This game piqued my interest from the get-go, the melding of Wizardry style exploration and Punch-Out combat combined with the raw energy of Black Knight 2000 seemed promising if not interesting. Unfortunately, this elevator pitch barely holds together past the game’s first floor, unraveling into a series of incredibly tedious puzzles interrupted by constant ""random"" encounters. In reality, each floor has 3-5 distinct sets of enemy encounters that it will eventually stitch into the fabric of your soul as the monotony of the puzzle solving is interchanged with the monotony of repeating the same encounters over and over and over. Some fights do take you by surprise the first time, but ultimately most battles will boil down to:

*1. Hold Auto Attack
2. Parry
3. Repeat*

I suppose it lived up to its Dungeon Crawling influences more than I had anticipated, but at least those had a modicum of player progression and agency that FIGHT KNIGHT desperately lacks. Your options here are limited to supers and armors that add varying levels of risk/reward to your base kit, but ultimately the clunkyness of having to completely put the brakes on whatever you were doing in the dungeon to painstakingly walk back to the hub world just to change your equips defeats any situational benefit they may have had; and frankly, what you start with by default is better than the vast majority of what you unlock.

There is no carrot dangling on a stick here to keep you going, it’s so unbelievably bland in almost all aspects, and what is there in the way of dialogue is better left unmentioned; the amount of words spent saying absolutely nothing would make a Dark Souls NPC blush. Beneath the garish color palettes and repetitive music terribly unfit for how often (and how briefly) it rears its head is an experience that is nothing short of nauseating.
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Edit 12/05: It would be remiss of myself not to acknowledge the allegations of abuse levied at Team Sorcerobe and lead developer “Boen” by a former writer on the project. Boen has chosen to respond by flooding all available avenues of information including the game’s Steam discussion forums with vitriol and rage; engaging one-on-one with parasitic individuals lusting after the latest gamer drama and indulging them in kind with unprofessional and crude attempts at generating Kiwifarms-style interest in the matter for his own sake. The Steam reviews for this game are a reflection of that behavior, where you will find no shortage of hateful jabs at sufferers of mental illness and other depraved takes on the events. This is the Fight Knight Boen wants you to see, and I will not accept any spineless calls to simply "ignore the controversy" in light of this.

"lol Sticker Star sux" is not a joke. It's not the lowest hanging fruit. Well, it IS, but the lowest hanging fruit is what sustained our ancestors in fair Lascaux. We are compelled to reach for this fruit to ensure survival and propagation of our wretched species who will, in turn, use the same hand which sought fruit to craft this absolute fucking abomination.

Experiencing Paper Mario: Sticker Star made me a worse person. Let me explain:

This is not a game. It is a flashing screen in which you may or may not have any influence on what happens. Decisions you make have no outcome on battle. Everything is preordained. I am thoroughly convinced you can select stickers at random in each battle and still come out on top. I'm convinced of this because I utilized this exact strategy in a second attempt during my 2020 playthrough. Because yes, I wanted to graft physical and mental pain in place of the looming existential caused by a pandemic.

I was only walled when it came to boss fights. You can skate by Large Goomba without using its kismet Thing sticker. However, in any other boss battle, you MUST use the invisibly assigned Thing card. There is no way to get around this. You will lose. And if you happen to not have the fated Thing card, which the game may or may not hint at, you must exit the battle, go buy the thing from the shop (or god fucking forbid, you never encountered the Thing, so now you must go track it down in the wild), and attempt the battle again. And you must use this EXACTLY ONE (1) Thing during the battle at the exact poorly-telegraphed moment to win with ease.

There is no strategy. There is no fun. Simply put, this was a $40 soundtrack released in 2012 with a completely unhinged (and un-playtested) visual experience included as a bonus. This visual experience slots into a Nintendo system, but again, it is by no means a game.

I will never forgive this alleged game for ruining an amazing series for no other reason than "Miyamoto likes Toad." If this is your favorite Paper Mario game, it is either the only one you have ever played, and thus playing it put you off the series entirely, or you are LYING. Or seeing the sexy Birdo/goat scene emulsified your brain using the 3D slider as a vector.

If it is your favorite game, or even if you think it's "good," then please by all means articulate a response. But your response cannot simply be "idk because I just liked it." Why did you like it?? What is there to like?? I don't understand!! I'm chained to this flesh prison until a zoomer can explain to me why this is an objectively good game!!

Help!!!!