Having finished Sticker Star, I'm kind of disappointed. I mean, It was fun for the most part. The writing is still great, I just wish there was MORE of it. Most of the best stuff is buried in the Sticker Museum (the optional sticker collection sidequest.) The RPG mechanics should have been deeper too. I understand where the developers were coming from, but the original Paper Mario and Thousand Year Door were both such amazing games, and the Paper Mario games are so few and far between. This is one case where sticking to the old formula would have been a good idea. I understand why people think Nintendo games are getting stale, but stripping out the best parts of a franchise is not the way to mix it up. It'd be like if a Zelda game lost the dungeon exploring, or if a mainline Mario game went for a more realistic tone. Keep the best stuff, the stuff people love about the franchise, and replace the rest.

I realize it's not that simple. I just wish I could see another Paper Mario game with great companions, INTERESTING puzzles, and a reason to actually want to engage in battles. Sticker Star drops the companions in favor of a (relatively quiet) helper. Kertsi is there to give you hints, but they're always vague, and when they do get specific, they don't change after you've gotten past the point she's referring to. Without the companions, the game also can't base puzzles around their abilities. Instead, the game asks you to solve puzzles by placing certain stickers in certain places. Most of the time, it's fairly intuitive, but on occasion, you're just throwing random objects at a wall and seeing what sticks (see what I did there?) And when it doesn't work, it drops off the page and out of your inventory. If you want it again, you either have to backtrack to where you first found it, or pay huge amounts of coins. These puzzles just aren't interesting. They're barely puzzles at all, honestly. Each one is a single-step process, and none of them require any out-of-the-box thinking.

I still had fun with it, I just feel like this entry in the series is lacking in most of the things I enjoy about the franchise. I'm not asking for a rehash, I just don't think the changes they made benefited the experience. I enjoyed Super Paper Mario even though it was such a huge departure. It still felt like a Paper Mario game somehow. This game kind of... doesn't. It was decent in it's own way, but too much has been stripped away from it.