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So, were battles in Paper Mario: Sticker Star truly pointless?

M

maxcriden

Member
stickerstar.gif


I see this bandied about fairly often on GAF but I really loved my time with this game and I don't remember the game in immense detail but I felt pretty sure I did most battles and that there was a point to them.

So, I did some perusing online on the subject and am going to present some point-counterpoint arguments below, and then please share your thoughts on the matter. Thank you.

Bottom line seems to be: if you want to 100% the game, battles are crucial. If you want to beat the game, battles aren't as important but the more you avoid, the harder the game will be as you go on in the game.

Argument: Battles have a point in Sticker Star

For:

It's the coins they are used for pretty much everything.

If you don't want a lot of back tracking and want to be able to use "thing" stickers freely you'll be dropping lots of coins at the "thing" shop.
It's going to take around 3000 coins to unlock ever secret door.
Boss battles where you use the battle spinner for multiple times will quickly cost a few hundred coins because of the steep price rise every time you use it, and won't reset tillthe end of that battle.
In general there are a number of rarer harder to find stickers that its simply faster to buy than try to find them, pluck it, completely leave the area, and then come back in. In addition there are still plenty of stickers you only get in shops which are nice to have. Shops increase their inventories throughout the game and become actually a very good place to quickly restock on stickers.
Also While it's merely an achievement there is a flag that require you to spend 10,000 coins in shops with the Thing Shop not counting as a a shop.

Basically when you have a surplus of coins you're completely free, you can move as you please as there are little restrictions. When you start to run low on coins that's when the game becomes more confining, requires more backtracking, and in general becomes more tedious.

So the point of battles is for coins, battles themselves don't give that many coins it's the coin bonus your after. When you grab a sticker comet piece at the end of a level you get a coin bonus based on how many enemies you killed. Kill a few enemies or none and get like 3 coins, kill most of the enemies can easily net you 200 or more coins the coin bonuses become quite hefty later on.

Ultimately though there really isn't a good reason to avoid battles. You don't need to worry about wasting stickers. They give you an overabundance of stickers all over fields, and stickers and blocks restock upon leaving and re-entering a level. In addition as long as you have coins you can easily replace most any sticker just by stopping at some of the shops. Don't worry about wasting a rare sticker either as you'll either be able to buy it later, it will respawn, or you'll find more of them. Sure i mean you won't wanna go wasting your best stickers on small fries but the cheaper things you can stock up on quickly make your life easier.

The only time battles are honestly pointless is in a royal sticker crown boss level. This is because those levels don't have sticker comet pieces so you get no coin bonus. Meaning enemies in boss levels actually are a waste of time for the most part unless you can kill them fast then they are still a great money source.
Click to expand...

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/997828-paper-mario-sticker-star/64862206

Combat isn't pointless if you're going for 100% completion. You need a lot of money in this game if you want to buy all the doors you need for the secrets and combat is the best way to get it. There's also the flags in Decalburg and certain stickers that you can only get from enemies if you want to complete the museum.
Click to expand...

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/997828-paper-mario-sticker-star/68337937

Against:

The 'interesting' combat system was not interesting because it taught me to avoid combat. I don't call potholes in the road interesting, I just drive around them and recognize them as a nuisance.

Combat wasted stickers and then gave you fewer stickers than you used. Net loss there. It'd waste Coins on the roulette trying to finish things up without being beat up too badly, then give you half a dozen Coins. Net loss there. So, you finished a battle, you now have FEWER stickers, LESS health, FEWER coins, LESS time in the day.

So now I'm avoiding battle, a few segregated stages in. Awesome. So now, with all my stickers I'm pulling off the landscape, I hit the page limit. FUCK the page limit. Why are you limiting my stickers? It's completely arbitrary. Maybe if I had more than a couple dozen, I would be more willing to jump into battle to burn a few. But as it stands, I'm not. So here I am, bitching that I don't have space for more, but I can't spend them in battle because I don't have enough to spend on non-mandatory battles. Sure, I could probably get away with it, but with the time for the battles and running back to a Heart Block, what a waste. Why even bother. I'll stick with my half a page of Standard Jump and suck it up. Won't get anything good from loot after a battle anyway.

We're now avoiding combat and collectibles simply because of game design. Now the enemies on the overworld. They move faster than Mario vertically, he doesn't jump high enough to pass them horizontally. Shit will happen. You will get in battles. You will get a meaningless first strike. You will run. It may not work. You'll take a turn of damage.

We're now avoiding combat and collectibles based on game design, while also being forced into an unenjoyable combat system because of the same game design. And you know what, we're gonna run in circles doing this trying to find a Poison Mushroom sticker, or a Bowling Ball sticker, or the Scissors, a Fan to move the windmill, because of some stupid puzzle concept that is based entirely around burning a 2x2ish grid off your bursting-at-the-seams sticker album for a (nearly)one-off item you'll never want to use because it was so impossible to find, up to the point where you'll probably not work out when to use it(except for the Bowling Ball, that one was kind of a given).

We're now avoiding combat and collectibles based on game design, while being forced into combat by the game and being forced to collect by the game. Now, because of segregated levels, you can explore a bit! Ooh, how exciting. Except if you do World 2 and 3 at the same time. If you get stuck in World 3? Do you need a stupid real-world object, are you just missing something, or do you need to go through 2? Do you waste hours looking around for things, or do you just sit there and wonder why they even let you go out of order if you can't go out of order? What's a world map if I still need to tackle things in a perfectly straight line?

So now we hate combat, we hate collectibles, we hate the no-hints puzzle(here's a square on the level, fill it in with something, you might even get it right!), we don't understand the world map. Yet all of those things are jammed down our throats.

But I mean, yeah, the almost half a game of writing I saw was pretty solid.
Click to expand...

https://www.reddit.com/r/3DS/comments/19w5p1/i_just_finished_paper_mario_sticker_star_and_i/c8rxzhh

Incidentally, much like how the game provides no incentive to seeing the end of the game, it provides no incentive to even fight the enemies along the way. Battles no longer reward you with experience points, as the only means of improving your stats stems from beating chapters and finding special hearts. Instead, winning fights rewards you with coins, and the occasional sticker. Coins are used to buy stickers which, apart from being found nearly everywhere for free, have one main use; to be used in combat. But since only a handful of fights are actually mandatory, it makes one wonder about just avoiding all the fights and keeping whatever stickers were lying around. You can even still earn coins just by beating a chapter in case you were worried about not being able to fund the in-battle slot machine for when you actually do have to battle. It should never be a viable strategy for the player to skip a primary component of the game’s content.
Click to expand...

http://www.goombastomp.com/features/paper-mario-sticker-star-review/

tumblr_inline_o4v47vuRpz1skj70u_500.gif
 
K

Kebiinu

Banned
I loved the game, and I kept wanting to fight more enemies, to use the coins and buy more powerful stickers.

Great game!
 
P

purseowner

Member
Much as I'm saddened that Paper Mario is no longer a true RPG ala Thousand Year Door, I love the look of Colour Splash and that above mariachi gif has sold me on Sticker Star.
 
G

georly

Member
They were awful to me, personally, for three reasons:

1. It made the levels last way longer than if you just avoided the combat. Let you get to the 'real' part of the game which was puzzle solving and exploring.

2. having to use up stickers in exchange for coins (which you basically use to buy more stickers) just *felt* bad to do. I *felt* like i was getting weaker at each fight making me feel less and less prepared by the time i got to the boss.

3. Sticker inventory management was not fun. The more I engaged in combat, the more 'holes' in my stickerbook i'd create and then just have to manage again later. I think there was an auto sort, right? But it never did it right or the way I wanted it to be. So I got the stickers in the way I wanted and avoided combat til I got to the boss.


Combat was also not interesting, as it didn't hinge as much on my knowledge of the enemies, but rather 'do you have the right stickers to deal with these enemies right now? No? This is going to be way less fun." I like permanently earning tools in games and using those tools as a solution to puzzles, including combat puzzles. Encountering a fight where you don't have the right stickers anymore (because you used them up on the last 3 fights) meant running away was usually the best option, meaning you probably should have avoided the fight to begin with.
 
T

The12thGripper

Member
Yes, without a doubt. Sticker Star would have been better if it didn't constantly try to waste your time, but it'd still be pretty bad for a Paper Mario game.
 
J

James Scott

Banned
From my experience the combat system itself feels less satisfying than the original two despite being modled after it.
Hammer and jumps are done in the same way instead of holding the analog stick and you don't gain experience and most likely lose stickers. At most you can get some coins and a sticker back from the enemies which likely won't be enough to replenish what you lost.
The system in place was broken and inferior in every single way.
Bosses are mandatory so fighting them is ok, but they feel scripted since you need to use a thing sticker or you'll die.
Thing stickers usually have use outside of the bosses so you'll more than likely have to go and look for thing stickers 2x which is pretty lame.
So yeah, the design makes fighting pointless and it's a broken game because of it
 
J

James Scott

Banned
If stickers were rare and permanent (or at least on a cool down timer/once per fight) then it would be ok.
The old paper Mario games had things like the dusty hammer which was a one use item.
Cards in Color Splash could work fairly well if they were permanent but needed paint to power up and fights give you paint level ups.
Nintendaan said Thing Stickers/Cards are permanent so I hope normal cards are too.
Cards being less common but permanent upgrades would also make exploring feel better.
I'm not sure if Color Splash is doing any of this, tho
 
S

SuomiDude

Member
That's great to know. I got the feeling that the combat was totally useless browsing this forum, good to see the majority was wrong. Raises my hype for Color Splash even further up :)
 
D

DownGrader

Member
I remember being excited from tough enemy dropping shiny stickers, which I then enhanced to mega-shiny ones by gluing them to invisible blocks to send them to museum to complete my collection.

The sticker museum is where the real game happened to me. It makes me think about Sticker Star with warmth in my heart, and makes me sad a bit about trading that game off. I need to pick it up again since it's a Selects title in Europe.
 
R

Ridley327

Member
I think the biggest issue with the combat in Sticker Star was it rarely had an immediate benefit to engage in it, which is something that Color Splash appears to be addressing with the addition of experience to level up your paint storage and being able to earn enemy stickers for combat that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise.
 
O

OmegaFax

Member
Team Pointless. There's no regular battle you couldn't run away from and the enemies disappear. There was no point. Jumping into a faux-RPG sticker slapping contest every time you ran into an enemy was a waste of time. Little motivation to do it and no pay off. Traditional RPG games have MP or BP or whatever they're called. Moves are limited but at least there's a moveset. There's some control over what the character does or how the player chooses to advance the character.
 
S

Sadist

Member
Not pointless... but mostly strange. I don't think Sticker Star is a bad game, but everything about it screams "so uh, we kind of decided mid development to go for something different, but it became this weird mish mash of genres and... well look what we made!" The battles are still fun, but at a certain point you got to your goal and kind of avoided battles. I think Intelligent Systems was in the middle of a change-up, but because of time constraints they just couldn't present their vision for it.
 
I

Intel_89

Member
maxcriden y u do dis man? :(

Nah seriously though, I'm in the minority that enjoyed Sticker Star, battles were somewhat pointless but not entirely which is, um, weird. But hey, in Color Splash you get points to upgrade your hammer ink tanks, that kinda counts like XP, right?
 
N

Ninjimbo

Member
They weren't pointless for the reasons you stated. They were the only way to get a sufficient amount of coins to properly pad out your sticker book with good stickers and get rewarded with rare, useful ones.

The only people who dismiss the combat are most likely RPG geeks who need their stats and numbers to go up to feel as if they're progressing.

Sticker Star isn't an RPG. It's an Adventure game with turn based combat. The enemies are obstacles and not a well to draw experience from.
 
Z

Zeldana

Neo Member
I beat Sticker Star twice and partially through a third time to save right before one of my favorite bosses just so I could listen to their battle theme whenever I wanted to. In my first playthrough I saved up as many stickers as I could for bosses and event battles since I'm an RPG item hoarder and you never know when you'll need 21 jump stickers, right? Got to the end, had a good time, replayed it again a year later but with much more liberal use of stickers the second time around.

What I learned: there are ways of squeezing extra damage from even the most common stickers, but only through practice and actually utilizing them in battles. Using a shell with good timing against 4-5 enemies will not only knock them all out at once, you'll also get a ton of coins and (more often than not) an item of equal potency as the one you used back as a reward. Thing stickers have tricks, too. Carefully timed A presses for some and mashing A for others will dole out extra damage. Enemies are weak to certain elements or sticker types and some are more situational than others, a point you can take advantage of in a handful of cases (mostly bosses).

In the end, the more you play with stickers in fights the better you will get at timing them effectively to bring bosses down faster. That's especially true for the final boss where players will have to resort to using stickers they most likely never touched prior to that moment. Then again that's true of other PM and M&L games and probably won't change anytime soon. Experience points may have been the great motivator before but now the devs have left it up to you to decide how much you want to learn the intricacies of those mechanics.
 
B

Brandon F

Well congratulations! You got yourself caught!
I don't like stickers. They're course and rough and irritating, and they stick everywhere!
 
bumpkin

bumpkin

Member
I still haven't beaten Sticker Star because of the sometimes obtuse puzzle solutions that require weird backtracking. They suck all the fun right of playing it, IMO.
 
M

MrBadger

Member
I really think they should have done away with turn-based battles entirely because I thought they felt like a carry-over from when the game was still going to be an RPG. I'd have been more inclined to use up my resources to get rid of enemies if they were actively trying to harm me in the overworld. And if they were threats in the overworld, avoiding combat would have been a part of the game in of itself, rather than bypassing a part of the game.
 
S

ShadowgeistX

Member
The battles are a punishment. Imagine playing a Mario game, but instead of dying on contact with an enemy and losing a life, you play a minigame to try and lose as little as possible.
 
N

Niraj

I shot people I like more for less.
I'm replaying right now and skipping most battles. If you really need coins there's an easy loop you can do in level 4-1 where you can hit a box for a shiny ice flower sticker and then get into combat with the nearby enemy, kill the 5 of them in one turn with that sticker, leave, and repeat. For the most part though you won't need a ton of coins unless you're either trying to complete the museum and don't feel like reentering levels for the specific thing that you're missing, or you just waste a ton of stickers. The game gives you so many opportunities to get a ton of stickers though, so it seems like the latter shouldn't be an issue anyway. I'd say for most players most battles can be safely skipped.
 
J

Japanmanx3

Member
I loved sticker start and the combat was fine to me. I just cheesed the areas with the better attack stickers or things and coins never became a problem for me.
 
D

DownGrader

Member
Niraj said:
I'm replaying right now and skipping most battles. If you really need coins there's an easy loop you can do in level 4-1 where you can hit a box for a shiny ice flower sticker and then get into combat with the nearby enemy, kill the 5 of them in one turn with that sticker, leave, and repeat.
Click to expand...

So you basically broke the game and complain now that the game is broken...
 
U

udivision

Member
Brandon F said:
I don't like stickers. They're course and rough and irritating, and they stick everywhere!
Click to expand...

You're tearing my paper heart, Anakin.

Maybe they should've taken a page from the action adventure puzzle king known as Zelda and have the action take place in the field.
 
J

JinjoUnchained

Member
I really liked the game too, max. The aesthetics were great and I loved all the environmental problem solving using special stickers. It was almost like a Metroidvania in that way, you'd see a sticker outline and then come back later to open up new exits once you got the appropriate sticker. It also doesn't get enough credit for its' non-linearity as you can complete a lot of stages out of order, like Super Mario World in a way.

As for the battles, they were fun, but not urgent. Lack of random encounters (thanks a lot Game Design Police) means you can walk around freely without any sense of danger. There's little risk-reward for using your best stickers on a particular battle if you know that you can always avoid tougher enemies. But that's a problem with a lot of inventory based RPG games these days.

My only issue with Sticker Star was the boss battles (unbeatable without a specific sticker) and not having your sticker book auto-sort new stickers. That got annoying.
 
W

Weston

Member
They aren't pointless, but they aren't terribly exciting either. The fights basically come down to how many stickers and coins you are willing to spend to win a fight. There are some resistances and weaknesses to consider and perfect timing helps a ton, but too often winning a fight feels like a given. So it's not all that satisfying when you do win. The lack of character progression doesn't help.

I still think it is a pretty good game. The characters are fun. Exploring the world and solving puzzles is nice. The art style is pretty standard Mario but the diorama style levels are really cool, especially in 3D. It's just a laid-back, pleasant sort of game. I hope Color Splash improves on it.
 
S

Shift Breaker

Member
Yeah, file me under team pointless. It wasn't the only issue with the game (The lack of humour and the heavy majority of the characters are generic toads being up there), but it was a huge one.
 
K

KirbYuuYuu

Member
Niraj said:
I'm replaying right now and skipping most battles. If you really need coins there's an easy loop you can do in level 4-1 where you can hit a box for a shiny ice flower sticker and then get into combat with the nearby enemy, kill the 5 of them in one turn with that sticker, leave, and repeat. For the most part though you won't need a ton of coins unless you're either trying to complete the museum and don't feel like reentering levels for the specific thing that you're missing, or you just waste a ton of stickers. The game gives you so many opportunities to get a ton of stickers though, so it seems like the latter shouldn't be an issue anyway. I'd say for most players most battles can be safely skipped.
Click to expand...


I can echo this as well. Plus ut doesnt take long to get to that point. Just need to veat like a fair amount of world 1 and more than 50 hp to get there.
 
C

ChaosZeroX

Banned
Yes. You gained nothing from the battles.

I don't get why they can;t have two RPG marios. Paper Mario was so damn good in this regard.
 
H

Hispanic! At the Disco

Member
If the general consensus is that they felt pointless, then they might as well be.

I think Skyward Sword's controls are fantastic, but my brother on the same file cant seem to accomplish simple moves with 100% accuracy. And the same can be said for many others. While I think controls are perfect, most people cant use them intuitively with 100% accuracy and that makes them bad.

In sort of the same way, if majority concensus feel as if the battles are pointless, then the big problem is they need to incentivize the battles more.
 
G

Ganondorfo

Junior Member
I am always afraid to open Sticker Star threads, because its always full of negativity. I am not really affected by other people opinions, but if you keep reading negative opinions about something you liked, eventually you will start to dislike it. I know this game doesnt live up to the masterpieces Paper Mario 1-2 and Super, but its still a decent game if you judge it by its own merits.
 
R

Ridley327

Member
Hispanic! At the Disco said:
If the general consensus is that they felt pointless, then they might as well be.

I think Skyward Sword's controls are fantastic, but my brother on the same file cant seem to accomplish simple moves with 100% accuracy. And the same can be said for many others. While I think controls are perfect, most people cant use them intuitively with 100% accuracy and that makes them bad.

In sort of the same way, if majority concensus feel as if the battles are pointless, then the big problem is they need to incentivize the battles more.
Click to expand...

Like I mentioned, this is something that they're directly addressing in Color Splash.
 
M

Mr Waluigi

Banned
yes

HP and first strike power are leveled up by finding items in the overworld
attack capacity is leveled up by finishing chapters
battles give you stickers and coins, but stickers can be found in the overworld abundantly and you max out on coins by chapter 4 if you are like me and fight every enemy on sight
running away from non-boss fights will simply make it as if you beat the enemy but got nothing for it

but that's not a problem because every single mario rpg is extremely easy to beat while skipping every optional battle too
sticker star's true crime was the complete lack of creativity and engaging story
 
Z

Zubz

Banned
The battles aren't just pointless, but they aren't fun, either! I'd've happily slogged through them if I enjoyed them, but it's either "waste a really good sticker" or "spam a page-worth of awful ones." So I found myself repeatedly backtracking for Things rather than grinding to rebuy them. And because they're one-time use and the game is crazy-unclear on when to use them (There're about 10 heat-themed Things by the time you encounter an ice block you need to melt), I had to backtrack a lot.
 
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