The Official Nintendo Direct Topic!

[MaestroUGC]

Here's the thing regarding Sticker Star and everything it does wrong:

Defining RPGs

1) RPG's are more than just turn-based, isolated combat simulators. In fact, the term "role playing game" is so broad there isn't even a real consensus as to what it means, where the line between that and other genres are, and the line of "western" vs. "eastern (or jrpg)" just blurs that distinction even more. The Paper Mario series (at least the original two) and Super Mario RPG from which they are a spiritual successor, are very much in the vein of the traditional model of RPGs. What's more is that they are some of the functionally easiest RPGs ever made. You mention the complexity of "classes", "menus", and other details are mitigated by a few things. You're party during a single battle consists of 2 people, Mario and a Partner. Mario's move set can grow, adapt, and improve as you see fit; while his partners have clearly defined strengths and weaknesses, with both parties having independent health meters. Your moves can be improved by using items for varying effects, and you even have a mana system to allow for stronger attacks. It's very much a lite version of the classic Final Fantasy formula, and it's all turn based without having to worry about additional things like speed and attack frequency, or class development. There are no classes in Paper Mario, you have Mario who has the capacity to play whoever you want, and your partners who have specific skillsets which are very fundamental. There's no added complexities to the core gameplay mechanic, and each battle nets you experience, money, and items to improve your stats as you face stronger enemies.

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An Example of Good Change

2) Super Paper Mario changed the central gameplay mechanic by getting rid of the isolated battles, but it adopts a real-time RPG system, like dungeon crawlers, and tracks your stats with every enemy you defeat. They adapt the partner system the not only help your now necessary platforming, but also make them useful tools when engaging with enemies. In addition they increase the party by giving you other people to play as besides Mario, giving you multiple methods of play and problem solving. Still not classes to track, and they remove menu navigation almost entirely with the exception of using items and changing your on-field party. While the game changes it's primary method of gameplay, it still preserves the central tenants of RPGs and core themes of the series.

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A Broken Core Mechanic

3) Sticker Star, being the fourth entry to the series, further changes things; but this time far more drastically. First, they change how you battle; the isolated fights return, but none of the mechanics typically seen in an RPG like this do. They replace the menus containing your moves and special abilities with a new method of play with the stickers. These stickers are now your moves that you can perform during your turn, which isn't immediately a bad thing, but the problem comes in when you realize they are a finite resource. If you're out of stickers, you're out of moves. Typically, the only time you run out of moves to use in this style of game is when you run out of mana and can't use your special or powered-up moves; you still have the ability to perform even the most basic attacks with all of the extra improvements you've applied to your stats. This is exacerbated by the fact that not only the fact that you're limited to how many "moves" you can have at any one time, but by how limited they are to acquire in the first place. Outside of finding them randomly in the world, you're only resort is to buy them from shops. You should not be forced to use resources earned just to have the ability to engage an enemy in which the central conceit of the game is engaging enemies. Imagine if your sword in any Legend of Zelda only have 10 swings before it just broke, forcing you to constantly buy a new one just to continue playing. Sure, you could argue "well you should just manage your resources better," but that only serves the point that being able to interact with your environment shouldn't be a finite resource.

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No Incentive for Playing

4) There's also the matter that, unlike every RPG like this ever, you don't get any long-term rewards for beating enemies besides bosses; at most you'll get a some coins and maybe a low level item or two. You don't get any experience from fighting enemies, experience which when accumulated makes you stronger or at least gives you more abilities to work with. This is such a central idea to RPGs that the fact it doesn't exist in Sticker Star is astounding. Sure, you can still have an RPG that doesn't have a traditional leveling system, but there still needs to be long term rewards for engaging with enemies; experience is more than just points, they a reward for getting better at the game and give you an opportunity to face bigger threats and beat them. It's a positive feedback loop every video game needs, an incentive to keep you playing. By taking that away you have no reason to engage with enemies, no reason to risk losing stickers that could be useful in a future encounter that you can't avoid; tying back to how you have a limited move count at any time in the game. Normally if you don't want to waste your special moves or item on common enemies you'll still have basic moves to deal with them without wasting your mana or items; and this is further aided by improving your stats with each encounter making dealing with low-level thugs all the easier. In Sticker Star, not only do you not have an incentive to not engage with any enemies (which is one of the main gameplay mechanics), but you're encouraged to actively skip them so as to be better prepared for boss fights. It forces you to play Sticker Star like a stealth-shooter like Metal Gear Solid, except the game isn't designed to do that; you can't sneak around something in a functionally two-dimensional space (which is what all Paper Mario games are, given that it's just a series of hallways with limited movement possible on the z-axis). Imagine if in Star Fox you only have 50 shots in any given mission, and if you ran out that was it; you'd be forced to make it through the level without firing your gun except in certain unavoidable situations, god help you if you got into a situation where you were forced to fight a large group of enemies without being able to reload (which is a recurring theme in Sticker Star). On the flip side this means there's no grinding, which is good for those who don't like that; but that also means you're not actively playing 70% of the game itself.

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Failure to Adapt the game to Changed Fundamental Mechanics

5) To compare Super Paper Mario, which itself changed a core mechanic to a new idea, Sticker Star took out all of the central themes of an RPG but didn't replace them with something else. SPM took out the battle system and replaced it with Mario-esque platforming, but kept all of the other RPG elements while also adding a level of platforming puzzles. Sure, it was a strange side-step from a working formula, but it at least adapted the RPG elements to this new style of gameplay and actually managed to enhance the experience because of it. Sticker Star took out all of the above points and didn't replace any of them; they reduced your main method of combat to an incredibly limited resource, removed any incentive to actually engage with enemies, and reduced it's own central mechanic to literal obstacles you have to overcome. Oh yeah, not only are this stickers limited in combat, but you have need some of them to not only get through the levels but some of them are needed to even beat some of the bosses. And before you say, "well that's not a bad thing, it just means you need to be extra careful about which stickers you use," to which I say would be fine, if you had any indication that you'd need them in the first place. Sticker Star doesn't telegraph, which you might think isn't a bad thing, but it's crucial to really any game. Telegraphing is how games let you know what puzzles are coming up, or even how to solve them on a smaller scale, so you can be prepared when you encounter it directly. Game Design 101: you're running through a level and you see spikes coming up and down in a sequence in a separate area from you, a little later you come across spikes directly in your path following that same pattern; you already know what the puzzle is and the game showed you how to solve it. Later it'll do this again with more complex patterns, but because you know how the puzzle works you're equipped to handle it as it gets harder. An enemy will jump into the ground to hide and surprise you, and later you'll be able to see him already hiding because you know what that looks like. Sticker Star doesn't do any of this, which becomes a problem if you accidently use a crucial sticker before you needed it, resulting in forcing you to backtrack to maybe find it again or buy it if you can. Now, I'm not saying games can't or shouldn't be cryptic, sometimes you have to rely on your intuition to solve a puzzle, but bad game designers create situations where you're left with guessing solutions to a problem. Sure, water beats fire, but unless you input the exact item the game wants, you can't solve this thing blocking your path, and there was no indication prior to this that I'd need this specific item.

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Explain Yourself

6) Sticker Star does a poor job at explaining itself. Outside of explaining the main mechanic of the game, you're left to your own devices to solve, well, everything else. I'm not talking about holding your hand while you play it through to the end, I'm just talking about explain main objectives the game wants you to complete. While anything with "Mario" in the title doesn't require you to be a member of MENSA to get to the end, they at least give you a well defined goal to achieve; reach the end of the level, win the race, get the star, don't die. Sticker Star gives no explanation for any of the tasks you need to solve; oh it'll show you that your path is blocked, but it won't give you any indication how to get past it, or even if you can get past it. There is a hint system in the game, but all it does is just highlight the problem without actually giving you a hint. In fact, that same hint system is taken away from you at one point in the game, giving you zero clarification on what the puzzle actually is. Tie this into the limited stickers you have and you're left with a lot of guess work and an equal amount of situations in which you can waste your stickers trying to solve. A lot of the boss fights are actually dependent on knowing the right stickers to use, but you'll never know that based on what the game actively tells you. If a game fails to convey it's incremental goals to the player that have to be met to advance towards the ultimate goal, it tends to discourage them from playing further. I realize that such a claim as this is largely subjective, but Sticker Star at most points in the game doesn't tell you how to beat the levels in order to advance the game. Compared to the other entries in this series, their goals are clearly described and will increasingly leave you to your own devices as the game progresses; but they still tell you or illustrate the objective for each room or area. Even SPM narrows it down to a very simple "reach the goal" for it's progression, but the obstacles in your way are clearly presented and the solutions are at least intuitive enough to solve. In most cases you're given various tools to solve a problem and you just need to figure out the right one to use.

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In summary Sticker Star is a bewildering abandonment of not only the Paper Mario formula, but standard RPG mechanics and tropes resulting in a bizarre non-game with little reason to actively play it. In most case you'll ignore a central mechanic of not only the genre, but the game itself (the battles), but it's other central mechanic is designed to be prohibitive to said mechanic. It fails as a follow-up to what is possibly one of the best designed games in RPGs (Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door), but it also fails at being an RPG in general; a failure which manifests itself in bad gameplay and equally flawed game design.

Your friend,
ZL "Maestro" Hogglesworth, esq.

[Nebbles]

That was the most beautiful Sticker Star smackdown I've ever read.

[Latios212]

being able to interact with your environment shouldn't be a finite resource.

Yeah, this is the thing that finally annoyed me to the point that I just stopped playing it.

[mikey]

Maestro where did you get those from
You didn't type them yourself obvs so just wonderinf

[Yug_Guy]

If we're on the Sticker Star hate bandwagon, I may as well add some of my own personal gripes with the game:

Thing Stickers

A decent idea in theory, right? Super-charged special attack stickers that can do massive damage in battle, right? Except that they are in my opinion, the worst things to be implemented in the game. It all boils down to one thing: their size. Sticker Star's combat relies on stickers, which are stored in an album on the bottom screen. Since you only have a finite amount of space to work with, it's key to maximize how many stickers you have in the album at any given time so you don't run out of stickers during battle. These Thing Stickers take up the space of about 4-6 regular combat stickers (or more, it's been a while since I've played it), making them space-inefficient in regards to the album. This means that I didn't even bother converting things into stickers at all, because they took up so much space. Problem is, you need these stickers in order to progress, because you need them to solve puzzles in the levels. Meaning you have to exit the level, walk back to the hub world, go to the fling-a-thing shop, go back and then you can finally progress in the level. And if you're thinking, "well why not just turn them into stickers if they're so important?" Because after a while, you eventually encounter enough things where turning them all into stickers would take up nearly all of your album space. Given the finite moves Maestro described above, this is not at all the optimal to play the game. The funny part is, this could've been solved by making one change: letting you use things without turning them into stickers first. BOOM: problem solved.

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Backtracking

Dear god, why do I have to backtrack in a freaking Paper Mario game? If this was just for sidequests and optional stuff like in SMP, then I'd be fine with it, but it turns out that it's necessary to beat the game. Let's start with World 2. In it, you're required to get all the different pieces of the whatever from the different levels. Okay then. So, you go through all the levels and collect the different pieces, and try to put them back together at the start of the boss level. But, there's one piece missing. So, where is it? It turns out that you have to go back to 2-3 (or whatever level it actually is), and find the secret alternate exit, to unlock another level that contains the final piece. WHY? What did this add to the gameplay? In literally every other Mario game an alternate exit leads to secrets and bonuses, they're not required to beat the game! Why couldn't you just unlock the last level normally? Wouldn't that accomplish the same thing? But the king has to be World 3, where you're tasked with capturing the missing segments of Wiggler, which are located in the different levels. And you know what sometimes (always?) happens when you confront a segment? It runs away into a different level. Again, WHY? It was in the middle of World 3 where I just turned off the game and said, "Nope. Screw this game."

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NPC's

Toads. Freaking Toads. They're the only friendly NPC's that you meet in the entirety of the game. Why? Isn't Paper Mario as a franchise known for creating new wacky characters to inhabit the Mario universe with? The last Paper Mario game, had dozens upon dozens of new, quirky, and interesting characters for us to play and interact with. And then you replace them all with Toads. I remember a line in an Iwata Asks the developers did saying that they had a challenge trying to make each of the Toads unique, since they all look the same. You know how many I remember after all these years? The guy in the sticker museum, some wimpy guy that always follows you around, and one that goes, "THAT'S RIGHT, IT'S CALLED A MONOPOLY BABY!"

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That puzzle at the end of World 1/beginning of World 2 I don't really care

FUCK THIS PUZZLE. This might've just been me, but there's this one puzzle I believe at the beginning of World 2 that requires you to paste 6 different stickers in order to open the door. There were 2 flowers, 2 mushrooms, and some other things, whatever. But when I went to paste the last mushroom sticker, it wouldn't let me. It turns out that you need a Poison Mushroom sticker in order to progress. I knew I had one at one point, but I threw it away because why on Earth would I keep a Poison Mushroom in my inventory? So I had to go back to where I thought I first encountered it, and hoped to God that if I defeated enough Buzzy Beetles then I would be graced with a Poison Mushroom. As luck would have it, I eventually got one, and finally moved on with the rest of the game. This was also about the same time where my enjoyment of the game started to go sour. Coincidence? I think not.

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In conclusion, it's a miracle that the development team managed to do nearly everything wrong with this game, despite it's polished aesthetics. Not just on a Paper Mario level, but on basic game design as a whole. The fact that even I, a guy who's only experience with Paper Mario has been via Super Paper Mario could realize how awful it is really shows how much they screwed up. In the meantime, I'll stay cautiously optimistic about Paper Mario: Color Splash. Because damn, those visuals tho.
Yes, I'm a bit salty. No, I will not apologize for it.

[Sebastian]

Maestro's spiel

I love you

[SlowPokemon]

You haven't played Sticker Star tho

I mean I don't contest that it's not good but you should play games before you bash them

[DonValentino]

Short impressions:

- Starfox Zero: I'm really excited to see Fox again, kinda worried for the mandatory motion controls though. Hopefully SF Guard being a standalone game will leave open the chance for online dogfights in SFZ.

- Splatoon Update: Eh, not appealing to me. I was hoping for playable Octolings once and for all, but...

- Mario & Sonic: Ehhhh, nope. Never have, never will.

- Super Mario Maker: Cool stuff, but I can't forget that there aren't SMB2 tilesets yet.

- FE x Shin Megami Tensei: Since I first saw it, it was clear that it wasn't what I expected, so pass.

- Lost Reavers: Not particularly interested, the game just seems to be enter some ruins, get some treasure and escape over and over.

- Paper Mario Color Splash: Ugh. It screams Sticker Star...

- Pokken: I hope it has some other game modes so it's not too repetitive, and I'm a little concerned about the roster's size, but we'll see...

- Zelda TP HD: Already got it lol

- My Nintendo: Not much was said, but I'm looking forward to it.

- Mario & Friends and AC amiibo party: Thanks but no thanks.

- New 3DS SNES VC: Uhhh it's nice, but so far I'm not interested in any game.

- Hyrule Warriors: Since the 3DS characters cannot be obtained in the Wii U version without Legends, I'll soooo pass. Not worth it.

- DQ, MH and other 3rd party stuff: Not interested in anything, sorry Ninty, try again.

- Rhythm Heaven: The rehashed minigames really turn me off on this one. The gameplay ends up being repetitive anyway.

- MP Federation Force: Yeeaaahhh... Riiiiiight....

- Kirby: Pfft. Kirby again. Where's my Wario Land I've been waiting for since 2008??


Don rates this Direct with a.... 7/10. Honestly, it left me as if I hadn't seen anything, either it was already seen games or unwanted/not promising reveals. Still, average good as expected, things are gearing up for the NX, so no big bombs yet obviously. E3 can't come soon enough!

[E. Gadd Industries]

I agree with a need for Wario Land! Oh, and I'll probably buy the next PM, but if it's anything like Sticker Star,  I may just keep it for looks. Ugh. (And Ima take time to read Maestro's smackdown tomorrow between programming courses)

[TheDreamingHawk]

NOA preparing private press event at Nintendo NY. Perhaps a new ND/The epic yearly E3 skit is incoming? Even with Nintendo's disappointing E3 presence, I can always count on an epic, humorous video!

[Nebbles]

Even if Nintendo will bomb at E3 this year (which I honestly think they will) I can hope for a good E3 skit.

[E. Gadd Industries]

I heard all they plan to talk about is LoZ. That's fine for the LoZ fans, but still, I'd like to think that variety is good. Perhaps I'm not the only one that shares this thought?

[Nebbles]

I love LoZ, but I'd like to see something else presented at E3. What, no Pokemon Sun and Moon? At all???

[SlowPokemon]

I heard all they plan to talk about is LoZ. That's fine for the LoZ fans, but still, I'd like to think that variety is good. Perhaps I'm not the only one that shares this thought?

You misunderstood--all that will be PLAYABLE at E3 will be Legend of Zelda. They never clarified anything as to what they'll talk about.

[E. Gadd Industries]

Oh. That's kinda better!