Happy daylight savings everyone! This week marks the 10th anniversary of one of the most controversial games in the entire Mario franchise. The fourth entry in a once beloved spinoff series that saw its entire gameplay foundation being uprooted in favor of a drastically different genre: it’s [Paper Mario Sticker Star](https://youtu.be/az9Sx4s_rZE)! But how did this polarizing piece of media come to be?
Let’s go back to 2009, a few years after Super Paper Mario was released. The next game was set to be released for Nintendo’s upcoming handheld system, the 3DS, which would be the series’s first portable entry. The initial plan was for the game to return to the overworlds and turn based combat of the first two games. Even partner characters were set to return like in those early games, as evidenced by [this early build](https://www.mariowiki.com/images/8/8a/GoombaPM3DS.PNG) at the game’s first showing. But some big sweeping changes took place between that initial reveal and the game’s eventual release.
In an [Iwata Asks interview](https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/papermario/0/2/), Shigeru Miyamoto (you might’ve heard of him) came up to the Paper Mario 3DS team one day and expressed dissatisfaction with the game’s direction, believing it to be too similar to Thousand Year Door. He subsequently requested the team to de-emphasize the story and only use character designs from the existing “Super Mario” brand. In Shiggy’s own words, “It’s fine without a story. Do we really need one?”
In that same interview, the game’s producer Kensuke Tanabe, who had been with the series since TTYD, revealed that sometime after Super Paper Mario’s release a survey was conducted on Japanese Club Nintendo players. And according to Tanabe less than 1% of Japanese players found that game’s story interesting, but they did say they enjoyed the whole “flipping from 2D to 3D” aspect was entertaining. To this end, a simpler Super Mario-esque story was brought forth, along with the solution to the “no original characters” challenge to be to use Toads in various colors.
As for the whole sticker concept the game was themed around, Tanabe and his team interpreted Miyamoto’s dissatisfaction of the TTYD-like prototype as a need to do something completely new for battles and puzzle solving. They originally planned for stickers to be used sporadically, but decided “eh might as well go all out” and made stickers the core mechanic of the game. These decisions fundamentally shifted the series’s RPG direction into more of an action adventure one, without unique character designs or EXP points from winning turn based battles.
The game’s November 2012 release saw mixed reviews and decent sales, with Nintendo pushing the series’s new direction forward with two sequels. There was Color Splash, which was released in the Wii U’s twilight years and felt more like an HD remaster of the last game. And most recently there was Origami King, which was certainly more ambitious even if it still wasn’t quite what hardcore fans wanted. Oh and if you were hoping the Paper Mario series would someday return to its roots, well think again. During an [E3 2016 interview](https://youtu.be/dlcNubU6bYA) for Color Splash, assistant producer Risa Tabata was asked this very question, to which her reply was simply, “you’ve heard of Mario & Luigi right?” And in [another interview](https://www.videogameschronicle.com/features/interviews/paper-mario-origami-king/) with VGC in 2020 for Origami King, Tanabe openly declared that as of Sticker Star, it is no longer possible to modify Mario characters or create unique original ones… at least for the Paper Mario series.
So that was the history and legacy of Paper Mario Sticker Star, a game that Nintendo fans really feel passionate about. But what did you think about this papercrafted adventure? Are you personally a fan of it? Or do you despise it with every fiber of your being like certain Internet personalities? How do you think it stacks up to the other Paper Mario games you’ve played? And do you consider it an important title in the series for what it did? And were you around to witness one of the angriest YouTube comment sections ever with regards to this game?
by Asad_Farooqui
29 Comments
This is in my opinion the worst first party Nintendo game ever released.
Easily the worst Mario adventure game. Incredibly boring story, no interesting characters, arbitrary and convoluted puzzles, and no reason to battle. It’s a shame because I love the concept, artstyle, and the music.
I wanted to like sticker star. I really did. I tried it, and hated it. I kept trying to push myself to play it but I just couldn’t. It had virtually nothing of the paper mario charm I enjoyed for years before.
Hot garbo. The worst paper mario.
This game along with Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon and the Wii U were strikes 1, 2, and 3 for me. I was so disappointed in Nintendo that it led to me taking a ~7 year break from all Nintendo games.
Went into it really excited to have turn-based Paper Mario back, and couldn’t even finish it. The shame is that Color Splash is significantly better, but people lump it with SS
I have played it three times, each one going “Maybe I judged it too harshly last time.” Only to find out that, no, it deserved every single bad review.
Probably one of the worst designed games out there. It’s crazy, it’s like the people who made it did not understand game design at all.
This is where the “Nintendo prioritizes hiring people who don’t play videogames to get new and innovative ideas” concept showed it worst face. I don’t know if Intelligent Systems does the same or if they still have the same mindset but it really didn’t pay off here.
This was also the beginning of an avalanche of bad releases across all franchises for Nintendo:
Sticker Stars, Amiibo Festival, Zipplash, Federation Force, Paper Jam, Ultra Smash, Fire Emblem Fates, Starfox Zero. It might have started with Other M though l.
Still shit and kind of an insult to rpgs. Like the concept is interesting but not well utilized
Great Soundtrack, terrible everything else.
It was ok. Pretty forgettable. I don’t remember anything other than it being disappointing.
This is a game so astronomically bad that it not only ruined its series but its fanbase as well. I can’t think of any other game that has done both of these things at once.
At launch, I beat the game but was pretty disappointed. I haven’t played it since then, but I think I may replay it soon with a new perspective. I know it’s popular to relentlessly dog on the game, but I gotta see if it’s really as bad as people claim it to be. Again, I was very disappointed with it, but I also haven’t played it in nearly a decade.
fuck Miyamoto and Nintendo higher ups in general for kneecapping Intelligent Systems and the Paper Mario series
Uh-oh.
Honestly, I can kind of see both sides of the argument. Super Paper Mario has a cult following, but the story absolutely jumped the shark for better or worse. All of the dialogue slows the game down considerably.
Sticker Star really just needed to tone down some of the wackier stuff from Super Paper Mario and find a good balance between new gameplay and well-liked mechanics. I feel like the developers really went overboard trying to make it *not* classic Paper Mario, and the game absolutely suffered.
(The Sticker Star music is great though)
What I enjoyed:
* The music during the Gooper Blooper fight. The sudden change when using the sponge gave me chills.
* The Mr. Blizzard fight was pretty cool.
* Kirsti giving Mario an apology during the final battle was kind of touching.
* The little nod to Space Zone from SML2 with the Boom
Box.
* The SM64 slide theme remixed during the minecart ride.
Sadly the rest of the game was very unremarkable. Origami King proved there could be a good Paper Mario that didn’t stick to the original formula, but SS did not deliver.
Idk why I liked this game when I played it but I did but I can also agree with basically every complaint I’ve ever seen at the same time.
I couldn’t stand it, and my dislike has only gotten worse over time. The newer games are better, especially in terms of writing, but they are still shadows of what they could have been.
One important oft-forgotten detail is that there was no question specifically asking about the story on the Club Nintendo survey. The less than 1% of people who commented on it did so because of the additional comments field, which people rarely fill out. The survey was made under the initial assumption that no one cared about the story in the first place.
The entire set of reasoning behind Sticker Star and subsequent games’ design baffles me. The result is a game where it is inadvisable to engage in core mechanics (battles) because it is pure resource drain with no substantial rewards, and the gimmicks are boring at best and frustrating at worst. With no real story, the only thing that remained was a battle system that wasn’t worth doing, and lukewarm exploration that didn’t really have substantial rewards either. You simply find the best stickers, hoard them to use on mandatory battles, and don’t bother with the rest of the game. The chapter bosses were horrendous; they were either impossible, or you happen to have the “I win” button in your album. There’s no drive to fight, barely a drive to explore, and no story to be invested in. The game is worse than bad; at least a bad game can be fun or interesting. Sticker Star was pointless. It being the model for the franchise going forward is simply frustrating to me.
it’s garbage
It is literally my least favorite game of all time for gutting my favorite Mario Spin-off series.
I like Sticker Star and I think that it has a lot of overlooked charm. There are plenty of quirky moments throughout the game, and I’m glad that it went all-in on the paper thematic. I like artsy stuff like that.
The map being split into levels makes it easy to pick up and play–I’m a fan of every Paper Mario, but I’d honestly probably replay Sticker Star over most of the others just because of this. I’ve played through it at least four times, and Paper Mario 64 is the only one that I’ve played more.
The story is nothing, the characters are all Toads and the boss battles in their purest form was “use this thing sticker that you may or may not have found, or lose the battle.”
Thousand Year Door was a masterpiece. Sure the story isn’t anything more than “Save the Princess.” but it was full of very interesting and a diverse cast of characters who made the side stories and in-between parts fun and exciting. Miyamoto may be a legendary game designer, but in the end, that’s what he knows best. Game DESIGN. A story doesn’t need to blow my socks off. I don’t expect writing on the level of Tolkien with my Mario games. But the story is a vehicle that you can build on. You can get away with a “save the princess!” story if the characters and the world are good enough to carry it.
Sticker Star failed on every single one of these things. What you got was a boring slog that I had to push myself to finish.
It’s the only Paper Mario I haven’t finished, and I will die happy knowing that.
The game isn’t as bad as people make it sound. I’ve definitely played worse. But everything the game stands for, and everything it did to the series, is unforgiveable. It definitely stands as one of my greatest disappointments in gaming. The series, which previously included two of the 10 best games Nintendo has ever made, is *still* recovering from what Sticker Star did.
I bought a 3DS specifically for this and was unbelievably disappointed. I don’t mind them trying something different. Super Paper Mario was totally different, but I still loved it in a different way. Sticker Star is just a terrible game. I gave it a second chance years later with different expectations, but I still hated it.
It’s to your advantage to avoid every battle due to lack of exp and expendable moves, and boss battles punish you for thinking outside the box by being painfully slow without the right moves. Instead of being rewarded or praised for toughing it out, the game condescendingly tells you you did it wrong.
Worst of all was the fish boss that required a specific sticker I didn’t have. It’s not just difficult, but impossible without it. It doesn’t seem like it until near the end of the battle, though. What’s the point of being able to choose my path if I can’t actually go out of order? At least make it clear at the start of the fight, instead of having me waste my time with an impossible battle. I used up all of my stickers for nothing.
Honestly what pains me the most about Sticker Star is that I do think it could’ve been good. They had an interesting combat system based around resource management, but the decision to rip the RPG out of it causes that to fall apart. Without XP, combat has no further reward beyond refunding the resources you spent on it, so why bother fighting at all? The optimal play is to run from every single encounter and hold onto your resources. And then the bosses don’t explore the system at all because you just pick the right object to win. There’s a real game buried deep in here somewhere, but you never actually play it.
For what it’s worth though, I don’t think it’s fair to pin all of this on Miyamoto, he didn’t make the game. That infamous interview that gets brought up all the time only had three real points of input from him: throw out their earlier prototype (we know nothing about this, could very well have been even worse), cut back on walls of text (I distinctly remember most reviews of SPM criticizing this and I feel like I’m getting Mandela Effected when people romanticize it now), focus on established Mario universe characters (really don’t see this one as a big deal). But there’s no mention of Miyamoto having had anything to do with the game’s much bigger problems.
Tabata’s statement about the Mario and Luigi series seems to really sting considering that ya know … AlphaDream bit the dust.
Didn’t bother to play Color Splash, but at least Origami King was a decent game on its own.
Replaying the game before Origami King came out, I found myself kind of surprised that it was a lot better than I remembered when it originally released. It feels like people hate the game more so for what it isn’t than what it is.
The game no doubt has its flaws. The pacing of the game is quite off with world 3 being significantly longer than everything else (I had to pause here for a bit cause it was feeling like a slog at this point). Outside of moments with Kamek (who is genuinely one of the best Paper Mario villains, seriously revisit his scenes in the game), the story is lacking in the personality of the rest of the series. For what it’s worth, the fact that every Paper Mario after has put more emphasis on the story would suggest IS realized they trimmed too much with SS. Worst of all, the game seems to not really know who its audience is. The puzzles can be extremely obtuse, which would suggest the game isn’t for kids, yet the Paper Mario series has always aimed to be an entry level series. I think the main reason I liked the game better on my second playthrough is because I knew the solution now to most puzzles and could just enjoy a natural pace to the game.
That all said, there are definitely things I like about the game (besides Kamek). The music of course is great. The level design is also quite enjoyable (arguably the best in the series at that point), suffering just a tad because almost every puzzle is solved by sticker placements. And while like might not be the right word, I found the battles to be snappy in a way that doesn’t slow down the adventure. I also can’t help but notice that the design philosophy of the battles is pretty similar to Breath of the Wild.
Overall, I would still place Sticker Star at the bottom of the Paper Mario series, but it would share that spot with Super Paper Mario in my eyes. Neither are awful games, but they have significantly more flaws than the rest of the series. Still, if they are the worst the series has to offer then Paper Mario is doing a lot better than people think.
It’s where it all started rolling downhill, at breakneck speed.
I haven’t been brave enough to try another Paper Mario game since.