A Link to the Past
Banned
Credit to Ms.Galaxy for the image. :v
LTTF means Late to the Funeral, because edge
Anyway I was writing this up for the 52 games thread, but it started to get kind of long so I was convinced by a friend to just make a thread for it. To note, no matter how harsh my comments are, these are opinions. I am not judging someone for liking Sticker Star - if you like it, more power to you. These are merely my thoughts on this game after having played it and beat every level in it. *ahem*
What a fucking travesty this game was. While I was writing this (and playing it), I was kind of debating whether it was appropriate to give it only a 1 out of 10. It looks nice, it sounds nice, and it is competently designed I can't think of any glitches. But that almost makes it worse that they had this product, this terrible thing, and its poor quality doesn't even have an excuse. At least when I play Sonic 06, I can attest to its quality being reflected in being a super rush job. Here though? This is the product they intended to launch. What they wanted to make was something shitty. Most people who know the arguments about the game know about the points battling, story, etc. But I'll talk about them anyway!
--Story--
The thing with Sticker Star is that people really do make the mistake of mis-ascribing its story issues. Sticker Star's issue isn't a lack of characters, dialogue, and story it has plenty of that. Characters, Kersti especially, never know when to shut the hell up and just let me play the game. The story is all too present, and it just infuriates me, because just like how they decided to keep RPG mechanics in a game they do not consider an RPG, they decided that a game with a barebones story should still be somewhat dialogue-heavy. You want to make New Super Mario Bros.? Whatever, do it, but don't do half measures. If you don't care about the story, don't pretend like you do.
The game also suffers immensely with rrespect to a lack of unique story/setting elements. The plot is your basic generic Mario shit Peach got captured, Bowser did it. It's SO generic that they didn't even let Bowser be a real character; he was just a mindless baddy. They even try to give him a goofy personality near the end when he's caught trying to fuck with shit again, as if ignoring how much they wasted him. Again, give me generic Bowser or give me good Bowser. Don't be lazy and then cheaply try to make up for it in the end. Going beyond that? The only character I vaguely enjoyed was Wiggler, partly because he represents the only enemy-character in the game that isn't a villain. No more do we get good Koopa Troopas and good Goombas now they're just baddies. And the Toads. Oh god, the Toads. I don't know which I find more absurd the fact that they put so little effort into NPC design, or the fact that they actually tried to spin it as them trying to challenge themselves creatively. Because apparently, it's really creative to say Green Toads live in the forest.
Kersti sucks, by the way. I never came to enjoy her as a character, and found her to really only contribute the act of making Navi more likable by comparison. Kersti complains a lot, adds very little mechanically to the game, and fuck did they ever blow it with her sacrifice. Mah gawd was it a bad scene I actually laughed at how shitty and out of nowhere it was! It was such a blatant forced sympathy moment, where they did nothing to endear her to me for the entire game, had no build-up to this, and yet decided that this sacrifice (that ultimately doesn't have her losing her life in any capacity) was a good story beat. It was just so lousy and lazy to the point of pity from me. I can only assume that the designers had some pride in this game. Like I said, they made something competent in terms of looking and sounding nice, but it's evident that the Vanpool designers came in without a clue of how this should be done.
--Enemies and boss fights--
The enemies suck. There's SO little variety. You can really tell that they got lazy here because so many of the enemies are just shiny versions of each other. Granted PM did that too, but at least there was creativity involved. The second level Goomba? Well that's a Gloomba! And with that a graphical glitch in SMB1 became a new character. Then we had Hyper Goombas, which had the gimmick of powering themselves up a whole bunch. And of course, we had the Paragoombas and Spiked Goombas (which existed in Gloom and Hyper forms). It just feels so empty and soulless in terms of the designs, particularly because of a mandate that disallowed creative enemy designs. We couldn't even get Clefts from Paper Mario!
Oh, and the boss fights suck too. The only boss fight I can say I care about or even really remember aside from Bowser (and he's only because his fight sucked) was Gooper Blooper. It had a neat rhythm mechanic, which was frankly neat to the point of me thinking imagine if every fight had that, every fight would be kind of neat! But ultimately, it's still not a good fight because all of the bosses require some degree of trial-and-error. You simply cannot know what item you may or may not need for that fight, and may wind up wasting a lot of items and time if you just try experimenting. Looking at the Bowser battle, the Bowser battle was the worst elements of every boss for me. It feels like the final boss of SMB1, not the final boss of a game with any real degree of story. The music isn't very good. Bowser's final form looks stupid. And of course, you need several stickers, specific stickers, for the fight to be viable. I have no idea what they were thinking with this game.
As for the battle system itself, I really, truly despise this thing, and it may be the very reason I hate this game with the passion that I do. It's never fun, and relies on the cheapest shit imaginable. People talk about how it's a myth that skipping battles is a good idea, and I'll just say nope. It is not. I skipped as many battles as I could, and only once did I ever find myself short on coins (but only as a result of me buying in bulk a ton of items I had like 4000 coins at one point!). The battles were not fun and the game super simplifies everything. Instead of having a variety of ways to combat enemies like the Hammer mechanic in PM games you just hit A, and for a lot of attacks, you just have to guess until you figure it out. By not having unique rewards that are exclusive to battles, the battles are simply worthless and a huge distraction.
--Levels and the World Map--
The levels are bad, I dislike them a lot. They often look nice, and to their credit the early game stuff was kind of okay, but once it got more complicated, it became tedious and shitty. Every fight, every obstacle, they felt actively like things to bemoan rather than things to anticipate. You can't just have something obnoxious and unfun in your way, you need to have an engaging challenge. SS simply does not do that. It's also really poorly paced, where worlds 1 and 2 are standard affairs and then world 3 goes off the rails with like 10 levels! Just out of nowhere! I've seen people cite world 3 as The good one, but for me it's the worst. It introduces so many of the problems in the game, and frankly, it communicates the problems of this game better than any level. After that, the pacing issues take a different turn levels that are MUCH longer than would be appropriate, and levels that are absurdly short, lasting literally a couple of minutes. What also gets me is that people describe this game as being a puzzle-adventure game, but as far as that goes, it really doesn't do that well at all. Any game in the series before it did overworld puzzles better than this; so many of the puzzles are simply trying to figure out which sticker should go where. OTOH, in TTYD you had Flurrie who could reveal secret places; you had Koops who could hit/retrieve faraway objects; you had Bobbery who could destroy obstacles and break walls; etc. etc. etc. What, exactly, does this game do to earn the label of being a puzzle-focused game when it doesn't even do that well?
Oh, and a couple QOL complaints, there is absolutely NO reason in the world why I'm not automatically healed after leaving a level. It isn't difficult to do, it just takes an extra half a minute. Often times, I'm in a rush to do the next level, so this results in me forgetting that they made such a strange design decision. The second QOL issue is that you cannot leave certain levels by pushing start, and the reason is almost exclusively arbitrary. The most egregious example for me was 6-3, the final level. You didn't have a save point or a healing point, and you couldn't quickly leave the level. However, you could absolutely walk back to the entrance after the Kamek fight in half a minute and save, heal, do whatever. There is no reason to not have convenient heal/save points if healing/saving isn't hard, but long.
Overall, going back to it, Sonic 06 really is a better game than this, for me. I can at least have a laugh at it, and while it is definitely shitty, you can tell it's a worse game than the designers wanted, so you can kind of feel bad for their situation. Metroid: Other M is a better game than this. Shitty misogynist story sure, but at least the game is playable and has some occasional fun factor in that respect. Sticker Star is ultimately maybe the worst Nintendo game I've ever played, and I am not embarrassed to admit, this game made me angry. Like, really really angry, for a variety of reasons. Whether it's that I didn't just know that I needed a certain sticker, or because the game asks me to do more than I need to do to accomplish very little, or just being reminded of how nice it would have been to have an actual story with good characters while the game is vomiting pointless dialogue at me, but I just found it absolutely to be the worst time I've ever had beating a game from beginning to end.
Also this thread I just did in one draft without editing or tightening so sorry if it's a lot of rambling and complaining about Sticker Star. :v
