Paper Mario Sticker Star/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: At first, news of this game's existence was met with plenty of rejoicing, with responses along the lines of "This game is an RPG again? Holy shit, count me in!" and "a Chain Chomp partner, sweet!" to early footage. Then it became clear in later trailers that partners were left on the cutting room floor and the gameplay has less in common with the first two games' than expected, which killed most of, if not all the hype.
  • Best Boss Ever: Kamek. It's annoying to have your stickers turned into flip flops and being unable to tell which ones you're using, yeah. But it's still hilarious and weirdly satisfying to whack him over the head with them!
  • Best Level Ever:
    • Snifit or Whiffit, an entertaining game show that's just deadly enough to keep you on your toes while still being a fun and rewarding experience thanks to the excellent writing and funny host. To a lot of fans, this is where the game's identity as a Paper Mario title truly shines through.
    • The Enigmansion, which is a spacious haunted mansion where you go on a ghost hunt and track down 100 Boos that's set to amazing music.
    • Whiteout Valley, a fun ride up a cable car where you wildly swing around to avoid Fuzzies and Ice Bros while collecting tons of coins.
  • Big Lipped Alligator Moment: World 4 is home to a few of these.
    • When you get the Goat Thing, Birdo suddenly descends from the heavens on a swing, and she sings a brief musical number before giving you the Goat and disappearing as quickly as she appeared. Kersti doesn't comment on it at all.
    • While hunting for Boos in the Enigmansion, five of them suddenly pop out of a picture frame while disco music starts up, complete with a disco ball coming out from the ceiling and lighting the place up. After a brief fight the disco music stops and everything goes back to normal as if it never happened. The weirdness would be understandable if this was, say, a prelude to getting a Disco Ball Thing, but it isn't.
  • Catharsis Factor: This is the first Paper Mario game where you can attack NPC's. If you hate seeing all those damned Paper Toads, you can take your anger out on them by bonking them with your hammer and crumpling them up.
  • Creator's Pet: It's rare for an entire game to be this, but Sticker Star fits the bill. It made a lot of changes that longtime Paper Mario fans despise but despite the vocal hatred for it, the higher-ups at Nintendo consider it to be the series' new gold standard. So not only do later games follow this one's lead going forward, but it gets the lion's share of the representation in spinoffs like Mario and Luigi Paper Jam and guest appearances like Super Smash Bros. The previous three games that are widely beloved and the standard fans desperately want the series to return to? They may as well not exist given Nintendo's refusal to acknowledge them.
  • Critical Dissonance: Surprisingly, video game critics thought rather highly of Sticker Star and gave it good reviews. Nintendo fans and most gamers in general on the other hand almost unanimously view it as being So Bad It's Horrible at worst and So Okay It's Average at best.
  • Demonic Spiders: Ice Bros. Like with all Bro enemies they'll hurl heavily-damaging projectiles at you from the map. But these guys are aggressive with their ice balls, and will happily nail you with a cheap shot from way off-screen. Even worse, their ice balls will freeze you, making it hard to dodge the next one or annoyingly, make you a sitting duck for an enemy to start a fight with.
  • Dork Age: Near unanimously agreed to be the game that ushered in the "Dark Age" of Paper Mario thanks to it divorcing the series from the elements that made people fall in love with it, as well as not being very fun to play. Depending on who you ask, it either ended with the very next game, the game after that, or is still ongoing.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Even this game's fiercest critics have a soft spot for Mizzter Blizzard. Not only is he brimming with personality in a game with tons of literal Flat Characters, but he's a Tragic Villain with a surprisingly heartbreaking death.
    • Other darkhorses include Gooper Blooper for being a genuinely fun boss, the Mariachi Shy Guys for the hilarity of mariachi-themed bard enemies, and the hammy Snifit who hosts the fun and memorable Snifit or Whifit minigame.
    • The unused Chain Chomp partner was immediately beloved during the game's pre-release days solely because he's a goddamned Chain Chomp partner. And that made the loss of him and partners in general so much more disappointing.
  • Goddamned Bats: Every enemy is this to some extent. Thanks to combat against non-essential enemies and bosses being a waste of time and resources, running into even a Goomba or Koopa can result in the flow of gameplay being interrupted, especially if you fail to run and have to take some unavoidable damage as a consequence.
    • Dry Bones, Spikes, Hammer Bros, Spear Guys and just about every spiky enemy are some of the worst examples: Dry Bones are fast and aggressive, and will not leave you the hell alone if they see you on the overworld. And if you kill them, they come back to life after a few seconds making the previous battle a true waste of resources. Spikes, Hammer Bros, and Spear Guys hurl projectiles at you with annoying accuracy and are often placed in ways that make it hard to avoid fighting them. Then when it comes to spiky enemies, you can't jump on or even over them because you'll get hurt, which often leads to you being forced to initiate combat with a Spiny or Pokey and running so you can get them out of the way.
  • Replacement Scrappy: Surprisingly downplayed with Kamek. While Paper Mario fans aren't exactly thrilled with the fact that he's replaced the lovable Kammy Koopa, he's a fun villain and effective enough in his role to keep the complaints to a minimum.
  • The Scrappy:
    • Kersti. She's rude and obnoxious towards Mario, and in a twist of fate she's a rare Exposition Fairy who doesn't do enough to help you instead of being ridiculously overbearing.
    • The Paper Toads. All of them. Past Paper Mario games have a diverse array of friendly NPC's from many races, and even Toads had plenty of unique designs. Here, they're the same generic design copy-pasted en masse, with the most unique designs simply being the occasional recolored Toad here and there. It doesn't help that a lot of their dialogue is unfunny and beats the player over the head with drawing attention to the game's papery setting, when it was more of an aesthetic in past games that was rarely ever highlighted. Thanks to this, they've become something of a mascot representing everything that's wrong with the post-Super games for longtime Paper Mario fans.
    • Bowser, for similar reasons as Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine: the developers took a character beloved for his hilarious dialogue and made him a silent, boring villain with no personality whatsoever.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Fighting has become this, believe it or not. Unlike in past Paper Marios and most RPG's in general, you don't have a default attack you can always rely on. Every action you take requires you to use a sticker, which are a mix of Mana points and items that are consumed with a single use. This would be annoying but not terrible if the payoff was worth it. Too bad it isn't: you don't level up or gain experience, and the meager amount of money enemies drop doesn't compare to the huge amount of coins you can find simply by exploring. Since finding HP-Up Hearts is what gives you more health, fighting is pointless unless it's a mandatory fight, and you're better off running from most enemies you get into a fight with.
    • Related to that, running away is annoying as well. Whether you flee at all is completely up to luck, and you'll often see Mario crash to the ground like a dumbass and take unavoidable damage when you just don't want to waste your stickers.
    • A lot of puzzles require you to use the correct sticker, and if you guess wrong? You lose the sticker. You're punished for not being psychic, and while you can always leave the level and grab whatever sticks you lost, it's seriously tedious and annoying.
    • Similarly, every boss is supposed to be beaten with a certain Thing sticker they're weak to, and will take pitiful Scratch Damage otherwise. This is terrible for several reasons. A: You're often given no indication as to what that Thing is until you run and are given a hint by Kersti. B: You might not know where it is in the first place. C: Things eat up a big chunk of space in your Sticker album. And D: It isn't enough to use the Thing: you have to know when to use it. Use it at the wrong time, and you may as well have thrown it in the garbage.
  • Sequelitis: Fans of the first three Paper Mario games almost universally hate this game, and it's hard to find fans even among those who like the series' new direction. Its flat characterization and meager story alienate those who play the games for the writing, and the despised sticker combat system and obtuse usage of "Things" for puzzles and boss fights make for some of the series' most frustrating gameplay yet. It seems that hatred for this game is the one thing that unites Paper Mario's heavily fractured fanbase.
  • That One Boss: Every boss is this without their weakness. And even with it, some can still be a headache. Tower Power Pokey is one of the worst, because his default attack does 5-to-10 damage depending on how good you are at blocking and he can recover a decent chunk of health to make you burn through more Stickers. He'll also summon a few Green Pokey minions to back him up before you can hit him with his weakness, and all damage he takes is quartered.
    • Bowser. Five stages, hundreds upon hundreds of HP, and lots of devastating attacks await you in this battle. Failure to block certain attacks of his will lead to him crumpling you for several turns (basically a death sentence) or destroying several of your precious stickers. Jury's out on which effect is worse.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Super Paper Mario already caught flack for its many gameplay changes despite having the soul of a Paper Mario game at its core. So when this game came and stripped the series of that, all hell broke loose. Partners are gone in their entirety, battles are pointless since you can't level up, basic attacking functions have been replaced with consumable items, and returning enemies have lost their unique designs in favor of the heavily homogenized New Super Mario Bros aesthetic. Oh, and Bowser doesn't talk at all.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Bowser. Just... Bowser. Easily the most entertaining character in the RPG's and Mario series as a whole, and can be a very effective threat as shown in games like the original Paper Mario, Super Mario Galaxy, or Mario and Luigi: Dream Team. He barely has any presence in this game, and when he does he's completely silent.
    • Mario has a huge cast of characters to fall back on for friendly NPC's: Piantas, Nokis, Whittles, Penguins, Bob-Omb Buddies, Yoshi, Toadsworth... but nope. You've got generic Paper Toads as far as the eye can see. The enemy cast suffers a bit from this too, namely the first two bosses. They easily could have put Goomboss or Mummipokey in as opposed to a generic Goomba and Pokey respectively.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Kersti is essentially an alien, with the Sticker Comet and the Royal Stickers also being alien superweapons. There's a surprisingly solid foundation for a plot that focuses on the weirdness of the stickers, Kersti's status as a representative from the Sticker Star, as well as the mysterious nature of the titular planet itself. Too bad what little story we do have focuses solely on rescuing Peach from Bowser for the billionth time, leaving all sticker-related intrigue as window dressing.
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