Paper Mario: Sticker Star

The history of Mario role-playing games is an interesting one. At first, they seemed to come out at random as these quirky little stand-alone titles. There was Super Mario RPG, the isometric SNES game that started it all. Then there was Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64, which charmingly designed a world made entirely of paper and paper-like products. Next came Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, a GameBoy Advance game that introduced Luigi into the mix and focused on teamwork-oriented battles. At this point it seemed like there was no rhyme or reason to when Mario RPGs would come out or how they'd be designed. But then another Paper Mario game game out for GameCube, and another Mario & Luigi game came out for the DS, and then one more of each, respectively, for the Wii and the DS, and suddenly we had a very distinct pattern. Paper Mario was its own series, a set of RPG games for Nintendo consoles, while Mario & Luigi was a separate series on the handheld side. And then along comes Paper Mario: Sticker Star, bridging the gap back to the handheld side and just ruining the sense of continuity the parallel RPG series had hammered out over the past ten years or so.

Okay, so maybe that wasn't all that interesting. Fortunately, Paper Mario: Sticker Star was a great little game. I have to say, I had my fears early on. Anyone who's played a few RPGs knows that the general idea, a staple of the very genre, is that the more battles you fight, the stronger you get. It's a great balancing mechanic built into the gameplay. Fight a lot early on, and you'll be better prepared for tougher enemies later in the game; avoid combat whenever possible, and you'll be far too weak to survive later on. My biggest knock on Sticker Star, then, is that it lacks an experience-based leveling up system entirely. Thus, all non-necessary combat is, well, pointless. In my book, that's poor RPG design. Luckily, the game has enough charm and originality to make up for this very deep flaw, and by excelling in all other areas, it wasn't a bad game at all. The world of Sticker Star actually resembles a traditional level-based Mario game more than an open world RPG, and it is broken down into six worlds of varying numbers of levels. But each level had its own unique objectives and feel, which was pretty cool. Everything in Sticker Star was new and fresh and exciting, which helped me forget that every single battle was a waste of my time.

So yeah. Overall, a solid game full of charm and simple pleasures. This one clocked in at just a hair over twenty-five hours, which feels like ten or twelve on the DS. (I mean that in a good way.)