Paper Mario: Sticker Star

Paper Mario: Sticker Star is one of the most unusual entries in its franchise thanks to a controversial decision by Shigeru Myamoto. Treating the great volume of story in the previous games as unnecessary fat, Nintendo’s most important developer advised the development team to rip it out from the adventure as much as possible, thereby shifting the focus to its main mechanic: the use of stickers.

The story, however, has not been completely removed from the game, being only simplified. In the midst of festivities commemorating the passage of the famous Sticker Star, Bowser performs the only action expressly forbidden by local conventions – touching the star –, which results in its shattering and the spread of chaos throughout the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario, then, needs to join Kersti, the guardian of the stickers, and collect all the star pieces before it’s too late.

The world of Paper Mario is completely built around paper and both the characters and the environment are flat and foldable. The presentation of this universe in Sticker Star is both creative and adorable, with buildings flattened and stuck by tape, enemies bending over in paper airplanes, and crumpled characters hiding in trash cans; all of them constantly surprising by how they reflect the game’s core motif: even Mario’s head bends forward as he enters a sauna as if his paper body became looser due to the humidity.

In this fictional universe – also called the diegesis – the presence of stickers sounds completely natural. Used in both battles and puzzle-solving, they are everywhere in Sticker Star: stickers are stuck on walls, on trees, hidden in caves or behind shrubs, supporting or holding structures.

In combat, they form the main mechanic. Abandoning the classic progression by experience points and leveling up, the combat system focuses exclusively on the different types of stickers and their attributes. At the beginning of each turn during the battles, players must choose a sticker from their inventory to use against an enemy, spending it. And each of them has its own dynamic in combat: boots, for example, make Mario jump into enemies’ heads and require the player to hit the A button at the exact time of each jump to trigger the next jump. Hammers cause damage on more than one opponent, and players can press A at the exact instant, indicated by a flash, to maximize the damage.

Not only that, but each sticker also has its own weakness: creatures with spikes damage Mario if hit by a jump, hammers do not reach flying enemies, and fireballs heal fire enemies instead of hurting them. With several different types of stickers – there are boots that can jump on all enemies and metal boots that manage to hit spiked enemies, for example – and different levels for each of them – the silver sticker is stronger than the normal one, the gold is stronger than the silver and the largest multicolored one is the strongest of all – Sticker Star offers a very diversified combat system that can dispense progression by levels without losing much. And with this new system, the developers replace a completely abstract mechanic (XP) for a considerably more concrete one (stickers), which is usually desirable.

And the developers also created a mechanic that have multiple functions, serving also to solve puzzles: the stickers can be used in a generic way – blocking acid streams or venting pipes, for example– but also with a particular purpose – a fire flower can melt an ice cream revealing a reward, for instance. 

On the other hand, a considerably more controversial decision concerns the use of special stickers. Hidden in each level are objects of our daily life (taps, pins, batteries, fans) that can be turned into stickers with unique powers. These stickers can also be used both in combat and in puzzles, but since they are rare and expensive to recover, they appear to not allow great experimentation – a factor that led to a fallacious claim about a lack of logic regarding their function.

These special stickers are paramount for overcoming all boss battles and solving specific puzzles. But precisely because they are objects known to anyone, their implementation is inevitably logical. The boss of the second world, for example, is a Pokey – an enemy made up of several balls filled with spikes stacked on top of each other. The fight takes place in a baseball stadium. Players have at their disposal a faucet, a bowling ball, a fan and a baseball bat. Common sense alone is enough to figure out which sticker to use, but even if players had also experimented with the baseball bat in a common battle, they would have realized that the resulting animation is the same as the background of the stadium during the battle against Pokey. Now, in Stage 5-1, players are faced with an area cluttered with ​​paper that needs to be cleaned. They have in their inventory a goat, a refrigerator, a car engine, and a vacuum cleaner. Proving not to be arbitrary at all, the developers even made, in addition to the vacuum cleaner, the goat work:  it chews all the paper.

The problem may only exist if players go face the boss without the baseball bat, which would prevent them from winning the battle, or enter the 5-1 stage without the goat and the vacuum cleaner. To circumvent this, Intelligent Systems classifies these special stickers into groups, which can be identified both by the color on the bottom of the sticker and in the main city museum, Decaulburg. Besides that, the level design is completely geared towards exploration. Achieving the star at the end of the stages may be the main challenge, but failing to investigate every corner means losing valuable rewards that are sometimes indispensable to progress in the adventure. The hidden place of these secrets is carefully chosen by the developers, who never fail to put subtle visual cues to lead players to their discovery – such as a suspect ray of light deep in the background.

Intelligent Systems, therefore, going against what’s the norm in the industry, is very confident in the players’ capacity to explore the levels by themselves, letting go of their hand after World 1. From that point on, when players already have a basic notion of the main mechanics, the developers set them loose in the levels they designed, without arrows pointing to the goal or characters indicating where the items are hidden. They let players explore alone, generating a refreshing feeling of abandonment, unusual in current games that are not Souls-like. It is precisely this design that generates so much commotion and fury in some players, when, after following the most linear path, are confronted with bosses that assume an assiduous exploration of both the levels and the mechanics of the game.

Avoiding battles is an even worse crime, as, instead of providing experience points, each victory congratulates players with coins. These coins are needed to buy new stickers, retrieve the special ones – thus guaranteeing the necessary experimentation – and they even allow the use of more than one sticker per round in battle – an essential tactic that can cost more than 90 coins.

The game’s shortcoming, though, is certainly its story. As the World 3 proves – where the huge earthworm Wiggler has its body shattered by one of the villains, with each part fleeing aimlessly throughout the levels –, a world having its own plot, however simple and silly, helps to make it more memorable as it gives meaning to the players’ actions. So, if World 3 has Wiggler, and the fourth one, the story of the Haunted Mansion, the first, second, and fifth are completely devoid of any semblance of plot, which unfortunately prevents them from having the pun-laden dialogues so common to the franchise: “May your days be ever toadful“.

Sticker Star graphics, on the other hand, are pleasing to the eye, especially with the use of the 3D effect, being extremely colorful and vivid. The soundtrack is equally competent, containing remixes of old songs and new melodies that are cheerful, stimulating,ççand addictive, such as the main theme.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star is a game that lives up to the franchise’s good reputation. By implementing an excellent new mechanic, Intelligent Systems has created a product with adorable content and presentation. A little more story, however, would have helped to make it more memorable.

December 06, 2018.

Originally published in Portuguese on March 15, 2015.