If you play Sticker Star expecting to find an irredeemable mess, then you'll find yourself pleasantly surprised. As it turns out, there are a few things to like about Sticker Star! For one, the game, despite being level based, holds a fairly open progression system. You can complete each world in any order you like, and in fact, after beating the game, I quickly jumped back in to see if I could get all the Royal Stickers in reverse order (...though I may have dropped it after getting number five and then four, because World 3 was just too tedious for me to want to deal with). The sticker system is, if nothing else, at least an interesting idea... When I first played the game, I drafted some revision ideas that sought to make the system a bit better. While I'll spare you the details (and they likely wouldn't've solved every issue), I think the sticker system does show some potential—it's just handled poorly. And besides that, the game is also a lot funnier than I anticipated. Like, it fits in just as well comedically as any other Paper Mario game. It's clear that the game's not soulless... there's some level of heart made apparent through the writing. And hey, the music is good! Very jazzy, certainly distinct from the rest of the games in the series. It's a fun style.
That being said, there is so, so much to not like about Sticker Star. Apparent from the get-go is a lack of depth in both the narrative and the world. Bowser kidnaps Peach, but he never utters a single word throughout the entire game, and it's never even clear as to whether Bowser is being controlled by the Royal Sticker or what. The world consists of “generic plains area”, “generic desert area”, “generic forest area” (though at least there's poison in that one), “generic snow area”, and “generic jungle + generic volcano area”. It's rare that you'll be wowed by any of the places you visit. You'll also never be wowed by any of the characters you meet, because “characters” is barely something Sticker Star has. There's Kersti, arguably Bowser Jr. and Kamek (they barely ever show up), and a cavalcade of indistinguishable Toads. Their writing may be witty, but there's nothing about them to make them memorable whatsoever. After all, they all look the same! Apparently Super Paper Mario got too creative, so Nintendo's response was to limit Intelligent Systems from making anything interesting again. Because of this character dilemma Sticker Star faces, there's absolutely nothing else for the game to fall on besides pure gameplay. There's practically no story. There's practically no characters. So all that's left is the gameplay to charm players.
And the gameplay... is a little lackluster. There's no incentive to battle besides your own desire to do so (which of course varies from player to player) since coins only buy you stickers, which themselves lay around levels in the open. Battles themselves have removed more complex action commands in favor of turning them all into some variation of “press the A button at the right time”, which stands to this day for Paper Mario games. And you can't even choose who to target with an attack. An insane amount of complexity has been stripped from the battle system for no reason.
And as for overworld exploration? Most levels are fine enough, but others seem specifically designed for you to tear your hair out with how tedious they are (looking at level 2-3 and the Wiggler chasing in World 3 (Wiggler being the game's one distinctly charming character does not save that world from how annoying it is)). And the game's overarching issue with level progression really comes down to Things. Allow me to recall a specific sequence I went through. I got stuck in the middle of World 2 after encountering a sandstorm I needed to deal with. I needed some Thing (special objects you find by exploration that you can then turn into stickers to use to solve environmental puzzles) to deal with it, but nothing I had fit the bill. There was a sign I could only read about half of that seemed to point me to Drybake Desert. So I run through Drybake Desert again and find nothing. I read the sign again. I run through Drybake Desert two more times and again find nothing. I finally ask Kersti for advice and she points me towards... Surfshine Harbor of all places? How in the world was I supposed to know to go there? I visited earlier in the game and found nothing, so why would it be any different now, especially when I’m in the middle of going through a world? Well anyway, it’s clear I need a lightbulb in Surfshine Harbor to get through a dark room (since that’s the only thing of interest there), and I’ve known that for a while, but now I know that I’m supposed to have one. Kersti won’t give me any hints on where to find one though, just that I should check out Surfshine Harbor. I run through Drybake Desert again and find nothing. Eventually, for a change of scenery, I run through the Yoshi Sphinx again and finally find the lightbulb I need in a random hallway, sitting in place of a candle. This entire segment was the first time I hated Sticker Star (but stay tuned, there’s more!). All this frustration could’ve been avoided if I was a bit more perceptive, yeah, but it exposes a greater flaw with Things as a whole. If you’re missing a Thing that you need to progress, there’s absolutely no way to know what you’re missing or where it is, and Kersti’s advice is consistently useless throughout the entire game. Something similar happened to me with the sponge in World 3, and I couldn’t beat the boss without it... I eventually ended up consulting a guide. Instead of feeling like puzzle solving, Things simply feel like a question of whether you happen to have the right thing at the right time. And you better hope that you do.
And that’s not to mention that after this entire lightbulb excursion, you get a ship’s wheel, which you use to fix a nearby ship. Seems like you can now sail across the ocean, so maybe I’ll find what I need to deal with the sandstorm there! Oh, but first you have to run back to Decalburg (the game’s main hub town) to get a pair of scissors to cut the tie holding the boat back. Now it’s time to–oh wait no, a giant Cheep Cheep suddenly attacks the boat! And guess what? You literally can’t deal with it until you get a fish hook Thing in World 3! I was too upset at this point to keep playing; I had to set the game down. All of that work seemingly opening up a new path forward, only for it to get cut short? And at this moment? There’s literally a giant fish terrorizing the harbor now! And I’ve just gotta walk away and come back later? It’s so frustrating. And guess what? In the end, the Thing I needed to deal with the sandstorm actually had nothing to do with the dark room, the lightbulb, the ship, or the Cheep Cheep. Instead, it was behind a wall I had to paperize to remove, a wall I had never noticed I could do anything with. I went through all that trouble, only to be told halfway through going down that path that it was the wrong way and I had to come back later. And all the while, Kersti’s advice wasn’t just unhelpful, but it was vague enough for me to interpret that this path was where I was supposed to be going. I felt like I’d been misled the entire time. That was a massive rant, but... God, it frustrated me.
Although an extreme example, I think going through all that helped me realize something important. Practically everybody who loves Sticker Star grew up with it, right (...as much as I still need to get used to the fact that people who grew up primarily with the 3DS and Wii U exist on the internet now)? And there’s no problem with that, not like I would get upset at you for, y’know... enjoying something. But the rest of us might find ourselves wondering how somebody nostalgic for the game can play it again years later and still find it enjoyable even after presumably gaining the ability to take off the rose-tinted glasses. But that’s the thing: a replay isn’t the same as that first time you run through the game. I wouldn’t possibly fall into that frustrating moment I just chronicled a second time, since I’d remember it well enough to just grab the lightbulb my first time through the Yoshi Sphinx. Things don’t pose nearly as big a problem for replayers, since you’ll already know what you need and when. In that sense, Sticker Star is the kind of game I imagine being more fun on a repeat playthrough (aided by its greater freedom in world order, which is built upon the back of the Thing system). The problem is just that the impression it makes the first time around isn’t enough to motivate you to play it again unless nostalgia factors in. And besides... if your puzzles are frustrating unless you already know all the solutions... then surprise! That’s bad puzzle design!
There’s probably a million more tiny things I could ramble about when it comes to Sticker Star, but at the end of the day, I think it can be summed up as a game with poor implementations of potentially interesting ideas. The story and characters aren’t creative enough to be interesting, and perhaps some of the gameplay ideas were a little too creative, without considering the consequences that would come from the systems put in place. Sticker Star hurts because it could’ve been a much more interesting game, but things just didn’t end up that way. (...If we got another gigaleak, just sayin’, Sticker Star’s development would be very interesting to dive into.)