+ Game teaches you to get good
+ Designed to be fast paced
+ Challenging, but fair
+ Music/sound complements gameplay
~ Cinematic NES story
~ Amazing NES Graphics
- Dying during boss sends you back to the beginning
- Wall clinging mechanics can ruin runs/ get annoying.

I have such a soft spot for WarioWare Smooth Moves and I appreciate a lot of things about this spiritual sequel. The core goofiness of the microgames are there and so are the amusing ways this game uses the Joy Cons. I also love how much better 2-player mode here feels compared to Get It Together.

Unfortunately the presentation is just... so barebones that it threatens to derail the entire game? The narrator voice discussing the forms just doesn't sound good at all. The music is unmemorable. And on top of that, since Smooth Moves controlled so well thanks to Wii hardware and the sensor bar, it's very jarring to have the Joy Cons just straight up not work in some microgames.

I was excited for this game the most out of Nintendo's late 2023 releases and I walked away feeling that this almost feels like an AI generated sequel to Smooth Moves. And that's without mentioning how short this game feels even for a WarioWare game.

I had enough fun, but this game is definitely a disappointment.

I can’t remember the last time a game made me so happy. Sonic will always be my favorite series and this game kept reminding me why. Ian Flynn did a great job with the writing. Characterization was on point and for the first time in forever it felt like there was legitimate worldbuilding in a game. Gameplay was a mixed bag but I was grinning ear to ear more often than I was sighing in frustration. If they decide to iterate on this formula and work out all the kinks I think it will surpass Sonic Adventure to become the quintessential 3D Sonic game.

I've heard a lot of people have faults with this game. Some of the characters are poorly written, the story doesn't make much sense, the gameplay can get repetitive, the fanbase, so on and so forth. But, all these people have forgotten a very, very important fact:

I am a lonely, gay furry.

Front-to-back, this game is literally flawless to me. To the point where it's not worth listing off all the reasons why. Music, characters, gameplay, art style, messages, story, everything. All perfect. My favorite game of all time, and one that I can confidently say changed my life.

I love Dark Souls despite its weak second half and I love Skyward Sword despite its litany of glaring flaws, all of which have been discussed to death. In the end, the high points overshadowed the low points. Every dungeon is a certified banger, the art style is gorgeous, and I love the 1:1 sword controls. The thing I find so odd about this game is that most of its flaws are the result of unnecessary padding, even though this game does NOT need it. Like, if you removed the padding it would still be a pretty long Zelda game. It was not needed at all, and ultimately sours the experience. That being said, I think I only spent an hour total throughout my 25 hour playthrough feeling frustrated, and I think that’s a pretty good ratio! A little annoyance here or there that last 5-10 minutes can’t sully my love for this game. In a sense, the sourness is covered up by the delicious flavors of everything else. Maybe the sour flavor enhances the deliciousness? Is Skyward Sword the lemon chicken or video games? Probably not. I’m just riding high on the sweet, sweet dopamine of slicing up bad guys and solving puzzles. This game rocks!!

I remember when Paper Mario was a good series, like despite any and all changes it had, it at least had a good story, good characters, and good RPG elements. Even Super Paper Mario with its retooling structure to the formula was still a good game. Sticker Star however, is not that, Sticker Star took out nearly everything that was good in the franchise and turned it into something unfinished, and not true to the source material. There was a lot of talk about Miyamoto changing a lot of the way the game played and worked, and frankly this is one of his biggest mistakes ever. Just everything in this game is a disgrace to what came before it and fans of the past games, well they just aren't going to like it. I know I didn't like this game, in fact I loathe this game for what it is, and that’s a missed appropriate for something great. Because aside from the horrible changes, Sticker Star still looks great, and has great music to it. Everything about the surface is eye catching and looks like a game that is very fun to play, but it's not that.

Sticker Star just changed way too much of the Paper Mario formula to really be called Paper Mario to began with. I understand that the name itself and the way it looks gives it that title, but the essence of what made Paper Mario as a series good, is gone in this game. They removed so much of what was there that gave Paper Mario substance as a series. Partners went away for pretty much no reason, instead of quirky unique characters that joined you along your travels to help solve problems along the way, they are instead replaced by thing stickers.

Thing Stickers are a good idea gone horribly wrong as they could have been a really cool power up for Mario this time around, like a special move that uses flower points, instead they are one time use stickers that are used randomly to solve certain obstacles you encounter in sticker star. I say randomly because for the vast part of the whole game it is up to you and what very little hints the game gives you to figure out which sticker to use in a given situation or battle, and if you don't use the right one or even at the correct time you not only lose your sticker, but are also punished for it by having to get it back by either paying for it or looking for it again. This causes a lot of guess work and a lot of lost stickers and money which can then led to more grinding for coins, which means a ton of your free time is wasted. And while I understand that the thing stickers are often too powerful for combat to keep getting used over and over again, being used for solving a puzzle and losing it whether or not it actually works? That is just some of the stupidest game design manageable, and strongly discourages use of any stickers throughout the entire game. Literally I remember making a thing sticker and being too afraid to use it in case it was used for something else at some point, and still having it at the last battle without using it even once. The game doesn't help either with Kristi, the new helper for Mario in this game, as she pretty much gives very little advice to begin with and what little she does is only based with in the whole level, and not one screen like in most Paper Mario games. To add more to this unhelpful mess, players aren't given information on what stickers do unless they use them. Which as said before, if you use certain stickers to early or incorrectly you are punished by getting the stickers back either through money grinding or backtracking. This mess of thing stickers wouldn't be so bad however if it wasn't for the fact that you are required to use thing stickers in order to beat the boss battles in this game. Thanks to not adding any sort of level up or experience system to the game, boss battles rely more on thing stickers than anything else in this entire game. Making the boss battles less of a challenge on battling and more on problem solving.

Granted a lot of the basics return to Sticker Star's battle system, but it's vastly basic and doesn't even mention the action commands that can give you a edge in battle. It's not like timing matters that much in these battles anyway, as by the end of the whole game I realized that just smashing A constantly would yield the same results as trying to figure out the correct timing. Either way, battles in this game are pretty much all for show. There is absolutely no reason to ever get into any battle in this game unless you are actually required to by the game itself. Not only are you not punished to go into unneeded battles, but rather rewarded by not having to use any stickers you currently have, saving them for when the “real battle starts”. Which in all honesty, I was a bit fine with at first till I noticed that Sticker Star as a lot more enemies than the majority of Paper Mario's do. Usually in the original and TTYD you get about 1 to 4 enemies on screen and that was pretty much it unless it was a unusual situation, but in this game you are normally given 4- 7 enemies to deal with on screen the majority of the time. Thus making it a lot harder to simply run away from battles, as fighting each enemy would be counter productive and waste a bunch of stickers. And this is all not mentioning the fact that the majority of characters and story are not there. Granted there is some story and some characters that talk to you, but Sticker Star vastly comes down to what sticker should I use now and where do I go to use it?

Sticker Star was reduced to the level of a regular Mario game when it came to story, and that above anything else is what made Paper Mario its own series. It wasn't just Bowser just kidnapping Peach, but of a whole world brought down by chaos. It was about Mario traveling around the varies lands, interacting with characters from all sorts of places and getting a rag tag group to defeat a greater evil. Sticker Star just doesn't have that story, it doesn't have that emotion, it doesn't have what made Paper Mario, Paper Mario.

Final Thoughts:

Paper Mario: Sticker Star is a huge disappointment on a franchise that has otherwise been stellar. Sticker Star removes too much of the old, and replaces it too much with broken ideas, and gameplay that just doesn't work. Despite the great soundtrack, and the way it looks, Sticker Star is a terrible game that doesn't understand its source material, and ruins the great formula that the series once had.

Maybe people here have just think that Origami King's good in comparison to Sticker Star and Color Splash, but as a guy whose last Paper Mario game was Super Paper Mario, this was god awful.

Character design is bland with little personality to it, the writing was just insufferable, with Olivia being on the level of Fi and Navi for just stating the most obvious thing and feeling like 5-6 steps behind my own thought process. She's genuinely stupid and I couldn't stop myself from groaning or rolling my eyes when she would flap her little origami mouth.

The partners were tolerable, but felt more like a bone being thrown to fans who want the partners that were in the first trilogy, with Bobby being useless as all shit. No, it wasn't sad when he died, shut up.

The combat system was gimmicky and rather worthless, seeing as how running felt like a much better alternative. And between time extensions and Toads literally solving the puzzles for you, why were there so many ways to make the combat system something to easily avoid? Did the team know it stinks, but it was too late to fundamentally change? Either go all in or don't do it.

This game feels like it wants to harken back to the old days of Paper Mario, but either doesn't know how to or doesn't want to fully commit. And when you try and make something for everyone, you end up just making crap that nobody can really enjoy.

tl;dr Leave Paper Mario in the shredder where it belongs. You're not gonna get the good stuff ever again. Just play Bug Fables instead.