This is a game I've had bad blood with for a looong time, and I've made no secret about it on this site before. I was so excited to hear about getting another turn-based Paper Mario game after Super Paper Mario was more of an action game, that I was probably never going to like this when I played it 7 years ago. It is not at all trying to be a revival of the gameplay style of the first two Paper Mario games, and is doing something else entirely. What spurred my desire to give it another try, in fact, was when I was researching online after playing Paper Mario Color Splash. I was reading the Wikipedia page for this game and saw that the game's director, when asked if it was an RPG before the game was out, denied that it was and insisted it was an action/adventure game. The game had positive reviews at the time, and I know that even some people on this site have spoken positively about it before (I think it was Sarge?), so I knew there was definitely some enjoyment that could be found here. I already knew that it was a bad RPG, so this time I went in looking for a good action/adventure game, and that's pleasantly what I found. I looked as much as I could for hidden stuff, but I didn't do all 8 super flags. It took me a little over 21 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game.
First of all, I will address my chief complaint with the game my last time through it: The game is a bad RPG. Very specifically, battles are a complete waste of time, because there is no reward for doing them other than money, and money isn't that important. Like Color Splash would kinda continue, you have a limited supply of battle stickers, and those stickers are your ability to fight. Getting into battles just drains your sticker supply and means you have less to use in boss encounters. It's a pretty terrible set up for an RPG, but a fairly typical one for an action/adventure game. Having to deal with avoiding enemies to conserve resources and not expecting rewards greater than what you put in is nothing out of the ordinary for an action/adventure game, and approaching the game that way genuinely changed my mind about what I'd previously seen as its biggest flaw.
While on the topic of the battle system, I'll continue on it here. So like Color Splash would continue to do, you can find all sorts of stickers with varying effects. You can find different kinds of jump and hammer moves as well as special ones like a raccoon tail or a frog suit that let you dodge attacks in a specific way. In addition, you also have Things (non-paper objects, like a vacuum or a pair of scissors) that you can find in the world and have turned into more powerful stickers that can easily win you a normal encounter or also serve as solutions to environmental puzzles or boss weaknesses. Color Splash generally improves on this system, but does actually have some steps back in terms of design.
Where Color Splash just has every battle card you find be part of a larger deck of cards, Sticker Star has a sticker album. More powerful stickers, particularly Thing stickers, are physically larger in the sticker album, so you need to consider just how much you'd rather have a more powerful arsenal or one that will last longer. In addition to that, having 2-8 pages of stickers to sort through is simply faster to sort through than shuffling back and forth between a deck of 50 battle cards. Lastly, where Color Splash has a requirement to use a boss' weakness to defeat them (they're invulnerable unless the proper thing is used on them at the correct time), Sticker Star doesn't have this stipulation most of the time. There are some boss fights that are effectively impossible without the boss' weakness being exploited (and some that require a counter move like the raccoon tail to even hurt them at all), but a surprising amount of them can just be brute-forced through with enough healing and proper use of action commands. It's not necessarily a better design, per se, but it's nice to have the option.
The main reason it isn't outright a better design relates to how Sticker Star is, at the end of the day, an all-around inferior game to Color Splash. The main reason that not being forced to use a boss' weakness to beat them is nice is because you only have environmental hints as to what a boss' weakness is in the first place, where Color Splash has a character who will give you big hints as to which Things you should have prepared for the next area you'll go to so you don't hit a road block. I surprisingly never had to look up which Thing I needed to solve a certain puzzle, but part of that is down to dumb luck and part of it is also down to just remembering the solution from my first attempt through this game (where I got like 3/4ths of the way through the game, apparently). However, I did still run into places where I needed to totally backtrack out of a level in order to go back and get a smattering of Thing stickers that were likely solutions to the puzzle I'd come across. This all wraps up into a larger problem of the game generally not respecting your time, as the battles still feel like wastes of time because they can take so long (longer than just a Super Mario-esque Goomba-stomp takes, at least) and have very little reward.
Something that does shine quite well is the presentation. Particularly the music, which isn't quite as overall great as Color Splash, but is still a damn fine selection of tunes. The paper-craft design of the world is also leaned into a bit, particularly with characters picking up objects and crumpling them up like paper, but it (once again) isn't leaned into as an aesthetic quite as hard as Color Splash would do it. The only real issue that I had was because of not playing in 3D (I only have a 2DS XL to play Japanese games on), there were two or three spots where not having 3D depth made a jump more awkward to make than it should've been.
Finally you have the writing, which is not as bad as I remember, but still comes off as a pale imitation of Color Splash after that game's writing is so good. The game has a lot of larger plot elements that go on to be reused and refined in Color Splash. You have a single new partner who is your constant companion throughout the game and they teach you to do the game's key mechanics, you'll occasionally lose your companion and have to deal with how to fight without them, and even the final battle has a very similar set-up to how your partner will help you fight. The more linear, stage-based world design is even started in this game and continued in the next (even though this game is far more linear in its approach to things). But overall, Kirsti just comes off as a less funny and endearing Huey, as she doesn't have nearly as much dialogue, and just as much of it is about giving you instructions as it is about making humorous commentary on the current situation. The pacing of the dialogue is much more in line with a typical Mario & Luigi game (fairly large spans of no dialogue interspersed with NPCs who talk a decent bit) rather than the almost VN-esque text frequencies of Color Splash. The dialogue is funny, but there just isn't enough of it. Heck, Bowser is in this game and literally doesn't have a single spoken line of dialogue.
A somewhat common complaint I've seen about this game online is that the overall story is lacking, but I honestly believe that that barely matters. Paper Mario has never been a series that benefited significantly from a story that tried significantly to talk about larger points of the human condition. Super Paper Mario arguably has one of the more serious overall themes of grappling with one's own existential mortality, but no one holds that up as the shining pinnacle of the series. The most memorable parts of it have related to the humor and the character found throughout the world, and this game does a good job of continuing that, as does Color Splash in improving upon it further. This game having a fairly fluffy and silly approach to its storytelling is a valid observation, but I don't believe it's a complaint any more meaningful than complaining that the Mario platformer games don't have enough social commentary in them.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Approached the right way, there is a decent amount of fun to be had with this game. Playing it after Color Splash certainly made its shortcomings stand out all the more, but none of its flaws make the experience totally worthless. I still believe it's the worst Paper Mario game, but it's not by nearly as much of a margin as I believed previously, and it is far from a bad game. If you can find it for $10 like I did, then it is a fine game to hop in and out of at your own pace.
First of all, I will address my chief complaint with the game my last time through it: The game is a bad RPG. Very specifically, battles are a complete waste of time, because there is no reward for doing them other than money, and money isn't that important. Like Color Splash would kinda continue, you have a limited supply of battle stickers, and those stickers are your ability to fight. Getting into battles just drains your sticker supply and means you have less to use in boss encounters. It's a pretty terrible set up for an RPG, but a fairly typical one for an action/adventure game. Having to deal with avoiding enemies to conserve resources and not expecting rewards greater than what you put in is nothing out of the ordinary for an action/adventure game, and approaching the game that way genuinely changed my mind about what I'd previously seen as its biggest flaw.
While on the topic of the battle system, I'll continue on it here. So like Color Splash would continue to do, you can find all sorts of stickers with varying effects. You can find different kinds of jump and hammer moves as well as special ones like a raccoon tail or a frog suit that let you dodge attacks in a specific way. In addition, you also have Things (non-paper objects, like a vacuum or a pair of scissors) that you can find in the world and have turned into more powerful stickers that can easily win you a normal encounter or also serve as solutions to environmental puzzles or boss weaknesses. Color Splash generally improves on this system, but does actually have some steps back in terms of design.
Where Color Splash just has every battle card you find be part of a larger deck of cards, Sticker Star has a sticker album. More powerful stickers, particularly Thing stickers, are physically larger in the sticker album, so you need to consider just how much you'd rather have a more powerful arsenal or one that will last longer. In addition to that, having 2-8 pages of stickers to sort through is simply faster to sort through than shuffling back and forth between a deck of 50 battle cards. Lastly, where Color Splash has a requirement to use a boss' weakness to defeat them (they're invulnerable unless the proper thing is used on them at the correct time), Sticker Star doesn't have this stipulation most of the time. There are some boss fights that are effectively impossible without the boss' weakness being exploited (and some that require a counter move like the raccoon tail to even hurt them at all), but a surprising amount of them can just be brute-forced through with enough healing and proper use of action commands. It's not necessarily a better design, per se, but it's nice to have the option.
The main reason it isn't outright a better design relates to how Sticker Star is, at the end of the day, an all-around inferior game to Color Splash. The main reason that not being forced to use a boss' weakness to beat them is nice is because you only have environmental hints as to what a boss' weakness is in the first place, where Color Splash has a character who will give you big hints as to which Things you should have prepared for the next area you'll go to so you don't hit a road block. I surprisingly never had to look up which Thing I needed to solve a certain puzzle, but part of that is down to dumb luck and part of it is also down to just remembering the solution from my first attempt through this game (where I got like 3/4ths of the way through the game, apparently). However, I did still run into places where I needed to totally backtrack out of a level in order to go back and get a smattering of Thing stickers that were likely solutions to the puzzle I'd come across. This all wraps up into a larger problem of the game generally not respecting your time, as the battles still feel like wastes of time because they can take so long (longer than just a Super Mario-esque Goomba-stomp takes, at least) and have very little reward.
Something that does shine quite well is the presentation. Particularly the music, which isn't quite as overall great as Color Splash, but is still a damn fine selection of tunes. The paper-craft design of the world is also leaned into a bit, particularly with characters picking up objects and crumpling them up like paper, but it (once again) isn't leaned into as an aesthetic quite as hard as Color Splash would do it. The only real issue that I had was because of not playing in 3D (I only have a 2DS XL to play Japanese games on), there were two or three spots where not having 3D depth made a jump more awkward to make than it should've been.
Finally you have the writing, which is not as bad as I remember, but still comes off as a pale imitation of Color Splash after that game's writing is so good. The game has a lot of larger plot elements that go on to be reused and refined in Color Splash. You have a single new partner who is your constant companion throughout the game and they teach you to do the game's key mechanics, you'll occasionally lose your companion and have to deal with how to fight without them, and even the final battle has a very similar set-up to how your partner will help you fight. The more linear, stage-based world design is even started in this game and continued in the next (even though this game is far more linear in its approach to things). But overall, Kirsti just comes off as a less funny and endearing Huey, as she doesn't have nearly as much dialogue, and just as much of it is about giving you instructions as it is about making humorous commentary on the current situation. The pacing of the dialogue is much more in line with a typical Mario & Luigi game (fairly large spans of no dialogue interspersed with NPCs who talk a decent bit) rather than the almost VN-esque text frequencies of Color Splash. The dialogue is funny, but there just isn't enough of it. Heck, Bowser is in this game and literally doesn't have a single spoken line of dialogue.
A somewhat common complaint I've seen about this game online is that the overall story is lacking, but I honestly believe that that barely matters. Paper Mario has never been a series that benefited significantly from a story that tried significantly to talk about larger points of the human condition. Super Paper Mario arguably has one of the more serious overall themes of grappling with one's own existential mortality, but no one holds that up as the shining pinnacle of the series. The most memorable parts of it have related to the humor and the character found throughout the world, and this game does a good job of continuing that, as does Color Splash in improving upon it further. This game having a fairly fluffy and silly approach to its storytelling is a valid observation, but I don't believe it's a complaint any more meaningful than complaining that the Mario platformer games don't have enough social commentary in them.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Approached the right way, there is a decent amount of fun to be had with this game. Playing it after Color Splash certainly made its shortcomings stand out all the more, but none of its flaws make the experience totally worthless. I still believe it's the worst Paper Mario game, but it's not by nearly as much of a margin as I believed previously, and it is far from a bad game. If you can find it for $10 like I did, then it is a fine game to hop in and out of at your own pace.