosses, who end up being of the most generic RPG type - they just sit at the end of the world waiting to be defeated without ever doing anything. It would've been nice to see them being a big deal in some way other than inconveniently possessing a Royal Sticker. And that could've been a first step to a more intricate plot. But just characterising them wouldn't have hurt. Play with the Goomba's nature as the most basic and generic enemy of the Mario series - maybe make it a miraculous survivor whose long life is attributed solely to luck in not being jumped on before. Instead of just having a big Pokey and Blooper redesign them in the same vein as Petey Piranha. The snowman guy would be much improved just by having its outer shells be anything other than a generic Bowser statue - or better yet, every single one of its shells is something different.

 

But, for someone who likes games to have a strong plot, the lack of plot sat quite well with me a lot of the time, and it took me a while to work out why: This game isn't designed to be an RPG at all. It's made to be a platformer. Take out the random battles and rework HP and the game basically is a Mario platformer with vastly enhanced plot, of the kind we've actually been looking for in things like future New Super Mario Bros. At first I thought the level numbers were a kind of playful, almost ironic use of a Mario staple, that breaking an RPG world up into levels was a kind of joke, but no, it's totally authentic. That broke a lot of the magic for me, especially as you can certainly do something interesting with levels in a Mario RPG if you wanted to just by making them part of the joke. Have every level be assigned a number and have characters refer to levels only by number and it'll sound totally silly. Make the numbers far more arbitrary than they were here, totally deconstruct the idea of a level and of a linear order in a game with an at least partially non-linear world. They didn't pursue this line at all and I think it weakens the game. It seems like an obvious joke to make to me, especially when the game was partly non-linear. Very strange.

 

But if they were going to make the game as essentially a platformer with some RPG elements, why not just... make a platformer? Come up with a new series prefix that gives people different expectations and go all out with the platformer elements? It might well have been a good idea to take out the RPG elements altogether, of which, let's face it, there were just two: HP, and self-contained battles. These could've been accomplished in-level with platformer rules as a kind of action RPG sort of thing. Stronger enemies take more jumps, you can maybe equip different kinds of sticker to the D-pad, so you've got your standard jump and hammer on their buttons, but you could customise the D-pad to have a healing mushroom on up and a shell on left, and these would subtract from your stock.

 

Regarding which, the sticker-hoarding element of the game was one of the weakest points, and I think I can see why: Okay, you have no incentive to battle the vast majority of enemies in the game. They serve no overall purpose in completing the level except to act as another obstacle to be walked around or jumped over, not on. Meanwhile, you're encouraged to think of stickers as rare, and other stickers as even rarer. You have a limited supply and limited space. So every time you have to use a sticker on an enemy who does nothing to help you complete the level, it feels like a waste. Like you've just thrown that sticker away. This is one of the reasons the Enigmansion worked for me: Every battle contributes directly towards completing the level, and using stickers on the enemies feels like a return on your investment. Ditto boss fights.

 

It might have been better to treat stickers differently: As ammo, of sorts. Say you have a category for every sticker. Like you have a boot sticker slot, say. And every boot sticker you get goes into that as "ammo." But when you run out of it, it's not that you can't use a jump attack, it's just that it's at its weakest. Conversely, the more boot stickers you gain, the shinier and stronger your attack becomes. Instead of new pages in your sticker album, your cap on each sticker stack is lifted. It would be regrettable to loose the sticker arrangement aspect in your album, but let's face it, making every single sticker into arbitrarily-sized squares kind of does away with a lot of the inventiveness of that aspect anyway.

 

Also Things can go to Hell. They teach you at the start of the game that these things are valable and you're shown the ones that you pick up have a near-immediate field or battle use. You beat Bowser Jr. with the scissors, you deactivate the fan in that one level and then use it somewhere else to activate the windmill. The game encourages you to prize and hold onto them. And then what they never ever tell you is that there are a huge amount of Things and that nearly every one of them is useless - which is to say, isn't obligatory. Doesn't have any usage in levels to change the geography and just acts as a strong sticker rather than a specific boss killer. And most are so huge that they just sit in your album taking up large quantities of space while you wait to find their proper place which doesn't exist. Dreadful. I'd have just thrown out the concept and reworked them as extensions to the Scraps system, which was absolutely fantastic and which I entirely approve of.

 

Oh, and you seem to use and need far fewer Things as the game goes on, too. After about world 3 I looked up exactly which ones were obligatory and then threw out all the rest, and had a much easier time. But then again it was also after world 3 that I started running from every single random battle rather than wasting my hard-earned stickers on enemies who didn't matter. Because what was the point of fighting the battle? There was no point. Which made it all the more frustrating when the game's apparently randomised escaping system would sometimes let me go immediately and sometimes trap me in a battle with some weakling for half a dozen turns. It increasingly felt like I was fighting the game itself. Do you throw away a sticker on an enemy which doesn't deserve it, or waste minutes trying to run from an inconsequential battle? Nobody wins in this equation.

 

I think this business with useless Things is one of the signs of what look an awful lot like rushed development towards the end of the game. The Enigmansion is pretty much the last big, inventive level. After that, we have, what? A level that's just a shop. A level that's a ski lift. Two levels that are just raft rides. They're interspersed with more involved levels, to be sure, but then look at the last world: Three levels... one of which is a cutscene... and the other of which is a straight line with one puzzle before the final boss. And it's a good boss, to be sure. One of the only ones I think justifies the game being an RPG as it's executed so well. But the last three worlds are certainly not as big as the first three. Maybe tearing up the game and starting from scratch wasn't such a good idea.

 

I think I've pretty much said my piece on this game. It has a lot of good elements, but they're hugely misguided by the game essentially being the wrong genre. Others are misguided in making you feel like you're wasting your time. We'll never know what the game they scrapped for this would've been like. But they scrapped the wrong game. This one needed a complete overhaul.

[Gabz Girl]

I haven't played this (yet), but I really want to. I've played Paper Mario TYD and it's AMAZING, but I'm slightly worried because I've heard some very mixed reviews for this. What worries me most though is that Sticker Star doesn't have companions., which for me were the highlight of TYD. What I want to know is, since I'm not a Paper Mario expert, is this game really for me or should I just get it when it's cheap?

Edited March 6, 2013 by Gabz Girl

[Swiss]

I'd honestly wait until it's cheap, personally. I beat the game 2 days ago and it just felt so...empty to me. I really can't put my finger on why because there's a good few things I like about the game but something about it just feels soul-less. I only forced myself to beat it so I could try and give it a chance but it just never seemed to pick up in terms of gameplay or story.

 

The music is incredible though, that's the one thing this game does really damn well. As pointless as the normal battles felt, I never minded running into them because of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI7bbPg4BMM. Doesn't even fit the Battle scenario, but it's so good I really don't mind!