Chugga Sticks It to Sticker Star [Full Review]

[Music] Paper Mario sticker star was the most disappointing thing since online smash BRS it's downright impressive how this game understands nothing about why people like RPGs and how much it botches being a follow-up to Super Paper Mario and the worst thing is that this game ushered in a new era of mediocrity that denies the old Paper Mario from continuing that's what stings so bad 10 years later this new Paper Mario refuses to go home it's not just one substandard game it's an influential bad game that won't stop infecting other better games that had potential even if the newer ones are better they're still held back by terrible decisions that have stuck around for God Knows Why and with Mario and Luigi seemingly Dead one of my favorite series of all time is just kind of to sat on while the publisher keeps pretending this is what Paper Mario is this is going to be kind of long a multiple parter for sure I want to preface this by saying I have no ill will toward anyone who made this game I wasn't there to watch development unfold Super Paper Mario had a mixed reception so a lot of Staff stepped down sticker star took almost 5 years to develop it lost its series director somewhere along the line it was developed by new hires who were given the Reigns to a big name and restarted development from scratch to drastically change direction that is a taxing development period for any team and would be incredibly challenging to work with and I want to make this clear no one person ruined this game as much as people love to find a face for their dart board you want to know who said this game sucked shago mamoto and kensuke tab seriously everyone loves to point at me oto's quote where he asked them to try creating a game without new characters but I never see anybody report on the part where he played the near final product and said it was boring this story was told to us by Ken tanabi himself who went into how demoralizing of an experience it was let's stop blaming one person for everything wrong with a massive collaborative effort because it simply isn't true these two people aren't evil super villains who hate fun okay so I want to pause here for a second since uploading the original draft of this video some people challenge this claim with points that I think are fair to explain this quote in Greater context mamoto played a prototype in Spring of 2011 the game was released in November 2012 so this was at most a year from The Game's completion date if we factor in things like manufacturing and localization time is a year enough time to make changes to a game absolutely I'm certain his feedback was taken seriously and they at least tried to course correct things I said what I said because within the same interview we have a designer say that the gameplay was one of the very last things they came up with we have a public trailer from June 2011 just after this happened and the game play really doesn't look all that different it's mostly aesthetic things like the coins here that are different in this build and basically every issue most people had with the game play still looks like it's present but to be fair even if I don't think it looks very different from a trailer I cannot know how much the gameplay change from the build mamoto played regardless of what mamoto thought I still think the interview paints a picture of an incredibly troubled development cycle full of low morale and I get into more about this interview in later parts of the review I didn't want to be so down on this game either I bought sticker star on release as a fan of the first three games in the series sticker star was my most anticipated game of 2012 and I wanted to enjoy it yes some other game might be objectively worse but I don't care about some obscure lowbudget asset flip that I didn't buy this was something I cared about and wanted to be good I waited 5 years for it and that's why I consider this to be the worst video game I've ever played and I'm not a real negative person I almost exclusively make videos about how much I like games and I'm making this video partly because I don't want to be so negative I have so much to say about it and it comes up so often that I want something that I can point people to that has all my thoughts in one place I like to talk about the positives if you manag to enjoy sticker star I wish I could too and on that note so that we don't entirely berate this game this entire time let's start out with the positives cuz even I have to admit there are some positive qualities to Paper Mario sticker star so here we go the 1% of sticker star that was actually good number one please go listen to The Amazing Music some people don't feel the Jazzy and brassy thing that permeates the whole soundtrack and I get it the earlier soundtracks exceed the later ones for me due to more variety in the musical styles but that doesn't mean this new music is terrible some Choice examples are the Hub World feeling friendly and [Music] inviting the bustly feel of De calberg the fight with gooper blooper [Music] [Music] and pretty much every track in World [Music] [Applause] [Music] 4 yeah isn't that fine feeling I love the music number two speaking of the soundtrack the title screen is my single favorite part of the entire gameplay experience it's got a great song Mario running around with Kirsty is cute and it just feels good to sit back and watch does a good job making you think this won't be so bad heck I even got a little emotional at the Thousand-Year Door font being the first thing you see when booting it up for the first time after 5 years without a new Paper Mario it brought me back in a way that that I didn't think a freaking font could number three building off what I was saying earlier chapter 4 is good like really good we'll go into detail later when we actually get to talking about chapter 4 but it warrants bringing up in this list if the rest of the game was as good as this I might not mind the changes so much okay some areas in it still suck but mostly it's good number four this is one of the best examples of the 3D on the 3DS it's designed like a paper diarama and tilting the system makes the head elements hanging from the top move around and the foil stickers shine in the light when the system is tilted too I was impressed the first time I noticed that it's a nice detail that shows some people working on this did legitimately Care number five I like [Music] um how they redesigned the Koopas instead of of exclusively flipping Thousand-Year Door art like they did for everything else the Koopas look pretty off model with a deaded stare in Thousand-Year Door so good initiative legitimate improvement over the old games it's the only design Improvement I can think of but it's something yeah this game sucks now do you have the time to listen to me whine about nothing and everything all at once no number one the [Music] story the following [Music] Thursday that's it story over number two okay never mind let's use a numbering system like the real Paper Mario chapter one a not that terrible beginning so let's talk about what's so cheap about every everything we just saw and break down the exposition first before we get into the actual game any semblance of story and characterization the short answer no we've already seen all the story this game has to offer in the first 30 seconds it really is just Bowser broke the thing go get it back I don't think it's unfair to expect some level of grandness when this game is marketing itself as a sequel to the original trilogy and we hadn't seen anything else but epic high scks plots at the time it released I get maybe not wanting to make another game about something as heavy as the inevitability of the Apocalypse as much as I liked it I'm sure some people found the story of the third game to be a bit much but you don't have to go this direction to avoid that the first Paper Mario had an admittedly simple blueprint for a story not straying too far from what Mario usually is but there we had unique characters minor subplots fun and memorable villains and a world that felt like much more than a bunch of levels in a video game spectacle in Bowser straight up carrying Peach's whole castle into outer space and laughing at anything Mario could do to him while the threat looms that Bowser can just wish for anything he wants and has already taken over whole sections of the world this is nothing but the first game story but worse in every possible way and speaking of Bowser I think he was the character who was done the most dirty here Bowser is never allowed to say one word in the entire game not allowed kirsty's stealing his lines in this footage he has no character other than stole the sticker Comet everyone loves Bowser he's well written in Odyssey and sunshine he's well written in Mario Party he's well written in sports games in Mario and Luigi in Super Mario RPG in a freaking parental controls video even Tetris attack at good lines for Bowser he's hands down one of the greatest funniest and most beloved super villains of all time all while having legitimate cool Factor you might say that Mario games aren't big on story but a Bowser with no personality is a huge let down for any Mario game and it's so egregious that this is happening in a whole sub series of Games built on its characters and writing also yeah it's called the sticker Comet not the sticker star sure man every time I play this I wish I was playing the Thousand day window instead well actually no sometimes it is called the sticker star so when it comes to the characters in story every one knows about that interview you know the one where they said that the club Nintendo survey for Super Paper Mario said not even 1% of customers thought the story was interesting I decided to do some digging as well as ask you guys about this and this logic hasn't been used in any other publicly known instance in Nintendo's history I'm certain Club Nintendo data was referenced during development lots of times but no other Nintendo Series has ever changed its entire identity on a dime over a customer survey plus it's completely terrible logic if the feedback was the story wasn't interesting in a successful series that was predicated on story then wouldn't logic be to improve upon your work and make an interesting story rather than just throw your arms up and go the people have spoken they want no effort it's a leap of logic for sure but you listen to this survey as gospel and said we ditch the story because it's what the fans wanted but you don't listen to the sheer Title Wave of comments begging for the old style to return after you failed you'll find no shortage of people anywhere else telling you the story wasn't the issue the only fans they were listening to were made of paper also I'm pretty sure Club Nintendo died shortly after this game's released because it was a completely terrible way of collecting feedback you only needed a serial number to participate in the surveys actually playing the game wasn't a requirement I think people mostly wanted free stuff from completing a ton of surveys about games they never played and just input whatever to get their points as fast as possible before the due date rolled around for the prizes I found an archive of Club Nintendo surveys and the interface for the questions was a scale of 1 to 7 with one or least interesting at the top so these surveys were greatly waited to people just saying everything sucked if they thoughtlessly click through it to get free items gosh if Nintendo ever gets hacked again it would be really funny if someone published the results to this survey so after the story starts and finishes we wake up at The Hangover in deberg we get yelled at by Kirsty who will be making our life hell for the next 4 to six weeks as she travels with us it's her duty to fix the sticker stomach and we got to help her this is our hubtown and our first taste of gameplay running around playing hide-and-seek with toads that Bowser scattered but okay plenty of of great games have slow beginnings and this is a better start than a lot of games that I've gone on to enjoy seriously the Toads have well-written dialogue the town is pretty welld designed to let you figure out how jumping and hammering are used to solve problems and that Secrets will be hidden everywhere if you look we end this on a toad getting buried under the fountain something we can do nothing about yet but it's a pretty weird moment that stuck with me and maybe me want to come back and help him once I knew how out on the map screen cool a nonlinear your game right wrong the freedom to work on worlds out of order is an illusion you need a poison mushroom from the end of world one to enter World two and the trumpet from the end of world one to start world three you can't actually stop working on one world and go hang out in another one for a while for the sake of variety until much later so why start the map off looking like this it's lying to you some people take up issue with there being a map screen at all when a big interconnected world was cooler but I'll give this a pass it's portable and having clear stopping points is nice when you're on the go so let's go through this one level at a time starting with the warm fuzzy Plains so here we get our Taste of a series first Bowser Jr I was pretty excited to see what they were going to do with him in the Paper Mario series who doesn't love that nle barle that grazes his luscious lips I think bringing him in was a great choice with loads of potential too bad they do next to nothing with it we get our first taste of paper a here too this is where you take pieces of paper and stick them to the environment to complete something which was the thing that Drew my eye the most before the initial release h i remember being physically in the audience the day they announced this game this Paper Mario retains all the fun of the originals but with even more game depth the idea of sticking stickers on the environment and it actually blending with it is a super cool idea it's just give it time and it'll go downhill this place shows off the game play pretty well and Bowser junr being introduced as a character at least had me intrigued into where it was all going the first time we also escorted toad around get used to that this toad was all over the marketing and fooled everyone into thinking that Partners were coming back even earlier footage showed Mario fighting with a chain chomp behind him so we all thought Partners were officially back until the day the game came out you're the closest thing I have to a partner in this set world one two bouquet Gardens number two picks up where number one left off and I ain't talking about in the toilet and here we learn some important things about the new Paper Mario your stickers aren't just for battle but also solving puzzles you'll be finding HP power ups on the ground instead of through battling and money solves all your problems this is where the cracks start to show and the things that are most talked about start showing up but honestly my first time I hadn't noticed yet I found things Charming enough and the new gameplay mechanics interesting so I didn't yet notice I wasn't leveling up oh yeah this level ends in a boss fight that's sort of memorable I guess 1 three Waters edgeway so we ran into the same toad again you going to tell us your name Buddy no um Okay bye so anyway kamik shows up and screws with us we fight him it's pretty uninteresting and we go about fixing the goal and running into lots of enemies along the way this is a minor point but now that we're getting into some more battles why do I even need stickers to fight it all they say enemies have sticker power and we need to match their power but I jump on enemies in the field and still hurt them just fine not major but something I noticed after playing this game long enough I'm intending to do overviews of every single level because I have complaints about pretty much all of them but some like this one are just inoffensive and boring so I'll gloss over them mostly whenever that happens if something good comes up I'll mention it but it'll be rare 14 I read that as something else so this place is the only location in this lame iteration of the Mushroom Kingdom I would call iconic it's been a stage in Super Smash Brothers and generally it's seen in a lot of promotional material so it must have some big significance right nah it's just another place a windmill we can do nothing with there's got to be a way to turn those blades here's our introduction to things and how they work these are real world objects hidden throughout the gamees world and are referred to as well things these are screen nukes for enemies weaknesses of bosses and your way of solving puzzles for instance a fire would naturally be extinguished by a rubber duck in their default state things are not usable you must take a thing to a shop called sling a thing in the hubtown in order to convert it into a sticker but that's not so bad since our roadblock is at the start of the level my first experience with sticker star was an onstage demo at PA West and it showed this section of the game and kept the in side of the windmill a mystery for the full experience this is all that was in there I remember being Amazed by this concept of sticking stickers on the environment and actually working as expected it immediately brought to mind Okami and how drawing on the world works there so going into this I saw it was turn-based battles like the first two games the series had done no wrong before and now papiz looked this cool oh my God this new game is literally Thousand-Year Door plus [Music] Okami oh how young and full of a hope we all were when it comes to puzzles there's checks for thing stickers everywhere like I said it's not a problem in this first instance but they frequently put checks at the ends of levels a thing in one two could open something in 43 and the game won't tell you there's no indication of what stickers you're going to need for a level before you run through it where the thing is to make that sticker and in some cases the game isn't clear about which thing you need even after you've run into the dead end tell me what do I need to do here the answer was oh tape the door shut of course logic would say to take all your things and convert them into stickers as soon as you get them my fault for not being prepared right well nah thing stickers take up so much room that they leave you no room for anything else after only a few of them and there's a grand total of 64 Things any of which could be the solution to any problem at any time why do we even need to convert these into stickers to use them I have the thing with me and I see the things functioning in the field when I collect them just let me plop it down it hurts so much worse than anything else when it's right there in the inventory but not in a usable State I can understand having to convert them to use them in battle since it'd be overpowered to have a ton of these effects but why not for solving puzzles I found the item you wanted me to find I was diligent so let me use it it's punishing the player for being smart with their inventory management with a Chance of rewarding the player for being Reckless with it now for things in battle thing stickers will usually nuke a screen of regular enemies with some humorous animation next is the Action commands for thing stickers oh yeah they have Action commands that's something I bet a good chunk of you didn't know because the game never tells you and there's no on screen cues to make you think so whatsoever I played through the entire game without knowing that because it just looks like a cut scene is playing out and it was doing hundreds of damage anyway so I had no reason to believe my attacks were weak and could become stronger almost all the thing stickers have the same action command Mash a there are a select few exceptions to this that involve pressing a at the right time like a squirt gun which is admittedly pretty cool if you've never tried it but mostly all of them have the same one I have a a story about a thing sticker in a battle from a friend of mine he got the cake sticker and brought it with him to the final battle of the game because he expected it to be a great healing item he used it the cake sat there for a few seconds and then it poofed away without doing anything what the hell it was cryptic to a whole new level wasn't that supposed to heal me this was the only instance in the entire game of having to blow into the microphone for the action command cuz candles you have to blow the mic and all because he didn't read the game's mind he wasted his turn when he needed healing the most and died right when he was about to win but needed to heal first just why would it have killed them to put one line of text on the screen telling you what the Action commands are you know like they did just fine since 1999 in fact they did it just fine in this game too regular stickers have descriptions thanks sers don't there's no excuse so think stickers while Charming in concept end up being frustrating because of cryptic puzzle solutions cryptic uses in battle and the fact that unless you're psychic you could be throwing away the solution to the next roadblock at any moment oh this level's over pretty quickly after we open the windmill it's not really much at all five whino [Music] Mountain it's so cool this came back I just wish it was in a better game [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] game [Music] okay this level rules it's just those two things and then it's over but it's great Goomba's Fortress the end of this world our big Showdown with a big boss our big first dungeon oh hi Luigi I adore you and every other Mario RPG you're one of the most interesting characters that I usually feel sympathetic toward oh bye sheesh what's his problem now that we have the trumpet and the poison mushrooms from this level we are free to begin chapter 2 or three if we so wish right before fighting the boss anyway one of the few times the game is actually nonlinear rather than just pretending that it is I can appreciate linearity in games it can work particularly well in story driven moments or make the atmosphere immersive to convey what a character is feeling I only bring it up because this game presents itself like you can do whatever you want but really you can't most of the time here's our first [Music] boss and they suck every boss fight sucks each boss gives you two options either use the thing sticker their weak to which slays them in one hit or actually play these 300 HP snor fests 10 damage at a time my first playthrough I was unsatisfied by destroying him in one turn so I reset due to it leaving a bad taste in my mouth it took me 7 Minutes of doing perfect Action commands to chip down this health bar for the first boss many later bosses sport several hundred HP to illustrate just how bad this is you only have bad options you will either be miserable or slay the bosses in one to two turns it manages to be both ways that a boss fight can be ruined at the same time it was also the event that caused me to realize that if you ever run out of stickers the game just keeps handing you more frequently it grants mushrooms in this way making death pretty much impossible if the enemy isn't nuking you and like I said nearly every boss fight fight is like this I would consider almost any boss in this game a serious candidate for the worst boss fight in any Nintendo game to the game's credit because they have you trying to figure out the sticker the boss is weak to they enable you to run away from the boss fight and try them again which is a pretty nifty idea I haven't seen done before and it makes sense for what they were going for it might have been better to just create a better structure for the boss fights to follow but hey it's genuinely a thoughtful feature to include however ever because something just has to drag down my one compliment remember when I said that I reset the boss fight that was when I learned this game doesn't have a soft reset programmed in I am hitting LR start select in this footage and nothing it's the only 3DS game I've ever seen that's this way and it's kind of worse than it would be for your average game when so many parts of this game are guess the correct sticker to progress you have to fully turn off the game and then start it up again and not only that if you somehow win the fight without the boss's weakness Kirsty actually has the G to pop out of your little hat and condescendingly tell you to try harder I didn't even know this until doing research for this video but she actually says it even if you win in one turn all because it wasn't with the sticker the developers intended that's right Kirsty calls you stupid for thinking a condescending helper character is a kiss a death for your game but man this is next level with us reaching the end of chapter 1 I think we're going to stop there and next time we'll cover chapter 2 I leave you with my reaction when I pop this cartridge in for the first time this used copy of sticker star only played the game for an hour before hting it in I call it the definitive experience chapter two oh wait this is actually that bad we start off in dry baked desert the first level of world to here's the big door that needed a poison mushroom you've heard so much about check it out it's the Mariachi guy well he doesn't say anything but he's cute right besides that you just run a bunch got to be faster than po one thing sticker star just loves doing is making secret Areas required now there's a concept unless you thought to do this you're playing this desert twice so we end on a pyramid with a secret of its own we found a few HP a parts now you want to know something confusing Max HP is your attack stat I didn't even notice this as the game progresses weak stickers get less common and strong stickers grow more more plentiful so I always assume my inconsistent damage was just stronger stickers doing that damage until a speedrunner showed me a DAT of Mind 2 two Yoshi Sphinx actually a good level seriously the Yoshi Sphinx is the only Charming set piece or memorable location we've come across and it's both at the same time this is a taste of what can happen when they actually care beyond making grass land desert land and Forest land the Mario you guys are fun enemies with some personality since they actually play songs and there's a trio of them here with different instruments the parat Troopers who fight you at the end are great and have one of the game's better moments the level even rewards exploration pretty nicely with some good stickers and an HP apart good going we're good to move on or are we so like I said these levels have mandatory secrets within them now there's a concept we must find treasure chests containing scraps that serve as a key for the final level in this case we go up to the Yoshi head and his eyes are perforated allowing us to go out his pupil and slide down his bleeding nose good thing he isn't alive we have a fight with kamik out here on the tongue where he transforms all your stickers into flip-flops that do five damage good thing we can attack twice per turn and he only has 20 hp this is a super lame boss fight where he will attack you once and then it's over every single time there is no strategy you don't even have to worry about accidentally using up a good sticker while they're disguised because they still show their power tiar just don't use a shiny or a rainbow one and you're good oh so it's Cy's fault I have to use stickers officially Canon I forgot he said that 2 three sand shifter ruins so we run around for a desert for a while or something and then we end up in a maze of underground tunnels and we take one look at this and we realize yep we're going to be here for a while it's all trial and error to find the correct path the enemies come back every time and this is all getting really dull you start to zone out and you find yourself out here in the middle of nowhere waiting for something to happen and you kind of notice that nothing's happened we haven't met a new character since the very beginning there's been no plot developments Peach and Bowser haven't shown up again we haven't unlocked any new abilities and wait oh it's that kind of game I got bored running through this maze multiple times for about 30 minutes so then I zoned out thought about things and this was the moment I realized I wasn't having fun my high from playing a brand new Paper Mario for the first time in 5 years carried me through the first chapter without even noticing everything I loved and expected was gone I've talked to people about this game game and usually there'll be at least somebody who tells me really sticker star is the worst game you've ever played I played it and while I didn't beat it it seemed fun enough for the little bit that I played and that's just it it genuinely doesn't seem so awful until you dive in and try to finish it when you're starting out you don't notice there's no story because barely any time has passed and lots of games have slow starts plus I was giving the game credit to pick up later due to the pedigree of intelligent systems I didn't realize I'd already met all the characters I'm ever going to meet because Kirsty and Bowser Jr make their debuts in the first 10 minutes or so before release I was excited that this was the return of turn-based battles but it takes spending a little while with it to notice how botched it is I didn't even realize how annoying the battle system was to play or that I wasn't gaining anything from combat until I'd participated in enough of them to stop and wonder hey wait how close am I to leveling up has that happened yet and then I couldn't find a menu for it I didn't realize all the fun text was locked to the intro because there's so few characters and decal Berg is the only town in the whole game I was expecting to find another town out here in the desert somewhere you're lucky to average one good character interaction per chapter and yes sometimes it's zero it's so Bare Bones it's so dry and desolate just like the desert I was standing in when I noticed it wait that killed me I was a what [Music] what I was just trying to be funny that killed I have just I have to do all that over no that is so not not cool I was just trying to be silly and see what happened when I stayed still in the quicksand for a few seconds just one level ago we were required to do this to progress in any other video game in this genre that would be minus one heart and a respawn at the door it would be like that in a Legend of Zelda game even why an instant game over I didn't even know this until I was getting footage for this I lost half an hour of playing this stupid maze to one Hazard this game is still surprising me in just how awful it is in this section we're going to be tearing the game play a new [ __ ] the main focus is the battle system because now we can fully appreciate everything that went wrong with it the way battles in this game actually work is somewhat confusing so let's get detailed with how this entire system feels like an 8-year-old through and whatever sounded cool without thinking about how it would all fit together you find stickers all over the ground they're even kind enough to respawn every time you leave the area and come back stickers are your attacks and items rolled into one big awful thing you play one sticker per turn you can pick coins to use a battle spinner which has a chance of allowing two or three stickers per turn instead and you can pay even more coins to rig the battle spinner to allow two at bare minimum how do you get coins battles give you coins and nothing else no I don't mean you can only get coins from battling I mean battles don't give anything but coins there is no resource exclusive to battle there is no shortage of coins in the field normally plus coins are given out as a reward for completing an area and why exactly would I buy stickers with my coins when both resources are free everywhere and are super plentiful all battles serve to do is reduce your HP and reduce your stock of stickers it just makes you more ill prepared for the next required battle it's a waste of time the only thing that is exclusively gain from battle in any context is the ability to heal so the only reason I'd ever want to get into a fight is something that should have been in a pause menu in the first place and thus is something I resent the game for Mario has no stats other than HP does not level up has no party member with him to strategize with cannot be customized in any way whatsoever and there no equipment system your stickers replaced all of that crap and Kirsty operates on the logic of ladies don't fight there's a nice message she says this all the time and God that pisses me off we have had so many Kick-Ass girls in this series Kirsty shut up but to me I think there's even worse problems than what seems to get all of the attention you've probably heard all of this before so let me get down into why even if you were to play these battles they're not fun anyway you can't strategically choose to attack a specific enemy just what all of your moves Target the enemy in front removing any strategy other than picking from whatever stickers you happen to have on hand it's no more complicated than shoving the other side with bigger numbers than they're shoving you with the only exceptions are the battle spinner which for instance the second sticker on a battle spinner will attack the second enemy or stickers that attack everybody when we attack what about the Action commands they're in this game and this is the way Paper Mario makes itself stand out from the crowd of RPGs so it's pretty important to get right every single regular sticker has the exact same action command press a at the right time there's no variety beyond that to vary it up or make the attacks feel different from one another how do we select our stickers then why from the sticker album of course and because the real sticker alum problems don't work like attack menus M your stock of an attack doesn't stack a regular jump is limited use each individual regular jump you have stopped takes up space and once you use it it's gone for good this is kind of a problem because after boss fights we get another page added to that album until we have eight of them so this means potentially 96 options to select from every single turn did you think that was enough it's easily possible to have more than 50 unorganized options spread across multiple screens as your interface for Which choice you will make this turn plus more powerful stickers take up more room than others so Pages aren't even consistent in their layout from one to the next this thing is a damn mess so already simply picking a battle command is is needlessly complicated and timec consuming every battle command from jumps to hammers to mushrooms to firef flers to defensive moves are all Lum into one big mass of messy paper and there's no way of organizing stickers inside a battle your only way to move stickers around is to pause between battles and hit a button in the menu to organize them by this one decision to not make the attack stack they've given us yet another reason to avoid combat so that we're not having to pause every minute just to keep our sticker straight this might be the worst user interface I have ever seen in a AAA title and it's the main gameplay mechanic even worse the organization system is poorly programmed here's a real thing that happened to myself and proton John on a live stream we couldn't pick up a sticker due to lack of space but it was only because the organization system only thinks in columns if it organized pages into rows or compared how it would be in rows versus columns to pick the better of the two we could have picked up that sticker and instead had to pause and move them around ourselves in practice let's say there's a pretty good option on page one but the best option is actually on page six but you've also looked at 50 other options in between while also trying to consider how much of each option was left at a glance because you aren't given numbers on that even worse a lot of stickers are objectively worse versions of other stickers While others are the same as other stickers just only situationally used able this sort of reminds me of those case studies where they say that as you give people more and more options they make progressively worse choices one thing that particularly got under my skin was that the developers bragged about how good these menus were in interviews and they're easily the worst part of the game play so we have a confusing user interface limitations over how we can organize our inventory an invisible attack stat that isn't shown to the player our in inventory contains everything down to our regular attacks and there's all these kinds of stickers many of which sport non-specific tiers of power when combining all this damage feels essentially random it's not consistent whatsoever good luck all you do in fights is click on whatever looks good because who needs strategy or to know what an attack is going to do ahead of time anyway there's a reason why most any RPG made in the last 30 years keeps things organized and separates options into a few simple commands even if we're talking Final Fantasy having 40 spells it's still less options than whatever this is and everything is always organized in neat Roes these magic spells are not disorganized watchamacallit that are all different shapes and sizes not every game has to follow the same structure but in RPGs it usually works pretty well to have magic attack items and I'm sure the other two don't matter but you know what I mean except in this game the last option does matter my friends let me introduce to you the most overpowered move in Paper Mario sticker star running away not even kidding why bother trying to pick through 50 plus options on a given turn to figure out what works best why try and guess how much damage your invisible attack stat is going to do why time button presses why waste your stickers on enemies that only drop coins which only buy you more stickers why do anything at all if your numbers don't get bigger from doing any of it running away has a piss Easy Action command of mashing the a button that you will probably succeed at in fact the game randomly predetermines if you can succeed at it but but you also probably weren't going to beat a mob of enemies in one round anyway without the battle spinner which uses coins so instead let's run away lose a few coins and oh yeah anytime you ever run away from an enemy it vanishes from the Overworld as though you defeated them congratulations your cowardice is so stunning that it actually killed someone go pick up all your lost coins without any challenge you've earned them my friend not you don't even lose coins from doing this in fact you actually gain resources from running from every battle every hit on an enemy gives coins including first strikes you lose zero stickers from running away and come out ahead in coins running away is a oneit kill on any enemy in the game that comes at zero cost other than rarely taking damage when it fails the game design design here is so amateurish that it rewards not playing the game more than any other strategy and punishes you for thinking or playing along isn't skipping combat usually a reward you have to earn while backtracking or something no two aspects of this battle system work well together each gameplay mechanic is at odds with the other pieces I wouldn't dislike this so much if just one thing was different it's the perfect blend of crap blended into a toilet soup that isn't fun to play if there's a strategy to these battles I might want to play them for fun and not care about profit if I got experience points and increase my stats from battling then at least my stickers are going to a good cause if coins did anything besides buy me more stickers maybe I'd want them heck while we're on the subject of coins they're everywhere too battles aren't remotely the only way to get rich I think some of you heard me say that and you're thinking well yeah but you get more money from battling so you still want to do it no I chose to do a second playthrough of this game to see if it was possible to beat it without fighting a single regular enemy I had 2,181 useless coins left over at the end of the game that's right you don't have to play a single optional battle in this entire Adventure in order to beat it never struggled once still beat the final boss I guess it's true the only winning move is not to play you are punished for engaging in combat and for being good at it oh goody one coin for a whole fight with 31 HP by the way it's unbelievable how shoddy of a product this is on a gameplay level and in the Mario series which has so much talent and money going into it it's like they liked all their ideas and viewed the game as a puzzle where they had to fit all those ideas in good ideas get cut for a reason in game development oh and the battle theme is annoying I know that's probably an unpopular opinion cuz I've heard this song phrased but not having to hear that every time I see a freaking Goomba is yet another incentive I had for avoiding every battle another personal annoyance is how often quote flying enemies look like they're on the ground what it looked like that should have totally hit them and when there's over aund types of stickers by the way how am I supposed to know what's a grounded attack or not that thing was a projectile and it didn't count and yet this projectile hits them just fine I also want to add that to me personally no customization is one of the worst things an RPG can do at that point all the player brings to the table here is walking Mario places and it's not like you get options and how you get there to make up for it and please I've heard it before don't tell me this is officially labeled as an action adventure game on the official Nintendo website and not as an RPG so you can't judge it as an RPG this is a main in installment in the Paper Mario series and as you run around an Overworld touch an enemy transition into turn-based battle everyone has HP bars and your job is to apparently manage resources until you discover running away is the most powerful move in the game it's an RPG a bad RPG that follows the basic structure without anything that makes them satisfying to play I really don't believe in the usual defense of sure it's not a good paper Mario sequel but it's a good game and it's zone right this game is badly designed inada asks the team said the battle system was only thought up at the very end of development it shows this game screams rushed also yes combining this with the statement that I quoted earlier this means they said the most Rush part of the game was also one of the best parts yeah checks out ironically I think Super Paper Mario could have been learned from in the gameplay Department here if there was a ref usel to have a progression system or customization then don't make an RPG no one would notice the lack of these things if battles just weren't a thing instead we get this awkward halfway attempt that gives us the worst of Both Worlds if all the battles do is waste your time then just cut them and of course I want experience points in my RPG I've seriously seen the argument well no experience points means no grinding are you saying you want grinding of course not as long as you fought enemies on your first run through through an area I have never had to grind in any Paper Mario game this wasn't an issue that needed fixing it's fun to upgrade my character and try out new abilities as I earn them there's a reason why every RPG does this or if it subverts it it's in the form of a challenge or gives you some other incentive to work for skipping battles to make things more challenging can be effective self-imposed difficulty when experience points are involved people love making up the own rules for playing Pokémon RPGs by Design have a difficulty option built into everything you do finding the game too easy fight less enemies so you level up less the possibilities are endless here skipping battles actively makes me stronger and there's no long-term benefit to doing anything there's a reason why experience points are what you earn after winning a match in an online shooter is a quick number that compares your experience level to other people there's a reason why most obas measure your goodness through a level up system visible to the other players or why mobile games dangle exp in front of you and rake in Oodles of cash from players doing so human like it when number go up and when that bar fills up and you unlock something your actions all meant something and now you get to try out new stuff there's an entire genre of games that are just experience points going up because it's so effective at motivating the player I would argue that experience points are the single greatest game design decision ever made in history you see it everywhere because it works when there is no progression in the game play no reward given to me for doing anything and no story then what exactly is my motivation to press on sticker star is just nothing if the story was good maybe I'd press through frustrating gameplay to see how it ends oh yeah the gaml is frustrating let's actually talk about this level that we were in the middle of when all this got started we're going to finally work our way through this Maze of a level after starting it over multiple times to find the correct path in fact even if you know the way you have to run this maze multiple times over because of these things that change the sand flow only after going the wrong way oh goody I have to do this TW you're rewarded with nothing the next level is just empty so we have to go back and play it again to find a secret exit or a required secret exit now there's a concept 24 damp Oasis is the real Next Level not that Faker that we got the first time this level is simple right there's a sandstorm we paperized through it and we see that we need a thing sticker in order to clear it this level was the one two punch that cemented my disdain for chapter too so I only have a dotted line with nothing else to go off of and it's got to be some way to save a Barren Wasteland I look at my album and Nothing fits the bill that I currently have I exit to the world map and oh the trees are dried out and it's called damp Oasis I need a faucet but crud what level was that in again I saw it sometime when I played yesterday but when was that exactly [Music] I know now that thing stickers can be purchased in the back alley behind sling a thing but on a first playthrough I had no clue it's hidden so I went through all of world one again trying to find it for almost half an hour I missed it my first time going through all the levels because the goal for 13 is accessible before the faucet is and I didn't remember the layout of the level exactly and I had a headache by the time I found this thing I was so ready to move on and just be done with it I stick it onto the environment and whoops wrong sticker we're just going to throw away that sticker wasting all your effort I was exasperated by this so so angry that it threw away my beautiful sticker that I spent all that time getting all because this was the first time I ever guessed the wrong sticker in any situation I didn't know it was going to do that if I was wrong I actually screamed no at my screen and rage quit over this sure I wasn't having fun before but now I was mad I ended up looking at a guide because like hell I was going to make another blind guess and waste even more of my time of course sandstorms are weak against vacuum cleaners which I had never found before so that Secret store behind slinga thing wouldn't have helped me anyway because you must have found found the thing for it to be for sale there where do you get the vacuum why you go down a different pathway from the starting point to a place called surf shine Harbor you have to just give up on world 2 and go do another one and the game doesn't tell you I grab the vacuum suck up all the sand move on to the next section and it's the faucet I need for the very next puzzle okay that's pretty funny and at least I know where to find one for our troubles we get the last tablet piece we also get a hint for where to find that first cryptic tablet if you haven't found it by now shut up toad I've had a worse day than you 25 Dry Bake Stadium all those scraps we collected are coming together now we've assembled the pieces or go back and wander the other four levels because we missed one and away we go this Tower is terrible we run around it we see the glyphs on the wall depicting stickers we need and then slot them into the door I hope you have the right stickers cuz otherwise back to town with you and all the enemies come back oh hey Luigi um listen I feel like we got off on the wrong foot [Music] and he's not coming back is he we pick ourselves up from that rejection and reach the top of the tower and the tower power Pokey darn near dies in one hit to the baseball bat the boss fights are indeed all the same now that we're two boss fights in yep the bosses are creatively bankrupt too oh look a giant Goomba oh look a giant Pokey would be nice to have actual villains or you know bosses that are at least more creative than the regular Muk of the area but big this was actually one of the most recent things I noticed the Bland boss has Blended in with the other bull so well that I didn't even notice how lacking they were furthering that at at least the bigger glomba talked this guy doesn't even get a character or a line of dialogue a few turns later he falls also yes Kirsty calls you an idiot for winning the fight faster than the intended method in every boss fight that's another Royal sticker in the books or on the book I've always thought this about these scenes the cover of the sticker album before it's filled in looks like Mario's glove giving you the middle finger five times it's sure what it feels like to play this freaking thing at the end of chapter we're going to stop things for now and next time we go into chapter three oh boy chapter 3 is long then at least my stickers are going to a good cause oh hi Kirby Kirby's like is the mean sticker star hurting you again Emil chapter three who the piss was in charge of the pacing and thought it was a great ad 3 to be triple the length of all the others well that's okay because I'm doing a thing and making my title batch relative to all the other chapter names and it's called doing a thing we begin our arduous track in leaf litter path we enter we use a trumpet on a tree stump it we get a funny scene with wiggler hey you're right why was wiggler sleeping in a place like this oh yes it was because wiggler filled up on leaves and got super sleepy wiggler hasn't eaten that much in a long time lately this Forest has been covered in icky goopy poison wiler's favorite leaves also got covered in icky goopy poison and so wiggler couldn't eat them anymore so wiggler came all the way to the forest enters Looking for clean leaves to nibble wiggler go here wiggler is wiggler is always alone so wiggler is happy to have friends come for a visit oh but from here onward it is always dark yes even during the daytime this is because of all the poison so wiggler says watch your step when we get to Wiggler's house wig like look wiggler is the only unique character in the game who doesn't suck ass still not allowed to have a name though this place is a nice style but that's about it it's over quickly you know it isn't over quickly world three we went from five levels in world one to five levels in world two to 12 in World 3 who approved this there's poor pacing and there's making a chapter 2 and 1 half times the length of all the others I'm as baffled as the baffle would our next level this place is the Lost Woods you're supposed to Mark the correct path with a sticker once you know it any sticker will do the final room is a five way Junction get it wrong you run the whole level again oh and don't accidentally put anything good on the sign post takey back sees will break the sign becoming unusable and wasting your sticker oh my God Wiggler's Treehouse we arrive at our hub for this chapter and there's a few free things lying around the boom box is is a personal favorite of mine doubling Mario's damage for a few turns I teased this a while ago but it's the only time Super Mario Land 2 spaceand theme is ever returned which is a shame because that game is awesome and way better than this piece of crap but hey legitimate positives we take those here's our conflict we have to help wiggler out with his dismemberment problem which apparently makes Kirsty so mad at him and come back here and claim the rewards whenever we find parts of Wiggler wigler continues to charm me the high heel among his many shoes is amazing and funny we're now on the hunt for disembodied torsos throughout this whole chapter starting now we run into nin another underappreciated Mario thing and I have to admit seeing them turn into origami shuriken is clever these enemies suck otherwise though and are all over this chapter they Dodge your attacks unless you use specific stickers I thought this was was random because no one told me yet another reason to just not waste your time battling anything even worse the poison ground hurts you if you take too long to pick a battle command which is kind of a problem when your sticker album is the length of the Declaration of Independence oh it's bad but I personally get some weird enjoyment out of it because Mario wins by doing absolutely nothing why even bother running away from a battle anymore when you can just get up and do a stretch just make sure there's a heal block nearby I really am grasping at ways to make my own fun in this awful game I'm even editing the script to this video while I wait to win fights by doing nothing it saves time oh and I also learned that the quicksand instantly killing you in Chapter 2 extends into battles as well if you take too long to select a command yes when the battle background was never communicated to have any impact on combat before that point and no it doesn't damage you on the first instance of battle backgrounds doing any kind of damage it kills you so I know now that at least one person got up to do something while in a battle in Chapter 2 and came back to an inexplicable game over game design is my passion strike Lake the [ __ ] bowling pins nothing else in this uninteresting level matters 164th as much as this this is the part where everyone enters the stage plays all the way to the end and is greeted by bowling pins blocking the exit having never seen a bowling ball sticker throughout the entire game up to that point as we've established this gives us two options number one look at a guide or number two methodically play through every level in the whole game a second time until you eventually find what you need did you think Kirsty was going to help you of those two options I gave both are a complete waste of time it is impossible to have found the bowling ball yet because it's in an inaccessible area as of this point in the story and because it's Paper Mario sticker star nobody tells you so if you decided to play this game for yourself congratulations you just banged your head into 20 different walls before giving up for no reason it's a shame puzzles are so frustrating in this game because I genuinely think this could have been a unique and fun way of doing it if we just had a bag of permanent key items to solve problems with complete with multiple Solutions after we give up on the level like the developers wanted we find the first wiggler segment on the way out this is a minor point but I feel like they intended for these mutilated pelvises to be cute and Charming but they're not the animation on them creeped me out I can't explain why they're just unsettling to me because this game refuses to just let us have anything the wiggler segment runs away after being C captured and must be captured multiple times get used to it Kirsty says we need to go after it so open the next level what's taking so long oh mandatory Secrets again you freaking game the game had us go 90% of the way through this level find the wiggler segment turn around and chase it back to the beginning but rather than take the exit beside where the segment joined us instead we're supposed to go all the way back to the right and take the farthest exit possible away from where our objective took us this level design fools you away from what you're supposed to do this is one thing that bothers me about modern Paper Mario in general nothing can ever be simple or straightforward it's important to have twists and turns in your scenario when designing a game absolutely it is you want to have difficulty ramping up and keep things interesting and catch the player off guard sometimes but I feel like they put twists at the end of every little thing they ask of you and it just makes the whole experience feel long I want you to keep that in mind as you watch this chapter because it happens a lot here loop loop River I couldn't remember anything about this level except that it goes around in circles and takes forever I just took the lazy ride around and around and around looking for any way up to where the wiggler segment ran up until I gave up and pulled up a walk through we're supposed to take a second loop around the river and jump up at this back ledge which I don't know if this is a perspective thing or just me but I didn't think it looked like I could jump up there we find the first segment again and this time it feels like beating us up even though we were friends a minute ago now I've got some bad news enemies randomly dodging attacks is the gimmick of this entire chapter they can't Dodge thing stickers so use those in the required fights and thank me later sucks that one of the better characters is going to bleed to death now though right past the goal we need to hit this Leaf right before going to the exit even though it doesn't do anything for us in this visit I figured this out of my first time so it's not that bad I'm just making note of it Outlook Point than origami I don't have to make out with Kirsty up here this level is purely a shop that introduces us to secret doors there a sticker that makes tangible all those door outlines visible in levels there's some other useful stickers available for sale but do we look like we care we skip combat like a real man the Secret Door stickers are pretty big and you'll want to carry a few with you because they hide things in HP at Parts behind them and yep some are required and because anything could be in any level in order to get them all you're playing every level a second time key of which I want to point out in six is the squirt gun that I've teased it's basically a win Button as long as you're good at button mashing thought I'd let you know it could make your playthrough a lot less painful and is a pretty fun item like I've said using a secret door in battle is a guaranteed run away making it technically the most overpowered sticker in the game and the most fun to use that's actually really funny we'll take Wiggler's rib cage home now it's late after that nothing happens so not only is chapter 3 over double the length of all the other chapters they make us repl stages on top of that we need to go back to loop loop River and get that scrap up on that ledge that we couldn't grab before I found myself lost yet again and so for the second time this stage I gave up and looked up a walkth through the answer was required invisible coin blocks once we make it where few YouTube playthroughs have ever gone before we pick up a tree stump and we use it to open up the next branch in the forest Russell burrow [Music] [Music] no no Kirsty yipp best level nothing Top This creative genius you shouldn't have we got to sneak around and get our stuff back yes Kirsty you count as stuff Kirsty sucks she stinks she stucks like a sticker like wow this is a horribly botched character has anyone ever seriously been helped by this loser she's supposed to give the player hints yet she pretty much always just says the weather is nice on every screen and when the puzzles are so obtuse and the inventory discourages you from carrying too much stuff this is an especially Dreadful game to include a help feature that doesn't do anything a way to make everything less frustrating is right there with Mario at all times they just chose not to utilize it because lol isn't Kirsty bitching funnier I would call Kirsty a ringer for the most useless party member I've ever seen in a video game there's always that one weak character that no one uses but at least even then that character is usually required for a few moments or can do a move that could theoretically win you a fight Kirsty has never helped me one bit toward succeeding at anything and might as well not even be there that dor can't get past to begin chapter 2 without a poison mushroom she says where's this desert supposed to be think it's on the other side no that whole maze in Chapter 2 here are the only two hints that she can say in that level these are ruins right so there's got to be at least one TR treasure do you think it could be hidden in a coffin and this is a total maze make sure you remember which way we came okay I need to amend something I said in part two regarding my story about damp Oasis I got a few comments telling me dude Kirsty tells you to use the vacuum sticker and it's in Surf shine Harbor you should have used the hints but I knew I used Kirsty and she didn't help this confused me and I wanted to get to the bottom of it so to give you a more accurate retelling I ran around the level my first time turning it upside down eventually conceded and I got this hint where all she does is tell me to paperized which gave me zero help at all it turns out Kirsty will give useful hints about where to find stickers but only if you have already had that item in your inventory at least once this defeats the entire purpose of a hint system she wouldn't give me a hint on the bowling pins no matter what I did because I didn't have the bowling ball already and this was consistent across every puzzle in chapter 3 that I tested so even if your sticker album pleased Kirsty enough to give you a useful hit once she probably won't do it again dude this is more work to program it this way than just having her tell me what I need to do maybe she does give a useful hint at least some point in the game but I was specifically looking for a single instance in this chapter and I couldn't find it I I think an extreme majority of players found her useless even if they gave her a chance plus how was I supposed to know any of this was how cury worked there was nothing else in that screen besides that tornado I got text that was worded as advice it's reasonable to assume she wasn't going to say anything else she sucks at giving hints but is she really that much more annoying than fi yes yes she is her character sucks too in fact that's the big thing I want to focus on in this chapter the characters suck and Kirsty is the worst of them all we get a bit more lore about Kirsty in this level or rather we would have but they obscured the text with the foreground because potatoes I had to check a hacker's research to get her wondrous dialogue wake up wake up now oh come on wake up I've had it why does stuff like this always happen to me hey are you going to keep me waiting here forever you listen to me when Mario shows up and he will he's going to tear all of you guys to pieces Mario you're really taking your time where are you what are you doing damel in distress over here hello don't you think you've kept me waiting a little too long you didn't go home did you was it something I said what am I going to do losing the Royal stickers is all my fault even though it isn't so you're just pity mongering ah I can't go back to the sticker star like this oh why me why this why now I want to cry wait I am crying stupid crying she's unlikable that whole block of tech sums her up perfectly she just yells at everyone and is mad all the time no matter whether they deserve it her emotions feel completely random there are no characters in this entire world to get attached to and she barely interacts with the whole four characters in this game who aren't our mute protagonist she has no one to bounce off of she's an even flatter character than the paper she's printed on I feel like the writing and sticker star is brilliant charming and funny when the characters do things but the game consistently chooses to do nothing with its characters even though it's long and there's all all the screen time in the world I have to admit there is exactly one moment where Kirsty is a good character and it's a tutorial that you can skip wouldn't you be able to mop up these guys faster if he could use more than one sticker at a time no really no kidding you really think that either you're nuts or you're just messing around no no one's going to think less of you if you want an advantage no come on more stickers at once no you are lying I mean come on are you afraid of another one stick time yes you know what forget you here pick one of these answers so we can move on yes yeah I want to clarify that I can still like a game even if the story sucks plenty of games I like have simple plots or moments where everyone acts like idiots but it's held together by a wonderful cast of characters or stuff just being plain funny chaos it's sort of hard to even consider Kirsty a Canon character when there's barely any moments to recall where she wasn't obnoxious or unnecessarily yelling at someone our silent protagonist just doesn't work when they only interact with one character this this one character just yells at him all the time but he can't do anything back I might like the story just fine if our main Duo was fun but they're not also yeah back to this level scuttlebug Your Design is horrible and hasn't been good since Mario 64 yeah I said it eat my star oh no what are you going to do cry to your boss oh no it's big Scuttle Bug I'm sure I'll have no trouble remembering this character next week this level isn't too bad on its own it's just the concept of you lost all your stuff go around this big open area and find it all again but they throw in an added bonus to make it worse than it would be unlike a game that even mildly respects your time you don't find the sticker album and then you can fight again no they make you pick up every individual sticker to do that then they make you pick up the hammer before your Hammer stickers will even do anything what anyway we pick up the reanimated corpse that we came for and leave oh how zany the wiggler got away again I sure am feeling tired all right World 38 Tree Branch Trail two screens of webs we free the wiggler segment and he tries to kill us for rescuing him after we win Wiggler's wiggler goes flaccid it might seem like some of these levels are short to make up for the number of levels no not really they're short levels in other worlds too and remember I'm just briefly touching on the times that we have to repeat something make sure to pick up the scrap behind wiggler besides that I guess the ending is a little obtuse in how you reach it but it wasn't anything I couldn't figure out after a minute or two Gauntlet pond it's a wiggler segment in the middle of the lake and it runs away repeatedly oh how Whimsical enjoy your last Superstar It's the final time this ever happens oh and this kitchen sponge that we need to ring out in order to collect is kind of clever it's even a shield get it HP sponge this level's a whole lot of waiting for platforms to move it feels worse than it actually is because the swamp was supposed to be over three levels ago and yep after you already had to chase down this wiggler segment three times in one level the wiggler segment makes you play through another level to get it why wouldn't it and this is after two other segments made us collect them multiple times stump Glade we go and into the forest and ladies and gentle [Music] buies so very sorry to keep you waiting we've got a great show for you folks that's right it's time to play sniff it or with [Applause] it yes we're back this week with another exciting episode episode of sniff it or with it I'm your host sniff it for the next 30 minutes our star guest will come face to face with three positively riveting challenges and today's guest is the best of the best yes the man we all detest Mario that's right and if our guest is sniffing enough to Vanquish all three games he'll receive this fabulous prize an abdomen well without further Ado Challenger are you ready both physically and mentally to sniff it or whiff it Color Me impressed this is actually kind of fun sticker star really could have used some more miname moments like this sure be he's having to play the battles I'll tell you what this is the most fun the game play has ever been the atmosphere is right on the air is electric this whole scenario is Fun the host is likable damn it's like for one level you can pretend this is an actual video game look at this stuff we're beating up unpaid interns the dialogue the fun the puns it's all so good they've done it they nailed one moment when we win we get if we want to do an optional bonus round if we say no he's kind enough to tell us this isn't a bonus round at all it's something that will be required later this man is officially a bigger help than Kirsty and he tried to kill us the bonus round's fun too they combine a quiz with the hammer game so you need to focus on two separate kinds of games at the same time there's our prize this has me on a more positive note we should start counting how many levels are good just cuz they're special as a refresher so far I have liked the warm fuzzy Plains whino mountain and Yoshi Sphinx this game show brings our ratio of good levels to four out of 21 uh maybe this wasn't so positive after all we leave and why would it be any different we're 10 levels into this thing and if we count replaying levels that we've already beat it's 15 we must go back through the baffle wood and find the segment on a different pathway than the required path we marked earlier ending in the same boss fight for the third time you'd better look sorry at the end of this place long last like an idol spoken of by the gods the bowling ball we return Wiggler's third segment and he tells us that he still needs more organs to live great bastard well only one level we haven't found an exit to so it's got to be strike Lake this is what we've been waiting for finally we use the bowling ball roll it down the lane I sure hope you return all the wiggler segments otherwise he Wast this attempt out of nowhere and you're playing this level again now too after all that time so if you were like me and gave this puzzle an honest try you 100% ended up frustrated because it was impossible on your first visit and when you can finally clear it they pull this crap how were you supposed to see that coming were they trying to make the most frustrating experience possible seriously maybe they knew how could they not this doesn't feel incompetent this feels malicious like they didn't want people to have fun with their game that they spent years of their life making luckily for us this time around I went through this place in an order that didn't allow this to happen so it won't happen to you if you're playing along but still the fact that this is even a possible thing that can happen it's yet another time they pretend the game encourages exploration and then punish you for it unless you explore the game in one specific order in a rare moment of kindness they return our bowling ball after the puzzle remember that part for later cuz oh it's going to bite this game in the ass to be nice to me holy Thicket we're seriously still going this chapter isn't ending for a while this place is just tape the level you whole tape off of stuff you're looking for a missing piece of tape that you can stick to something and then tear it off to open it however that works okay that's really funny wow he's stuck inside the wall but it's a pretty clever level and it doesn't go on too long or that's what I would say but the regular exit didn't lead us to the segment the bloopers floated off with so back in we go to find a required secret exit just got to find the secret hole that blends in with a puddle and then find another one white cat Beach hi Luigi bye Luigi yeah I'm learning to cope we find the wiggler segment and he looks like this guess that confirms this is the severed anus makes sense why it's been such an ass to us just when you thought World 3 was too long psych we get a fake out ending we need to find a way to that Island this chapter just doesn't end and it's worse than normal because Bad Games feel longer than they already are sticker star is too long they pat out every tiny task when they already aren't fun so it feels like 50 hours instead of 25 but the good news is we're so so close we just got to go to Surf shine Harbor and wrap this up toad I don't blame you I wouldn't let a dirty anus on my dinghy the wiggler segment goes back with us at long last this is a minor annoyance but they put a poison puddle under the heart block which just looks like a shadow so you get hurt from trying to heal here after we miss the boat we perform surgery on wigler while he's still conscious I call it payback for the way his ant has treated us but oh no the forest is poisoned wiggler is going to help us get to the source of this problem I care more about this starting now wiggler will have a diary in his house what's kind of cool is that they gave a damn about Wiggler's character enough to make these diary entries tell a little story it's pretty cute and feels nice this is the only story we have come across so far and it's the only permanently missable thing in Paper Mario sticker star to have the privilege of viewing the story of chapter 3 you have to one not immediately return the segments of Wiggler's body after you get them back two bring a segment to 32 before returning it walk all the way to the end with it and walk through the dandelion to make the seed scatter three bring a segment to World 36 stand on the Scenic Overlook four bring the segment to the poison hot springs in 38 aw how wholesome I drowned him in toxic wayte five bring a segment to 310 play the game show again with the segment in the audience I'd like to add this level rewarded you with a segment which in turn ran away from you went to another level and then prompted you to return home only for you to go back and replay the level that you just played in order to get it the last page will always happen at Surf shine Harbor no matter what doesn't matter and as always nothing in the game tells you any of this exists it's like they're ashamed of telling a good story and wanted to hide it and now for white cat Beach we're ready to take the SS wiggler to the island guess the water was only a foot deep uh the way the water looks in this game is phenomenally good this might be the best looking water in this series ever and yeah I saw Autumn Mountain I mean that that it's that good pretty basic level I'm into anything that allows us to easily Dodge the fights there's some weirdly homing tentacles they can be tough to avoid but as long as you don't get me into a battle when you touch me you can beat me up all you like as we make our way through I want to tell you that we just met our final new character in this entire game poison blooper yeah that's it that's Kirsty the hieroglyph Koopas and Goombas Mariachi guy and poison blooper they created Five character designs for an entire game that's zero new characters introduced in Worlds 1 4 5 and six this would be pitiful and unacceptable even for a lowbudget indie game heck I've seen more effort out of fan games oh wait they did design more characters yeah they removed all of those before release and we only know about them from pre-release screenshots everything else is verbatim a reused character design from The Originals or a standard Mario enemy plus Kirsty is just Rosalina's crown with eyes I know Simplicity is good design but this feels so creatively empty when combined with all the other things that fell short it makes the world feel small and without an identity of its own new enemies even minor clever alterations on existing designs go along way to making a world feel creative and memorable and believable everyone knows that one fr ation that every character is a generic nameless toad I could sit here and compare it to previous games to illustrate why this is a terrible idea but that's been done to death already and I think we're all on the same page about it so here's a new one you run into generic toads that look identical to all the others have no name but reference previous events and are clearly the same people from earlier scenes that were meant to grow attached to no writer has ever thought this was a good idea heck the headwriter Apparently hated this having to work under these restrictions sounds like hell have you ever seen a TV show where everyone but the main character is a generic nameless human have you ever read a book where the author doesn't bother to explain how a character's appearance is distinct from the others in the story I think this might be the only video game I've ever played where I can't name a favorite character it's hard to think of a one I guess wiggler but I feel like that's purely because he's the most distinct thing that talks and has no competition I mean who else am I going to say Kirsty there was um oh wait the Red Toad who had a flower garden the purple toad who says stay perky it's difficult to even describe a character that I enjoy there's no good reason that it has to be this way and yes it's a big problem when Paper Mario even now Prides itself on trying to have witty writing and before anyone tells me well they had restrictions they weren't allowed to create new characters or make the kind of game you wanted they went about solving this in the worst way imaginable when talking about this everyone points at that one quote where mamoto requested that this game only use existing Mario characters but I don't think this is solely his fault they could have process that request in any number of better ways including throwing it in the [ __ ] trash it wasn't a corpor mandate it was just something he asked for when popping in and offering suggestions if you don't believe me people from intelligent systems have said in interviews they have almost full creative control over the series and mamoto is barely involved even so not wanting to introduce too many unique characters is no excuse for this level of blandness in such a crappy story you can abide by these types of restrictions and still make a good story still make interesting locations or utilized any of the many existing characters characters like Toadette or the Kongs or Yoshi or poochie or toadsworth Pauline King Vu Wario honey Queen and her be Kingdom or Captain Toad or or samis eat or Camy Koopa since Super Paper Mario's released Nintendo had created beloved icons like Ros Alina and respectable Side characters like Lumas or if we're talking later in the timeline characters like plusy or an abbit or you could have used any of the many existing Paper Mario characters people love like goombella or Rock hawk or bobbery or maybe have Gario come back older and stronger the wording was no new characters that touch on the Mario Universe okay so fully original characters were allowed like Vivien or twink or demeno those were great I would have loved to have seen it how many new original characters you could have cooked up or you know they could have let Bowser say literally anything what about races like pantas they'd been featured in Paper Mario before the dev team went about this request in the most thoughtless low effort uncreative way under the sun and pretended the existing material never existed you have all this awesome material at your disposal but no man Goombas Koopas and toads that's enough this tiny cast of characters isn't even indicative of what Mario is typically like there's so many awesome characters across all of the games even games like new Super Mario Brothers that are heavily criticized for lack of originality still feature a handful of new enemies designed around new abilities or settings or interact with Mario in interesting ways of course we want to see the old characters again it would be nice to know what they're up to these days rather than just Nintendo sticking their fingers in their ears and saying there is no Thousand-Year Door in bossing say this is such a big deal to me I want to extend this point into later games in the series for a moment why is this whole war on having characters so arbitrary Mario Kart was allowed to play with existing character designs since sticker star released Mario and Luigi was allowed to make new characters the Mario movie was allowed to make new characters The Crossover with the damn rabids was allowed to make new characters and that was made by a third party outside of Nintendo Odyssey was allowed to put in a [ __ ] T-Rex and a Skyrim dragon why is Paper Mario the only Mario series that has to play by this stupid rule of being as milk toast and uninspired as humanly possible [ __ ] anyway this level's actually pretty good the music is excellent once again gooper blooper clapping along to the music is a fun touch and makes him stand out though there is one thing that kind of brings it down using the bowling ball sticker on this boss consistently crashes the game I have to admit that's pretty funny I know just cuz something was caught by QA testers doesn't mean there was time to fix it but like when your game is designed around using thing stickers on bosses in order to expose their weaknesses you think one of the first things the devs would have made a priority is using every thing sticker on every boss to make sure nothing breaks and this is literally two levels after they handed us a free bowling ball when they have trained us to make thing stickers to use on boss fight such an obvious crash triggered by what you're supposed to be trying out in boss fights feels like there wasn't a lot of care put into the project to be fair it didn't happen to me personally on this playthrough I later learned that you have to succeed at getting an excellent action command to cause it to happen probably breaks the speed of some kind of Animation but I promise you there are a lot of Clips floating around the internet of this happening to people now that we got the bat out of the way we want to use the sponge as it was shown to suck up all the poison when we found it pretty good way of signposting that it'll protect us from his strong moves gooper blooper continues the horrible gimmick of this chapter his poison causes your attacks to miss this sucks if he hits you not only do your attacks miss you can't even see the Hut elements it's like if the Mario Kart blooper was actually good I also want to say that the developers defended their lack of exp by saying that you need to save up coins for the battle spinner in boss fights and that's why fighting enemies is important oh right I'm sorry you mean the battle spinner that cost me 43 coins to win this entire fight my bad also apparently my strategy wasn't what they intended at all because Kirsty called me stupid I don't know there's so many dang thing stickers and they all do so much damage anyway I didn't have to care about what I was supposed to do I blocked his poison I killed him in three turns I don't need you but the point is we win it's hard to say how much longer chapter 3 was from player to player but if we go by the number of levels that it makes us play through we can get a pretty good idea chapter 3 has 12 levels one is mostly a store but there's required cutcenes there and it's the hub for the Secret Door quest which is required and we'll be revisiting all throughout the adventure you spend more time with these secret doors than on any one level so I think it counts there are a total of 16 level exits then there's the time to make you play the baffle wood again to get a wiggler segment so that bumps us up to 17 I think it's also fair to count that one level where the wiggler segment leads you away from the exit and you probably will have to run through it again so 18 then we have our fruitless visits to white cat Beach and surf shine Harbor also we can return and put wigler back together again which I think constitutes as the 19th level because that's a lot of steps for the final level to unlock I won't count these but it's worth mentioning that if you want the journal entries you're replaying sniffit or with it then if your bowling ball got kicked away You're rep playing that level now too I want to figure out how much of this game is spent in chapter 3 so for the worlds Beyond I will follow the same rules and cut out anything that isn't a mandatory shop or a glorified cut scene level in total world one is five levels world two is six levels world three is 19 levels world four is five levels world five is Seven Levels world six is two levels this means you run around in this amam swamp for 43% of this game without a doubt this was the most excruciating chapter to play through and you saw how God awful chapter 2 was already on my first playthrough and when getting footage for this I would sit down thinking this is it I'm going to get through it this time and then they would just pull three more repeats of levels I already beat and i' only get slightly further toward the end chapter 3 overstays its welcome it's a exhausting to get through and it's a shame that this black cloud had to sour a decent character like wiggler and some rare amazing moments in this game but that's okay we're done it's over I never have to play this thing again and the best part chapter 4 is actually kind of good I teased that it's my favorite chapter before and I'm excited for us to see how good this game can be when it really tries so it get better for a time don't worry it'll find a way to suck later on so next time we're going to be tackling the best part of Paper Mario sticker star that practically no one ever got far enough to see this is a minor point but I feel like they Kirby shut up this is a minor Point Kirby this is a minor point but I feel like they intended these G four your reward for putting up with this crap surfshine Harbor is where we begin today with nowhere else to go we need to use the boat to access the northern reaches of the land without personality problem is somehow toad never considered the ship would need a steering wheel so we're going to the basement of the warehouse in the depths we have to change a light bulb so we can clear out the garbage in front of our prize [Music] oh look a big cheap cheap unlike other bosses this one outright requires the proper thing sticker before it will take any damage at all so winning the battle spinner at the start of the fight is actively a negative thing because the extra stickers go to waste this is sort of a problem with most fights actually specific stickers are needed on specific turns and additional ones are just there this toad tells you that you need the hook but not where to get one it's 50% better than we usually do at least Kirsty can't call us stupid if we can't succeed without the sticker she wants us to use I used my fish hook on the wrong turn and got an old boot for my efforts oh my God isn't that funny I'm sure I would be laughing along at this gag if I didn't have an unwinable fight on my hands now so I go back get stickers and okay so we'll just use our remaining thing stickers and what if you don't have strong enough stickers after using the hook the fish explodes killing you instantly yeah that's fair and was a completely normal thing to expect a fish to do I didn't even think that's what it was going to do I thought it was just growing stronger this game is the anti- Earthbound every time I open this freaking can of worms I learned something new about it but it's always some clever way that it's even more awful than I already thought it was and makes me question even further why someone would spend years of their life making this so on to attempt number three first the fight was unwinable because we were too fast the second fight was unwinable because we were too slow the third fight is just right we win the right to cross the waters and board a boat this animation always looked bizarre to me and like it wasn't meant for Mario driving a boat I recently learned this was correct this animation was meant for the unused chain chomp partner's ability he lives on in our hearts and in our boat the characters may not be allowed to have names but I dubb the boat the SS Chompy after the best friend I never got to meet in this life 41 snow rise we get a breath of fresh air I said chapter 4 was good and if the rest of the game was like this I probably wouldn't detest the celestial body of stickiness as I am want to do the music of snow rise is incred [Music] great the enemies give tons and tons of coins so in a rare case it might actually be worth battling if you're going for 100% otherwise really just don't bother there is no reason we go on and have a pretty clever puzzle that can be solved with a reasonable sticker that scrap enables us to progress that gets us one exit let's go get the other we get a musical number from Berto of all dinosaurs heart of a woman heart of a man both can know of loves Grace know loves Grace here's a go just try not to get egg on your face thanks M try not to get egg on your face this is probably the only running gag in the new Trilogy that was any good so far so good but don't worry I'll find something about it that sucks this [ __ ] corter go on guess what object you need to advance here the answer is the space heater sniffit told us we would need it at some point but even with that hint I didn't get it I saw that outline and thought I needed something much larger than this tiny sticker then I got to this snow Spike and they just don't give enough time to squeeze through here I keep getting like one pixel away it was just a little faster than I could destroy the snowball with my [Music] hammer I was stuck on this for about 5 minutes assuming I had to get to him fast enough and the snowball couldn't be broken probably my own fault but it was still a frustrating part of my experience Ice Flow you're running around on slippery ice while cooligans try to run into you thankfully they at least have the decency to not battle us because cool people skip battling in this game I just got to say it this chapter is gorgeous really the art style is at its greatest here making ice out of foil to beautiful effect the way the caves look using blue new construction paper and bright color for the icicles it all just works the ice Bros however are [ __ ] just try to avoid them you won't the ice balls are homing and do impossible stuns to still somehow hit you it's annoying sure but at least the ice balls don't start a battle and the guy himself just stands still so it's easy to avoid combat and levels with them heck I can't even remember the last time I seriously fought a regular enemy this game really should have been called Mario walking simulator that's all you do if you're playing it well well okay right after our first ice bro I began fighting enemies again a thing I Want To Praise is the ease of battle in this chapter it's not that hard to avoid these specific enemies because some of them just stun you and others don't even fight at all then every sticker is shiny due to this area being well ice on the rare occasion when I got into a fight I figured was worth just using one of my many shiny spread damage stickers to instantly win it also felt kind of good to just see the coin counter go up by so much because the enemies dropped so many oh my God I'm enjoying battling in Paper Mario sticker star I think the hypoxia of this mountain might be getting to be we need to go we finish this level on seeming yeah we see the next area in the distance this might be be the only time the world is ever cohesive damn look at you sticker star going all Super Mario Sunshine on us for one level starting now we'll be counting good levels now that one has finally happened again the good level count is now five out of 26 the enig Mansion the enig Mansion is amazing we begin on an actually decent story and some fun character interaction to boot this place has its own history and it's pretty unique as far as Mario levels are concerned which doesn't happen at any other point across what 40 areas it stands out it's fun it's mysterious it's silly it's an adventure the music's atmospheric to an almost Professor Laton like quality [Music] we can find a book that turns out to be the sacred text that says no one should ever touch the sticker Comet less disaster await so we get a tiny sprinkling of World building for the game as a whole too it's not deep or anything but it's something and it's certainly better than the nothing that we usually get our mission is to go around capturing booze to seal them inside a book and there's tons of them hidden everywhere with clever ways to uncover and defeat them it's like a mini Luigi's mansion Game I don't even feel like any puzzle is cheap or unfair they're just simple enough to figure out without being frustrating there is one puzzle where I ran around the whole house twice before figuring out what to do but that's great exactly one puzzle that takes a bit longer is perfect difficulty in my Reckoning not enough to make you feel frustrated but just enough challenge that you feel smart for getting through it we're also collecting scraps looking for where they would make sense and then drop them into place a lot of scraps have the same outline and thus multiple things can fit into each space meaning you have to use your brain for what would be useful this Mansion is a point-and-click adventure game and it rules it's even a nice catch your breath kind of level due to the funny moments so few random battles and lots of good stickers lying around I also like it because when there's an actual reason as to why you're fighting the enemies and there aren't just lots of boring battles everywhere it lets you enjoy the highs of sticker star without the gameplay being so annoying and get this there's even a convenient fast travel point between this place and D calberg so we can stock up on stickers in the middle of a level and like this level level is full of new things and opportunities to use unusual stickers it's open-ended and lets us explore freely while giving us this so we would realistically be wishing we had some new stickers when they give this to us excuse me whoever designed this level thought of the player so much more than any other design Choice thus far holy crap and I just got to say it how often is the I section of any game this good it would have been so easy to get this wrong with all the other mistakes this game made especially usually ice worlds are just annoying physics slowness lack of control and Samy looking snow fields that Define them but no Paper Mario sticker star doesn't do any of that crap it makes beautiful locations contrast levels with snow fields Ice Caves warm mansions and more to come it Nails the atmosphere of all these different settings and the good soundtrack is the best it's ever been I'm impressed I I like this feels so good to say so yeah wow uh next we're getting an infin jump sticker a super helpful sticker with a quick tutorial explaining what it does then we fight a mini boss that's designed to be beaten with effective use of it the sticker you need isn't hidden 400 m away on a Mountaintop in Minnesota without any indication that is there they explain it in a safe environment the boss test your abilities to use mechanics of this area and it makes it clear what you need to do with pure visuals sort of like a video game paper Apple sticker Rubble deer sticker sticker sticker on stick paper D duper sticky sticky sticky sticky STI paper whky paper doodle squ dier paper rock H see why am I laughing at this I'm disappointed because this seems like the perfect set for a shining reference where it's just the dude going insane you know all working no play make someone made of paper this made me laugh out loud the first time I saw it I just I wanted to include my reaction to it so badly well whatever that was opens the way to the basement where we put the book of ceiling to rest or do we there's still one boo remaining out there why it's outside right behind the steward under your nose silly we put the book to rest [Music] and wa even the boss looks cool gosh that's like funny moment number three in this chapter a new record this boss fight is another HP sponge we have to infinite jump i s of don't like this part it's identical to the mid boss in all but name only it was satisfying to pull it off the first time but now we're having to press the A Button 100 times by the way all over again and in a constant Rhythm he can be hurt by other stickers he just has exactly 100 HP so this immediately comes to mind as the efficient solution if you're wondering no this isn't enough to bring down an otherwise great level it's just one annoyance I have we end on a gift from the steward to take with us I'll miss you Inc Mansion we'll all miss you I've tried to avoid turning this review into how to fix everything wrong with video games written by Captain not a game designer because so many things are wrong with this game that a simple list of changes or a simple patch would not suddenly make it a great game let's be real plus I've always felt that it's unfair when people compare a finished game to their imaginary game that had perfect execution with zero setbacks and everything being as great as it sounded on paper all while staying exactly on schedule and under budget that said I think if even a few levels were more like the enig Mansion this could have been a significantly better game cut 90% of the pointless random battles give it a focus on puzzle solving and put most of the items you need within the level heck this is the point I am the most sure of because modern Paper Mario consistently excels at this type of thing in addition to it being done well in sticker star hunting for toads is the single best part of origami King they just always choose to instead focus on a jumbled mess of RPG mechanics that don't work well together moving on shaved ice [Music] cave okay that's pretty funny man two levels in a row made me laugh this place is just going to be your sticker store of choice now the red shell and clone jump are too good to Not Just Wind button any fight with they're great white out Valley we begin on okay well we begin on this spot that belongs to the steward of old we bring him back to life okay I'm staying black and white because he's old and made of paper that's pretty funny this whole level is one great big miname set to style and music we hop around in our seat putting our lives in imminent danger SLG grabbing coins SL destroying fuzzies all while swinging around to dodge more ice balls Luigi's in this [Music] level yeah Luigi is never going to be allowed to do anything I thought that much was clear by now top of the mountain to you this level's pretty short and inoffensive I wouldn't didn't call it great it's prettyy much just what I said but it'll do we get more of the interconnected world at the end with the final Fortress being visible on the horizon now that we've reached Bowser snow fort we should go and make some heat related items sounds good oh it's Bowser [Music] Junior thanks game he juggled bom bombs and yeah that's about right at least it hurts him too we'll toss a clone jump his way and show him the power of icy stickers dang you're nothing but a big bully I'm telling my dad on you and my dad is so shiny right now better be ready to cry a lot oh God he's actually funny I'm starting to wonder if I like this game better when it was a stupid loser I'm feeling so conflicted right now oh yeah heat stickers Bowser snow fort let's get to saving this land hey buddy what are you oh you're a dick okay this level begins with waiting in line it's more fun than it sounds the shy guys react to us cutting in front and also fight us if we bump into them we can choose to get out of line to help this guy but I won't no amount of p is enough to get out of the line for the matter hord and you think you're good enough please once on the ride holy hell [Music] slider sorry to yell so much but this made me smile so freaking widely like a goofball the first time I heard it it's not even a song they bring back that often compared to other great Mario themes and everyone loves slider we have to name this guy in a staged roller coaster accident and take his stuff then we can repair our own track to repair our own track to repair our own track to make the jump there we go I don't know why but this jump was so hard for me to get we move on and it's more of the same repair the track in more ways Find A Way Forward here we are a final showdown after a fun coaster ride it's been a perfect day at bowerland the happiest place on Earth damn uh this is actually good the scope is kind of Epic the boss being the Fortress itself is a nice touch the boss fight revolves around using heat to crack its ice armor which seemed pretty obvious that I would want to bring fire along to an ice World boss certainly more obvious than the baseball bat being the weakness of the freaking [Music] Cactus wow only five damage buddy once we break down every layer we get to the real fight at the end he's kind of weak but I'm not about to complain about an easy fight wait him throwing a snowball at me does more damage than that giant Bowser stepping on me why this also gives a taste of what sticker star could have done with its limitations they used an existing Mario character that's pretty remote and had no development in a game yet when was the last time you saw Mr blizzard outside of Mario Party oh something happens with a character they made Mr blizzard all sympathetic and gave him this sad story he just wanted to live and now that we've taken away that sticker his life is coming to an end and he wishes in his dying breath to be rebuilt next winter this caught me off guard like wow I felt something while playing this unlike all the other chapters where the story is no more than one day a Goomba was walking around he found a sticker on the ground and suddenly he's an [ __ ] we get an actual story about Mr blizzard once being a snowman who melted and that pile of snow wished to be alive again then the sticker fell to that snow and enabled him to Grant his own wish and come back to life a I have to say this was touching and ends this pretty good chapter on a nice note an amazing note I would even say it's an example of how a little heart can go a long way chapter 4 was pretty great even if it had a few bumps along the way but no this doesn't suddenly make this a good game while I appreciate their efforts paying off here remember we still had to go through the horrible chapters 2 and three that dragged on for ever to get to this point and those two chapters alone make up over half of the levels in this game it's grueling labor to unlock this place my first time I remember getting to the end of chapter 4 and thinking hey maybe this finally gets good [Music] [Laughter] no the game somehow manages to get even worse than ever after this this was just one gem in a of Despair I hope you savored it next time we get to chapter 5 in all of it boring boring tum see you guys then chapter five I defy anyone to remember anything that happened in this Bland forgettable chapter other than the boss fight welcome to the last big world and isn't it disappointing we've had what like 40 areas up to this point and only the Yoshi Sphinx in the Mansion stood out what however this is the worst most Bland iteration of the Mushroom Kingdom Ever every other Mario Adventure no matter how minor always get some creative place or theme we haven't seen before this was just grass desert forest snow and lava it's even less themes than your average 2D Mario platformer usually those get eight worlds and at least one of them is something new like Peach's castle in lava we start with 51 Shy Guy jungle battle you for a sticker you wish we go to the right and get eaten by a flower it was this Hazard that made me realize they don't heal you after a chapter boss I'm sure this happens in other games too but in 2012 really I go back and heal and try again nice false start to what's supposed to be a fun adventure jump didn't work so I guess Hammer must be the answer that's another thing that shows after playing long enough this isn't like other games where you gain access to more Powers as it goes on or there's a large number of abilities that work together in different ways we're almost at the end of this thing and still just jumping hammering and sticking stuff on stuff like we did back in chapter 1 so all the puzzles feel the same I guess they intended for the stickers to be the progression but I say not good enough cuz they make the game less fun to play and the battles aren't fun to make up for it so it just all Blends together the hitbox in this flower is pretty weird too so it took me a few tries to get it to work that's one of the worst things that can happen to me when playing a game inconsistent when its mechanics respond to a button press it's frustrating when you thought of the correct answer tried it maybe even tried it twice but it doesn't work right so you get stuck and assume the answer must be something else behold the sequel to ice Bros spear guys they're everywhere and again they do impossible stunts to hit you almost no matter what you try oh my god there he hit me with the blunt side of I got sucked into to that up ahead there's three of these asses that hold the keys to unlocking the level exit it's one of those our first spear guy is kind of clever we have to chase him around and feed him to the carnivorous flower God behind the ledge near that flower we can slip into the background and get the Powder Puff this thing blocks all damage for three turns it's real helpful for someone trying to trudge through this diarrhea the second spear guy is hiding by the start and oh my God we have our first incentive to participate in battles five chapters in and the spear guys don't despawn if we run away only in Tall Grass though the one standing on normal ground still dematerialized at the sight of you doing nothing what an honor this means they had the capability of making enemies stay on the field after running they just chose not to do it spear guys suck and are pretty easy to beat though even my normal stickers beat them in one hit and they seem to only attack alone the guy with the key just gets cornered and dies the third spear guys hio contains one one of my favorite things in any Nintendo game seriously we have all these scraps of paper that say different things there's all sorts of stuff in here anything from a toad throwing away the F his teacher gave him to personal ads to Extended Lyrics for berto's song to lore on the parat trip as we met at Yoshi Sphinx a help wanted ad to work on the production of sniffit or whiff it a tabloid telling you Luigi must be hidden in this game explanation for why the ancient Egyptians played baseball some funny jokes and the only time characters from Paper Mario on N64 and Thousand-Year Door are ever treated as Canon there's a letter from paracer and an essay written by goombella at the University of goom but my favorite one is this this is a coded message that no one knows the meaning of it isn't known to do anything in this game people have tried going beyond the game and punching it into various Nintendo eshops to no avail cuz it's the right l length no one's ever cracked the code I just want to like let that settle in when are video game Mysteries Ever a mystery for any amount of time nowadays people just hack the game and boom everything about it's known instantly the last time a mystery in a Mario game remained at mystery for 10 years it was Luigi and Mario 64 this is awesome and developers should do more of this stuff granted I think video game design courses could learn a lot from sticker star but I mean this one in a positive way I would laugh if someone cracked this code one day and it was a developer talking to us through a cipher saying he knows the game's dog [ __ ] it would still remain one of my favorite parts of the game if that was the case though I get the feeling the mystery isn't all that exciting and they just intended for this to be an activation key or an eShop code that someone threw in the garbage cuz it was already used since we see yesterday's newspapers horoscopes losing lottery tickets and tons of other things that people just throw away that happen to be printed on paper also I just noticed right now that I said my favorite part of sticker star was in a garbage dump oh and the puzzle itself is horrible too to match I ran around this damn place for 31 minutes exactly finding the wrong spear guy over and over until I got a walk through to help me when running around here it's the most mind numbing mindless game of hide and seek you can imagine just run around in a straight line zigzagging every which way until you find the right spear guy and guess what the answer is to use a thing sticker they didn't tell you about of course course and I don't have it how did you expect me to know this I went in here and checked the paper found a spear guy found several of them in fact which is what I was looking for and I just thought oh these are the wrong ones the right ones got to be around here somewhere I just got to keep checking there shouldn't have been decoy spear guys hiding among the trash if the real one wasn't there it's a beginner's trap fooling the player into thinking they're doing what the game wants when they aren't I didn't think to paper eyesee in this room for an age much less do it in the right spot that's also picky [Music] yes yes very scary now we can leave this place world five makes an awful first impression I'd call it the biggest drop off in quality from one level to the next so far but it just feels numb to say that because this is like the third time we've hit a new low within the same consistently terrible game I got like nine coins for that looking at my recording timer this one level took me an hour and 9 minutes to get through Jungle Rapids you go down a river instant game over if the raft is destroyed otherwise forgettable I didn't realize that I mov this raft by trying to walk off the edge of it at first I figured it'd be weight based but then that didn't work so I figured you couldn't control it and just had to hit the enemies with your Hammer then I died and went oh pretty obvious and I just didn't figure it out the death didn't even send me back back that far this level's all right and it's over quickly I won't hold it against it long fall Falls oh wow uh it's the same level again but in Reverse just with a cheap chop after you this time how would you even go down a river backwards anyway I started out playing it legit and then I realized you can win this level by just pressing left once at the start and then doing nothing well while we're sitting still and going down the same river again I think we can pass the time with something I am intensely passionate about this game's backtracking and repetition is horrible it's a farce when people try to defend the modern Trilogy by saying well thousand in your door has backtracking the old games aren't that good compared to the new ones bro have you even played sticker star like seriously I want to know even partially even slightly I have played every game in this series and I would happily take running to creepy steeple one more time or doing that horrible search for General white that happens once per playthrough by the way over this garbage any backtracking section in the old Trilogy is infinitely more tolerable than the minute-to-minute gameplay of sticker star this game is constantly wasting your time for no benefit sending you back to the start of levels for not magically knowing which stickers you needed arbitrarily hiding the Illusions to puzzles in entire other worlds without even telling you where you need a backtrack and even as an entire chapter themed around backtracking where you go through 12 levels and then replay seven of them and you don't even get to replay the only good level in that chapter and I'm not defending General white oh I got annoyed at him as a kid sure I did but it's like 20 minutes out of a 40-hour game is it really that big of a deal in the long run Plus plus the rest of that chapter was Ultra amazing and had some of the best gameplay emotion and music in the entire series then when I backtrack an older games at least I'm picking up easy experience points along the way so there's potentially a benefit Thousand-Year doors retreading at its worst isn't even in the same universe as sticker stars constant I have no idea why Thousand-Year Door became the poster boy for bad backtracking and not sticker star oh wait it's cuz no one finished sticker star and people actually wanted to play Thousand-Year Door sticker star is Bar None the worst Paper Mario in terms of wasting the player's time and it isn't even remotely close this should be the game everyone Rags on for having backtracking and bad pacing out the ass Plus at least the old games balanced out their flaws because they had good stories Good characters and were you know actually fun I like games that are actually fun of course the old games were better than this [ __ ] we beat the level and the map just goes in a big circle we have to press left a second time near the end of the level to find the the true exit damn I did two inputs and found a secret exit that's got to be some kind of record okay so we have to papiz one so it's more like five inputs but still this level might as well not exist I would have voted to cut it or tack it on to the end of the last level it doesn't deserve to be its own thing because I want to help you go off to the right in the final room for this thing it's a win button against practically everything you'll need it before we move on to the next one I'd like to jump back into 53 for a minute here's another playthrough of longf fall did you get that the cheap chop has its speed increased after you found both level exits to the point where it's unfair and will often one hit KO you even if you were moving at top speed to avoid it so this means even if you like this game there's an entire level you can make nearly impossible to complete by just playing the level again in a Mario game cream of the crop how did they not catch this or ever patch in but okay back to the mission at hand Chomp Ruins I didn't even remember this place or have opinions when I saw it again I hope I develop some when I play it because wow this world is [Music] trash huh music's actually pretty good it's your typical puzzly Temple not a lot of battles here after playing it again I'd say it rounds out to being okay not spectacular or good or anything but I'm up for anything that doesn't expect me to fight stuff oh look a big chain chomp yeah we got a boss fight at the end of this one time to bust out our best stickers and they have no effect I won the slot machine at the start got to use three stickers and they all did nothing so just reset cuz screw taken a law on this they gave us a save block for a reason even more of a dick move the chain chomp is sitting still before the fight and my first strike did do damage to it first strikes don't normally ignore defense so it's an oversight that fools the player into thinking they can damage it this isn't a boss fight it's do nothing for three turns until he wakes up and beats the level for you um okay rugged Road wow stuff's really heating up we have a clear roadblock at the start prompting us to paper eyesee I'm going to I guess something cold thank the Lord knowing the nonsensical game design we've seen so far I was half expecting that we'd cool this place off with a tube of foot ointment instead cool visual theming in this place I liked how intense it felt starting off and then seeing hell freeze over it's always just kind of a neat thing to see in a game it goes back to just being a lava level after that the start made me think that we were going to get a freeze flame Galaxy which would have stood out more it's fine it looks good I just thought it would have been more I had no idea what to do with this part let's see what Kirsty has to off offer Oh eye opening lava is hot thanks for the hot tip love you Kirsty really do our answer is to go back and use these blocks to go higher no that gives us a car sponge because of course the answer was a whole foreground I didn't notice guess the joke's on me again the puzzles lately have been pretty straightforward and not that bad I think it's on me generally when I've messed up in this world world so they get a pass the scrap immediately looked familiar and I knew where to take it based on its shape because the corresponding spot stood [Music] out th our goal going forward is to use the sentient Falling Rocks who are out for blood to make holes in the floor where there's X's we go in and find a secret underground hot spring we peek in the other bath and who do we [Music] see and that my friends is the conclusion of Luigi's involvement I showed you every second of his screen time within the main story Luigi didn't want to be in this game he's smart while we take a rest I noticed around here they've been giving us these ginormous stickers out of a bunch of question mark blocks because of this my sticker album became a downright mess even if I paused to organize it seems not even pausing can save us now on the way out it's another cracked Rock scrap we're going to need Thor ouch we Thor it so hard we broke the level exit well just flip that over I feel like I haven't commented on how good a level is in a while because they've just been okay not offensively terrible except for that first one but also nothing stood out from the rest of the bad levels I'm not sure if the game is slightly improving or if I'm just used to how bad it is and I'm surprised by less things I think it's a combination of both actually now that I say it Rumble volcano totally not Grumble Volcano isn't world five boring for a place made of lava yeah and World 56 is long as hell apparently this place is one of the reasons people dislike speedrunning this game besides realizing they're playing Paper Mario sticker star that is the stage is super long and it has so many hazards that stun you that this place is where good runs go to die we jump down the hole and yay can I just [Music] leave well that didn't go as planned so great we're stuck here and we risk running into her again we fly up and have to work our way back down to Petey we keep going up and there's a man on fire we let him run around and he weighs down the lift so we got to collect skulls to weigh it down on the second level down there's a shop I'll bet business is booming here we've got a chain chomp boss fight in the Next Room like all the others it was impervious to everything and the fight didn't end after a few turns of surviving like last time time I left and came back to try some potential weaknesses and then when that didn't work I looked at a guide I've decided I'm giving this my award for the most obtuse solution to a boss fight the solution is the B hammer and then after using the B Hammer run from the battle while it's asleep and then hitting the steak and then getting into another fight with it and then wasting three turns letting it wake up and then having him end the battle the second time you know in a game where running away makes regular enemies despawn and has no effect on any other boss fight the third floor down is quite huge this is kind of impressive for a 3DS game we start off with this network of chains one of them's got Bowser tape on it so that's logically going to be the one with the chain chomp that we have to free we make our way back down to where we started the particular glowing moment of awful is the boss py piranha he's the only major chapter boss that isn't beaten in 3 seconds by the thing sticker he's weak to so it sounds like he'd be an improvement this world gave us a mega flash infinite jump and a mega flash clone jump guess how they intend for you to beat him no [Music] yes I get paid to do this infinite jump is my least favorite sticker it seriously hurts my dumb to use this and any YouTube playthrough I've watched of this section included the commentator complaining of physical pain in this boss fight so I know I'm not alone this game actually hurts you for playing it dude my finger hurts so bad oh my goodness that really does hurt a lot did you know that big infinite jump and mega flash infinite jump are objectively worse than regular infinite jump here we go regular infin jump is one damage 100 times big infin jump jump is two damage 100 times and mega flash is three damage 100 times it sounds like those stickers would be amazing so how is any of that worse bosses quarter your damage with a house minimum of one damage per hit as long as the attack still landed all infin jumps do one damage per hit to bosses as a result but the so-called better versions take up more room in the sticker album there's no regular enemies with more than 100 HP to justify using those bigger ones against them and they still only hit one enemy even with the stereo to double your damage you'll be doing six damage per hit at maximum that quarters to 1.5 damage and it just so happens that damage is rounded down in this game so you still hit for one the only way it could ever be useful is if things stickers shut off of boss's defense but even there you're likely better off using something else because 300 damage after using their weakness is overkill the best stickers in the game are actually outclassed by a weaker version of themselves we're 20 hours in and sticker star is still looking for new ways to be a blight on your love of this franchise I can't believe how it just keeps finding new ways to fail as it keeps going on it's failure managed to break the fourth wall and hurt me theoretically you could win with just thing stickers but the boss has no weakness and 300 HP no other sticker is going to beat 100 damage in a single use this is the Strat after a while he'll make himself dizzy and we can knock him off his feet to expose his belly with the belly button erect he takes major damage from jumps allowing us to finish the fight with weak attacks and claim the fifth Royal sticker that's chapter five it's the first chapter I like zero levels in but it also didn't have any Stand Out horrible levels other than that first one the levels were just kind of there they weren't even really that long the only thing that really stood out was just having the lousiest boss fights yet I suppose technically you could say this is the third best chapter in the game on the virtue of being forgettable instead of excruciating great level of quality being upheld from the pedigree of the Mario series someday I'll wake up from this nightmare and I'll get to play the four sequels to Thousand-Year Door they made since I went into aoma in 2005 we're done with five out of six chapters only one more go and I can't believe it like really can't believe it but we haven't even gotten to my pick for worst level in the game yet see you next time for the finale when we play that level the worst has yet to come the first time I played sticker star I was in a bad place I was left behind while other people I normally vacationed with went off to Hawaii with without me anyone else I knew was similarly busy with cool things they couldn't include me in and I was going to be alone for 2 weeks my apartment building was struck by lightning the first day of my loneliness destroying my internet and cable for several days plus it just so happened my phone didn't get reception to where I lived then I woke up with the flu the following day and couldn't eat I needed something to do that I could actually manage I bought a copy of The Last of Us intending to play that but it required a system update to play and I had no means of connecting my PS3 to the Internet so now I needed something else I passed on Fire Emblem Awakening which I considered buying on sale and I chose sticker star instead because Paper Mario was one of my favorite series of all time and I needed to feel good about something I had to like a new Paper Mario game the following week was horrible painfully coughing always in pain barely eating cut off for my friends and realizing more and more of this game was somehow even worse than I already thought it was I'd reach puzzles or boss fights not have a clue which stickers I needed and try everything until I got frustrated enough to get my sick ass out of bed grab my phone and walk down that sidewalk until I had one bar of reception to look it up I felt so weak it was hard to justify going back to the store potentially making other people sick in the process and buying another game and who's to say I wouldn't waste my time buying a game that needed a system update like I already did I had to finish this one because of sunken cost fallacy I'd played this thing so much already might as well finish it right the next chapter has to be the one where the game gets good it just has to be it can't be this bad instead I was locked in a cycle of being dumbstruck and asking myself how do you seriously put something like this into a store for people to buy with money this game was a major contributing factor to a terrible week of my life I just wanted to unwind with a good game so I could forget about everything going so badly was that so much to ask that's what games are for well here we are it's the end of sticker star even though the experience was almost totally joyless and routinely disappointed me in new ways the whole way through nothing I'd been through could have prepared me for the ending of this game so here it is [ __ ] the Final Chapter may God have mercy on our souls chapter six I would complain about there only being six chapters but I was begging for it to be over gate Cliff uhoh a dead end guess we'll just have to go I can't believe that worked it really lets you just leave we use the Royal stickers to summon Satan no seriously okay moving on we cannot enter the flying Castle unless we can fly ourselves seems legit we have to go and find a friend who can fly but my only friend is wigler just like all times like the time when wiggler took you two on his back to that poison Island remember you know that was just a little while ago right oh is that so flutters childhood memories feel like so long ago okay then let's go and there we are I'm serious that was the whole first level at least the next one's better Bowser Junior's flotilla dad was pretty angry when I told him how you beat me up for no good reason he was spitting mad I bet he didn't say anything though we've got our Mario Airship level music's pretty good [Music] too for all the dickish projectile hurling enemies in this thing Rocky wrenches aren't bad they don't move and their projectiles are a joke to avoid yeah probably the easiest enemy was introduced in the finale we get these shiny new tail stickers everywhere and the concept is pretty cool you just swing your tail and a projectile either disappears or gets redirected back at the enemy sure that did a lot we've seen too too many airships in Mario before but this one's pretty original that's it just B on a bullet they don't even count as real enemies and what's possibly the dumbest plan ever we take a missile launcher turn it around and make the ship blow itself apart while we're still on it Mario Just dust himself off at the sight of it which is pretty cute it's not like the story had any tension or drama anyway we know they'll both be fine then we get to our big Showdown with Bowser Junior he puts up a barrier so our attacks can't do much it's obvious we're in a boss fight that tests our skills with our new tail congratulations this is the second time you've qualified as having boss design not bad for 15 attempts now the fight's pretty fun and sure beats all the lame bosses we've had so far it's a shame they only figured out how to make a boss fight right before the end that Airship was all right I'd say it was good Junior was the only boss fight I had any fun with and the level itself was creative you know maybe this will finally get good the buildup was pretty epic some levels have been good and it's the finale they always save their best for the end Bowser sky castle kamix back for more well it's the exact same Third Rate boss fight is chapter 2 he doesn't even have higher stats he has 20 hp your second to last boss is verbatim the chapter 2 mid boss the only difference is splitting into three so we got to figure out the real one oh never mind that's what would happen in normal RPGs you can't select Targets in this game so it's just blindly attacking until you eventually hit the right one aren't you so glad kamik is here such a worthwhile character introduction I'm so glad kamik was one of only three characters they dedicated energy to making and now he's dead like he actually [Music] died well well that sucked but after that we get a whole ass sky castle to run through and our final level is a straight line that's seriously it this time lapse is the entire level according to interviews they intended for mini games like the stuff you did in Bowser's Castle in Paper Mario 1 they cut it from the final game because I guess they thought that would be fun and memorable or would give the ending any sense of finality this for a final level somehow managed to still disappoint me after everything else I was expecting a little more going on for the big finish than [Music] nothing oh boy my favorite Bowser quote from this game I want to add that mamoto was quoted saying he hated the way the developers of this game treated Bowser the man man's innocent just saying it's the final fight with Bowser and it's horrible it's no hyperbole to say this is the worst final boss fight I've ever played in an RPG it's an RPG a bad RPG but I guess I don't see a lot of bad games through to the end so there's probably a worse one out there somewhere each of the five phases of this thing by the way is unenjoyable for different reasons so it's impossible to make a blanket statement for the whole fight instead we'll go through it Point by Point Bowser's first phase involves him summoning enemies that keep respawning the damage on all of them working together is pretty steep so they mean for you to use the tape or stapler to shut the doors the enemies come out of the game never told you you needed these did you expect it to start now Bowser also has frankly a ton of HP so high damage thing stickers are a must for the fight as a whole I feel anyone would bring high damage stickers to a final fight and it's their fault if they didn't we've been through this song and dance enough by now so the game gets a pass on that part they're captive and have to listen to my horrible [Applause] playing in phase two a wamp guard's Bowser and must be destroyed every hit does one damage to the old block and he must be hit 50 times so you need multi-hit stickers or you could wait for him to fall over and use the scissors as comically shown on his back the game never tells you you needed this ahead of time and it's real istic that you didn't bring any good multi-hit items when trying to stock up on things stickers so you have neither of his weaknesses phase three has Bowser commanding Fireballs to hit you which hurt for a lot it's possible to weaken them with the refrigerator the shaved ice or the fan you guessed it game never indicated you needed to bring these either it's not so much the requiring of powerful items to win that's fine it's just all these damn specific checks for them phase four needs you to use tail stickers which the chain chomp gives you if you don't have it one hit he's done that one's fine I guess and you probably even have a leftover tail from Bowser Junior's Airship the Final Phase is the most complex and the most suckish okay so like try to follow along here because this goes places Bowser becomes a giant and things get really heated up after that you can't do much to hurt him he's too strong Kirsty pops out of her hat and decides she needs to die right Here and Now wait what that was a pretty big tonal Whiplash from how everything was before this she decides to sacrifice herself and becomes a sticker because only a sticker from the sticker star could ever match Bowser's power even though we spent the whole game collecting the five rail stickers we could use instead never mind go ahead whatever kills you faster I'll masch the a button to make it come sooner I've earned this her final words are that she'd never forgive you if you sold her in a shop turns out if you do she's canonically worth 15 coins I rolled my eyes at this moment maybe I'm a horrible person for this but kirsty's death was one of the rare times I thought this game was really funny that might sound harsh but sticker star suddenly trying to force me to feel sad over the abrupt death of its obnoxious useless hint system is so baffling it's kind of amazing this fictional sticker lady is so useless to the point where her living or dying is of no consequence I recently gained an even greater dislike for this section because it was so hard to figure out what to even say about it it can be pretty sensitive territory to say that a death scene made me laugh and this was genuinely hard for me to talk about it's just so forced they had this armchair quarterback boss me around for the last 20 hours and then killed her off with nothing in between it all just made me think they're really going for this with this character okay man [ __ ] Kirsty moments solely made to make people cry really stand out to me I can see why this fight needed something big to happen as good final battles have a shifting balance of power that goes back and forth I would say that they could have picked any other character for this but that's the thing there are none this is a consequence of not making characters she's the only character they can try to make us feel for and Kirsty never did anything to make herself admirable heck she never did anything to make herself helpful either the story isn't built up to this moment none of this is sad it's shot and Frid that I never have to listen to her and a driel ever again and laughter that this complete non story thinks it can pull off having emotion at 11:59 p.m. when they put in no effort before this it feels like I'm being told what to feel rather than just feeling it about the only thing that feels genuine is the part where she say she's sorry for making me go on this adventure which reads more like a meta joke about the quality of this game I guess you could say she fell flat though I have to admit and I know some of you are waiting for this this moment is brought up significantly by The Amazing song spectacular finale I guess even the composer was celebrating kirsty's death in style [Music] I mean it when I say this is one of the best Mario songs ever and if the goodbye held actual Wade I'm sure people would have cried their way through this fight it's awesome but hey the [ __ ] is dead or something so back to the battle now that we can hurt Bowser You Must Destroy oh God Bowser's arms just when it seemed like this game would only ruin turn-based Paper Mario it manages to bmer my favorite thing in Super Paper Mario as well I decided to try this boss fight without any special thing stickers to see how far I could get and I just barely failed to win at this phase I ran out of stickers and run I can kill Bowser by doing nothing I'm saved or not if you run out of stickers they give you a run button that doesn't work so that you can slam your face into the concrete because Mario's turn ending gives you a free sticker and they have to give you some way to waste your turn to make that happen this was their solution to making every attack consumable on our second attempt I want to recommend the boom box though not required its effected double your attack power really saved me here it will at least make you not have to use as many stickers to win which you're probably pretty low on all of this is horrible that's what like five specific rare stickers they want you to have for this fight with no indication you needed to bring them at all beforehand and that's in addition to needing to bring lots of high damage stuff to outpace his attacks Bowser deserved better he's four unfun boss fights from this game mashed into one as I alluded to earlier yes this is the only boss fight in the whole game that you aren't allowed to run from after seeing what it's like without bringing a guide your only option is to fight hit a brick wall you had no way of predicting die go get the sticker you needed from town fight again hit another brick wall and die until you've seen all the phases plus this is assuming you even know the effects of the thing stickers my first time I had no idea they had effects they nuked every fight up to this point in one turn the enemies were already dead so wait these things had effects what they do anything besides damage if you don't know the effects of the stickers much less have the right ones this fight drags on and I've seen multiple streamers get stuck here for over an hour seriously how do people figure this crap out who has the patience to go through all these and see what works best the only thing I can say to the final boss fights credit is that the thing stickers they intend for you to beat Bowser with are pretty hard to miss so 99% of players will at least be able to buy them at sling a thing once they find a list this is like all those times where they put sticker checks at the end of a level but for a level you can't quit out of then as if this wasn't the worst final Bowser fight ever Bowser never said a single word in this whole game this bit I did earlier it wasn't a joke I think that's the worst part waiting for him to open his mouth and be hilarious and hammy but getting nothing the level before him was nothing the second to last boss was nothing thing the finale was the [ __ ] worst level in this whole game Sticker Star managed to keep getting worse all the way to the end in world six I only enjoyed the Airship which means our final good level count is 8 out of 39 I enjoyed 20% of this game thank you good levels thank you now let's get that princess [Music] oh my God a main character said something now let me tell you why paper Peach sucks now paper Peach was one of my personal favorite characters she was a far cry from Peach in the main series always taking things into her own hands and doing what she could in the face of bad situations eventually even becoming a Great Hero Of Legend alongside Mario himself honestly she she was kind of a badass here she gets three lines she gets kidnapped she shows up at the end and says congratulations that is all she means nothing and changes nothing her capture isn't even the main conflict since that's getting the sticker Comet back from Bowser and he just used that power to get Peach on the side I can't even remember a time where any toad cared she was gone they were all too busy talking about how hilarious it is that they're made of paper you could actually remove her from this plot and nothing would change Bowser still does everything he does by merely having the sticker Comet and that's the main thing we were sent here to fix dude now that we met Peach I just realized sticker star managed to ruin toad ruin Peach ruin Bowser ruin partners and ruin turnbas battles in the span of one game all while actively trying to create something good that's astounding failure we end with the party at Princess Peach's castle that she was trying to hold the day everything went arai yep it's just Paper Mario 1's ending again look at all the friends we made everybody's here toad number 642 toad number 347 even toad number 97324 oh I'm glad the steart came he's pretty cool Bowser tries to steal the sticker Comet again hardy har Bowser and Kirsty is alive again they handwave away everything by saying Mario wished for this to happen so even her death is pointless and means nothing it really was just weak unearned drama in a story that doesn't support it you might question why Mario even liked her enough to do this when he could have wished for anything else but I'm actually in agreement with him on this one I loved Kirsty dying so much I wished for her to come back to life because that means someday she can die all over again it's time for the end credits poor Luigi man you thought his role was small in Super Mario 64 ouch he was demoted to an Easter egg who never says a word you only get to see him lead the parade at the end if you find him in all five stages he's hiding in yeah you have to unlock the series tradition I guess they had to give him one last middle fing before the Year of Luigi that kicked up a couple months after this game was released you know I guess that means they ruined Luigi too in the credits we see this game had 12 writers 12 11 are people who worked only as writers with how little text there is in this game I can't explain this we're not done yet though sticker star has a post game something I'm sure barely anybody played it also sucks being brief with with this the sticker grounds were repaired and you earn bonuses for achieving various Milestones I did horribly and I'm proud as for this Banner that says we somehow collected zero stickers remember that guy I said I wanted to save under the fountain all the way back at the beginning of this thing I guess I sort of forgot while complaining about everything else damn that's some impressive vitriol he was down there for months this toad opens a sticker Museum you're meant to donate one of each sticker type to this is up my alley in one idea I was glad stuck around in future games but for this specific one I never wanted to play the game enough to complete it your reward for cataloging all 160 stickers is a sound test and a beastiary who cares about a beastiary when you already have 100% and have no reason to ever fight another enemy ever again I don't know maybe it would have been a little helpful if some in-game resource told you the weakness of enemies and bosses a little bit sooner H it's cemented as one of the most useless rewards for 100% completion when most games start you off with this basic feature here's a big kicker though you see that little tab on the viewfinder that's a coin slot yeah there's a coin slot on the side of this thing one coin that's I don't remember that either slap in the face even after 100 pering the game you're expected to pay to see the enemies you don't pay per enemy either no you instead pay for a minute of viewing time and then get kicked out and have to hey again you may only scroll through the enemies one at a time too oh goody one enemy at a time in a linear order dude yeah you also can't scroll backwards if you want to see another wait that was it it's on a timer like an actual like viewing thing oh my God let me mash as fast as I can then I knew that there was a coin slot I didn't know there was a timer for this I'll pra the sound test though or I would have if they actually bothered to put the whole soundtrack in they only put 20 9 tracks out of 78 into the sound test so good job 37% of the way there is more than the amount of the game I enjoyed they left out snow rise and spectacular finale but gave us all these forgettable cutscene songs instead there's a couple hits here but come on if it doesn't have snow rise I'm just going to go on YouTube and listen instead the sound test is similarly on a timer a badly programmed timer at that I was so so freaking like just is is his bobbing there he goes he just changed he changed that you didn't do that I didn't touch it my hand wasn't even on the system oh he changes the song I thought he left no he changes the song on his own Mario will just skip to the next song every 4 minutes because he gets bored but the timer doesn't reset if you manually change tracks yourself so every second you take to find the song you want that's another second closer Mario is to just skipping what you wanted to listen to why on Earth would you make your developers do more work to make things less functional and this happens so often in this game where making something better would have taken less work it's like they knew how to make a good game but willingly went out of their way to not do so you couldn't even showcase the music right and it's one of the few positives of this game I'm done Paper Mario sticker star is the greatest disappointment in Nintendo's history nothing else even comes close to this divide between expectation versus reality no other Mario game is this insipid and gluten-free with a side of diet soda it comes off as an obligation that was commissioned due to how well it would sell but no one had any idea what to do with it and then it somehow wasn't canceled when it wasn't coming together it's excruciating to play with only a few fun parts to make up for it basically every new idea flopped and the worst thing is it's long this is a great example of how games can be too long for what they are some people point out the new games have humor and great music so you can't say they're all bad but to that I say you know what else had amazing music and good jokes the Old Paper Mario that also had better gameplay in stories I think people lump sticker star in with its Sequel and assume sticker star is funny too not really he doesn't even try sticker star has what like four jokes in its whole runtime and one of them was Kirsty dying but even if it did have some good jokes and a few good songs so what that isn't a game aside from saying this installment has the worst backtracking in the series which it does and has a worst version of The Originals plot which it does at no point in this entire review until now have I ever compared sticker star directly to the original trilogy I didn't feel it was necessary it's a bad game even when taken on its own it's just worse if you win an expecting payer for Mario 4 which by the way is what they advertised it as but okay let's throw away all of that and let's say that there was a Creative Vision for a cute little arts and crafts theme game for the kids no real strategy or depth and you can just SK past everything if you really want to Great make a new franchise this would be like if the next Dark Souls wasn't remotely about anything people liked about dark souls and their justification was well we aren't officially refer refering to Dark Souls as an RPG in our company's press releases anymore we've decided to officially refer to Dark Souls as a farming game from now on so you can't criticize it for failing as an RPG oh and we aren't going to make games like the old style for the next 10 years or let anyone else make one because this is our new vision but we are going to advertise it as a main sequel to those games because we still want the fans to buy it oh and the new farming Direction has no strategy or resource management and won't resemble a farming game in any way so even people who like farming games won't like it either because artistic Vision I've seen people say you're an adult this game is for kids and that's why you can't understand it the original Paper Mario was my first story driven game and it was so simple I could pick it up at the age of 10 the story got me pumped up and they kept pushing the envelope and iterating so much on it that the sequels continued to impress me as a 14 and a 17-year-old I've replayed those games in my 20s and could appreciate the battle system in characters even more so than I could as a kid and that's saying a lot because Paper Mario inspired me as a child I drew the characters all the time it was a contributing factor to me wanting to be an artist at that age I would theorize about what was going to happen next the old Games took their audience seriously they didn't just go it's for seven-year-old so who cares I think kids are smart kids know when they're being talked down to and when they're being left out of the real fun seeing something this important fall this far sucked and that's what I find the most disgraceful this isn't just Paper Mario this is Mario freaking Mario the single biggest icon in video games this is without a doubt one of the shoddiest products to ever feature Mario's face on the front cover Mario deserves to have great RPGs and until this came along he did I know some people feel like I'm beating a dead horse by continuing to talk about sticker star and fair enough but the series continued on this path for 10 years I genuinely thought in 2013 after playing this well sticker star was awful but at least they won't do it again I couldn't believe how wrong I was we'd get a new Paper Mario game and even if it was at least better than sticker star that's not exactly a high bar and I don't consider that much of a defense if anything I found it more frustrating that color splash and origami King had real potential in some good parts but they just refused to allow these games to live up to their full potential and kept holding them to all these bizarre restrictions on how fun or creative the game was allowed to be are you serious you're saying well we're not allowed to make the game that fun who does that didn't stop with Paper Mario either we had Mario and Luigi get increasingly plain as the decade went by and we landed on a subpar remake of Bowser's Inside Story then the developer went bankrupt and we haven't heard from that series since it just wouldn't stop my opinion of sticker star kept getting lower the longer we went in this direction and how much more hopeless it looked so I kept having new things to say about this thing I cared about this next part is something I wrote mere days before the announcement of the Thousand-Year Door remake I left it in because I like how it reads now I said sticker star damaged Mario's reputation badly there's a reason why people are so averse to these RPGs trying new things now I can respect the folks at intelligence systems for experimenting a little since I consider Super Paper Mario to be a high point that wouldn't have happened if they just made every game the same way but I think it's time to give what worked before another shot it's been 19 years we've had four consecutive games that are drastically different from the original two it would actually be the least stagnant thing in the world to give the old stuff another try instead we have a series that's so stagnant it's repeating the same mistakes for the third game in a row now I don't see how going back to its roots now would be any more stagnant than that pretty nice yeah back to the present the direction we're going in now has me more hopeful for the future Nintendo's in a good place now in the previous era I could not imagine them allowing Super Mario RPG or Thousand-Year Door to exist alongside these new games and we got both of them it's not uncommon for developers to remake an earlier game to figure out what worked and get things back on track and yeah the Mario and Rabbids games are good too I didn't forget about them I'm glad I don't have a reason to play sticker star anymore I felt happy when I beat Bowser which didn't happen the first time I finished it we're done with this era of Paper Mario it came to an end right as this review came to an end sticker star wasn't an important step for the series going forward it wasn't a return to form it isn't a good introduction to the series as a hole it fails as an RPG it fails as a story at being a Mario G game at being its own thing and feels like it was made by some space alien who's only heard about what an RPG is like in passing and never saw a Mario game since Mario 3 and I think that's the worst thing entertainment can be it's unnecessary and it won't be [Music] missed [Music] I

Channel: chuggaaconroy

Views: 293,607

Keywords: Nintendo, Let's Play, Howto, How to, Walkthrough, Guide

Id: rUEdHCGNvpo

Length: 174min 30sec (10470 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 06 2023