I find it funny that the best way to kneecap a character's (or anything) chances of winning is to completely remove the award. Like removing the Worst Enemy award so that Hammer Bro. won't be winning it, or removing Most Disappointing Game because Paper Mario: Sticker Star keeps winning.
Yeah, I agree that's pretty funny. Like, I heard that they also had to remove the Worst Character Award in the Fail Awards since Pink Gold Peach kept winning it from the year she was introduced onward. So to keep the same character/enemy/game/whatever from always winning the same award in a landslide "victory" each year, they had to completely shelve that particular category.
Why is Paper Mario Sticker Star so hated on? I've never actually played it nor seen gameplay of it outside of Snifit or Whiffit but I have heard that it is a slow game with an unfun battle system.
Why is Paper Mario Sticker Star so hated on? I've never actually played it nor seen gameplay of it outside of Snifit or Whiffit but I have heard that it is a slow game with an unfun battle system.
The closest you'll get to Luigi in Sticker Star is finding him through five silent cameo's, and if you manage to get all of those cameo's, he'll appear in the game's ending credits, leading the parade as he did in Paper Mario 64 (and to a lesser extent, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door).
Why is Paper Mario Sticker Star so hated on? I've never actually played it nor seen gameplay of it outside of Snifit or Whiffit but I have heard that it is a slow game with an unfun battle system.
Sticker Star defender here, but I think I've heard enough to know the answers
Lack of non Toad friendly NPCs, While prior Paper Mario games have a wealth of different species to meet, ranging from new ones, to old ones given ally status, to allied groups of normally enemy species, Sticker Star's allies are Toads, Toads, more Toads, and then one Wiggler.
Really just the story's small scope: We're confined to the Mushroom Kingdom, and the world themes are just traditional themes from Super Mario Bros. games. Especially New Super Mario Bros. games which (some parts of) the Mario fandom would grow to dislike more and more as they kept releasing. All Bowser does is cause havoc and kidnap Peach, things he does in more or less any video game. The story is to collect the all mystical shiny baubles, which is justification enough for a game, but this is only in service of fixing the thing that broke at the start, and while the story tries to explain what makes that thing important, many (including me) would argue that the attempt is not good enough to motivate the player through the game. The game has three "towns", and for the count to even reach three I have to strech the definition of "town" far more than actual RPG players. Its more like "1.5". In one sense, Mario isn't even exploring the world in this game, it's just a really big backyard that players have already been to twice before this game came out.
No Bowser: Bowser isn't a main character in the game. People like Bowser, and his over the top prideful and arrogant nature. Here, Bowser gets no dialogue. After the intro, where he powers up, his next appearance is at the end of the game, where he still has no dialogue and is only the end boss.
No customization: Without stats or equippable anythings, Sticker Star's battle system is just a back and forth of attacks with little in the way of customization or "builds". It may be a combat system, but if you want growth in the sense of the character getting stronger, Sticker Star doesn't provide that. Some people might even say Sticker Star has nothing in the way of strategy: this isn't a system where you can find an interesting niche set up or anything that feels personal to the player. (I think there's still "strategy" to the game, but it is true that there is less of it.)
Why battle anyway?: If getting better at fighting doesn't progress the player toward goals, why bother fighting to begin with? Experience points and levels serve to make players fight the optional minor enemies because without them the mandatory boss enemies will be impossible to defeat. Sticker Star has neither, so skipping every non-boss opponent is a valid means through the game. Some people say that shouldn't happen (I think they're wrong, they missed that Sticker Star values money highly and that is the main reward for fighting, but still.)
No Partners: This combines small scope and no customization. Without other characters to help in battle, the player is making fewer choices per turn. Without other characters outside of battle, the world feels smaller. All you get is Kersti, another fairy companion who has quips. They're a dime a dozen these days.
Inventory Mismanagement: Have you seen all those people who hate weapon durablity? Yeah its this. Since all of the attacks can only be used once, players have reason to not want to fight enemies, which will make them lose all their good attacks as they use them up in battles. People hate losing their hard earned stuff.
Overpowered Attacks: Things are universally overpowered for their size and their Action Commands being largely optional... but then they feel cheap to use. But since they're so good, using them on common enemies feels like a waste
(Poorly made) Point and Click Adventure:
Paperization, while conceptially very cute, is an absolute disaster of a puzzle solving mechanic. Mostly because whatever it does do is esentiallly a die roll, varying wildly depending on what setpiece the developers want to include. It's hard to determine when you need to paperize short of getting in the developer's heads. (This isn't helped by the game's text, whose best advice is to Paperize basically anytime you think you are stuck. Its not great advice, even if it is accurate.) Players could genuinely get stuck, with nothing in the game available to help them.
Often, the solution to puzzles is to use certain Things in Paperization, but the game's inventory mechanics discourage you from holding on to Things you don't intend to use and the game's battle system means that if you need to use a Thing in a puzzle, using it in a ballte before hand means you have to track down a second copy of the Thing to use. So players shouldn't use their Things in battle for any reason, and if they find a puzzle that requires a Thing that means backtracking all the way back to town to get the Thing. Mind that this means walking all the way back out of the level, because Sticker Star does not allow the player to quit out of uncompleted levels. And if a player uses the wrong Thing in a puzzle, the Thing is lost, meaning they wasted valuable time/in game money on obtaining the Thing. This discourages experimentation, which is kind of important to making the player want to sniff out the solution instead of being annoyed that they have to figure it out. Real point and click adventure games usually don't take away the player's items as the penalty for being wrong for a reason.
Boss fights double down on this already painful weakness. All of them have weaknesses to certain Stickers, usually always a kind of Thing. Unless the player is clairvoyant, they probably don't have that Thing in their possession. Without the weakness available, boss fights become endurance matches against particularly unfair opponents, and there's one boss who outright cannot be defeated without their weakness. I mean, the player could flee, but they still probably don't know what the weakness is and trying random Things to figure it out is both time consuming and inventory space consuming. If the player has the weakness, most bosses crumple at the slightest touch, perhaps making the battles too easy. In theory, the process of "figuring out the weakness" should counterbalance this, but odds are high players players who don't know the weakness don't have it on hand, so it isn't really a game of "figuring it out" to begin with.
After defeating a boss without using their weakness, Kersti reminds the player that they should have used the boss's weakness. For no reason... or rather, the developers wanted to encourage players to experiment but in practice it just made players feel bad.
Changing the style to be literal: Paper Mario: Sticker Star changes the series stylistically from "everyone looks like they are made of paper" to "everything is literally made of cardboard and paper, including the characters, but except the Things". These are very different styles, and some people did not like the swap.
(Yes, I am fully aware that I should just write a 'Shroom Sticker Star review section)
I'm just gonna say this and I know people are gonna hate me for this. I really don't like when Nintendo remasters their games such as what's happening with super Mario Galaxy although it first started with the All-Stars game got released I was OK with something like the advanced series But when you remastered something like the galaxy series, it looks looks worse than before like it was made by a fan or like a 3DS quality.
I agree for no fucking reason and Nintendo is so fucking greedy at this point that I want to really protest by actually buying products from the thrift store and I'm currently hunting for that
Mario Kart Live Home Circuit should not cost as much as it does. It's pretty much an RC car with a camera and Switch software. The software itself is free.
