YMMV / Paper Mario: Sticker Star

• Americans Hate Tingle: The Paper Mario franchise is usually far more popular overseas, but Sticker Star is actually the best-selling Paper Mario title in Japan, whereas it was the worst-selling Paper Mario in North America since the first. This might simply be because it was released on a handheld, because Japanese fans had similar complaints about the sudden shift in gameplay and tone, and Paper Mario: Color Splash performed dismally in both regions — even so, it seems to indicate that the shift in the series' tone isn't as much of a hot-button issue in Japan as it is overseas.
• Arc Fatigue: While generally considered one of the better parts of the game, World 3 contains double the levels of any other world, plus a decent amount of backtracking and repetition in retrieving Wiggler's parts, it can get a little tiring. It doesn't help that beating the boss of the world makes collectibles appear in certain levels, requiring even more backtracking if you want to collect everything.
• Ass Pull: Kersti's Heroic Sacrifice, in which she gives herself up as a usable sticker to give Mario the power he needs to beat Bowser, comes out of nowhere and only serves as an attempt to add some last-minute drama to the climax of an otherwise lighthearted and by-the-numbers "Mario saves the Princess" story. Some have wondered why not harness the power of the MacGuffins you've spent the entire game gathering, as per the previous games, to vanquish Bowser instead of sacrificing Kersti, who was given no prior indication that she had royal sticker power of her own.^note It becomes even funnier when you realize you don't need to actually use her to defeat Bowser as the game doesn't force you to, and it's very possible to beat him using just infinijump stickers instead with a little patience and strategy. For added insult, you can unceremoniously throw Kersti away after the battle is won this way.
• Awesome Bosses: Bowser Snow Statue, the boss of World 4. Its Logical Weakness to fire attacks means you don't need to get carried by Thing stickers to win, the music for this fight is really nice and then there's the reveal of Mizzter Blizzard, the real boss inside of the statue, who wished for a body that wouldn't melt at the end of Winter. The fact this is the only boss with a fleshed out backstory, and said backstory makes for one of the game's most emotional moments, is what turns this fight into one of the few parts of the game most players actually loved.
• Awesome Levels: Despite Sticker Star's less-than-stellar reputation, most can agree that two levels stand out above the rest:
  • 3-10: Stump Glade starts out as a seemingly normal jungle stage as Mario follows a Wiggler segment down a giant tree stump… and lands in the middle of a Sadistic Game Show called Snifit or Whiffit. The Unexpected Gameplay Change and the Affably Evil personality of the show's host have led even the most diehard Sticker Star haters to admit that the level is nice change of pace.
  • 4-3: The Enigmansion is a Boo-infested residence that harkens back to the dungeon design of the original game. It's filled with puzzles, traps, exploration, and features by far the best usage of the otherwise underwhelming Paperization mechanic in the game.
• Awesome Music: See here. The soundtrack is widely regarded as one of the best things about the game, with every track being a lovingly written, appropriate, and above all else jazzy piece of music.
• Base-Breaking Character: People either love Wiggler/Flutter for being an adorable goofball and one of the handful of people in the game with proper characterization, or hate him for being the cause of a lot of tedium with rescuing his segments in a series of annoying Escort Missions that span the entirety of World 3.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • In a hidden area in 4-1, you can find Birdo, who appears on a swing, sings a short serenade, and gives you the Goat before leaving. This is the only time said character appears, and the player is free to return to the level once they're gone.
  • One group of five Boos in the Enigmansion is sitting in a photo frame. When investigated, they all fly off of the wall and move in a circle. Then a disco ball comes down and Mario gives a thumbs-up, and the ensuing disco music and lights continue throughout the entire battle. After the fight concludes, the disco ball vanishes and no further comment is made by anyone. Unlike some of the other Boos in the mansion, which are thematically appropriate (such as a gold Boo in a vault, a crumpled Boo in a garbage can, and a stack of Boos emulating the tightly-packed Toads in a cabinet in the opening), the disco Boos have no relation to anything prior or following the event. It's likely there for Rule of Funny, though—disco is dead, so of course ghosts would enjoy it.
• Bile Fascination: Given its reputation as the weakest Paper Mario, some have played just to see if Sticker Star is really that bad.
• Breather Boss: Bowser Snow Statue, the boss of World 4, is one of the easiest bosses in the whole game. Due to its Logical Weakness to fire attacks, it's one of the few major fights in the game that doesn't force you to rely on Thing stickers to have a chance at winning, and the boss's own attacks are relatively simple to deal with, especially after it goes into Clipped-Wing Angel form.
• Critical Backlash: Has been seeing this more over time. While many would agree Sticker Star is the weakest title in the series, some people feel the hostile reception to it is overly exaggerated as the game has good ideas and qualities that are paired with notable problems and questionable design choices that overshadow them. These people often feel the game is just alright and wouldn't receive the amount of hate it gets if it didn't influence future titles.
• Critical Dissonance: Sticker Star has gotten So Okay, It's Average scores from most critics, which is certainly different from the outright negative reception from fans.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • Even for those who like the game, Bowser's Sky Castle is really short and simple, simply consisting of the final bout against Kamek, a couple of corridors with no enemies, and Bowser. It doesn't help that the previous area, Bowser Jr.'s Flotilla, was far longer and more complex, and it's especially disappointing for the last stage given that all the previous games had long and involved final dungeons filled with tough enemies, puzzles and boss fights, added to the fact that Bowser is the final boss again after the fan-favorites Shadow Queen and Super Dimentio, which isn't helped by these bosses being generally regarded as amazing final boss fights. Bowser, on the other hand, alongide his universally hated silent role, has a rather disappointing battle that takes one of the game's biggest flaws, the Thing weakness system, to levels never seen before, as opposed to his boss battle in the first game which is also regarded as a Best Boss Ever for being challenging, but purely based on skill and strategy as opposed to having the correct items.
  • World 6 as a whole is this. It only consists of three levels, when all of the previous worlds had at least five (for the record, World 3 had twelve), making it the shortest world in the entire game. On top of that, the first area, Gate Cliff, is barely passable as a level (even though the game lists it as 6-1), as it's a tiny area that only contains an interactive cutscene linking to the final areas when you have 5 Royal Stickers, as well as the aforementioned Bowser's Sky Castle, which is very short and simple and (mostly) serves as a final corridor before the Final Boss. The only stage that's actually complicated and involved is Bowser Jr.'s Flotilla, and even then you would expect more than just that. Taking it even further, the final level was originally supposed to be a minigame gauntlet; whether or not this would have been better is up for debate.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Mariachi Shy Guys and Gooper Blooper for the music theming behind them and being plain hilarious, the "Snifit or Whiffit" Host for his level being one of the highlights of the game, and Mizzter Blizzard for being a Tragic Monster and having more characterization than anyone else in the game.
• Fandom Heresy: Simply mentioning the game can cause this in some circles. Also, whatever you do, don't admit that you actually like this game.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Most Paper Mario fans pretend that Sticker Star (and depending on who you ask, its successor Color Splash) never happened, labeling Super Paper Mario (or The Thousand-Year Door, depending on who you ask) as the moment where the series stopped instead. Aside from the game's controversial restrictions, it doesn't help that Ryota Kawade, the director of the first three games, was barely involved in the production of Sticker Star (the only credit he had for the game was "Special Thanks"), and most of its crew was never involved in the series before. Paper Jam ended up reaffirming the discontinuity, with detractors coming up with the Fanon that Sticker Star took place in the book that all the "Paper" characters in that game came from, thereby making it a Show Within a Show and not a "real" Mario adventure; the Show Within a Show theory actually predates Paper Jam.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Little is known about what Sticker Star was like before it was retooled into the game the public received. However, the quote from Miyamoto about an early version of the game resembling a port of The Thousand-Year Door has led fans of that title, and others dissatisfied with the final Sticker Star, to want more information on what they believe could've been a more interesting version of Sticker Star than what was released.
• Franchise Original Sin: The "inventory items as attacks" concept that the despised Stickers use can actually be traced back to a game in the other Mario RPG series, Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time. However, its Bros. Item system, while receiving a mixed reception itself, isn't nearly as hated because that game still allows you to use basic Jump and Hammer attacks to save items for later, they can sometimes be dropped by defeated enemies and are buyable in shops other than just finding them in blocks through the game and the inventory limit is much more generous (99 for each item).
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Super Boot applies Iron to your jumps so you can stomp enemies that normally hurt you, and it increases the damage done by jump-based stickers. It's so effective that the official Prima strategy guide recommends almost nothing but Super Boots and jump stickers for every boss.
  • The Frog Suit, on the other hand, doesn't apply Iron to your jumps, but boosts all damage done that turn — even from Thing Stickers. Combine this with the Crumpled status, which causes affected enemies to take double damage and is easily spread through POW Block stickers, and the Boom Box Thing, and let the destruction begin.
  • The Boom Box Thing doubles your damage for up to four turns if you get an Excellent Action Command. Combine this with any Shiny or higher stickers that are already strong, such as any Thing, Fire/Ice Flowers, Clone Jumps, Burnhammers and Chillhammers, the aforementioned Super Boot, or even just some Flashy basic jumps and hammers, and you can steamroll any boss in just a few turns.
  • POW Blocks are another way to make bosses, and most Mook fights, super easy. Like the other examples, its shtick — the Crumpled status — makes grounded enemies (which every boss is) into spikeless sitting ducks and causes them to take double damage. The best part is that POW Blocks are fairly common and easily bought in bulk, and it's also a bonus on the Battle Spin, meaning you always have access to one if you're good.
  • Infinijump stickers are like the Power Bounce attack from the first two games, which is already considered a Game-Breaker despite being randomly capped based on a value assigned to all enemies (especially bosses), making it effectively impossible to reach the 101 jump cap on most of them. The Infinijump stickers, on the other hand, have no random cap, making it trivial to reach the maximum 100 hits and even make it possible to beat the Final Boss without the 11th-Hour Superpower! Naturally, the stickers for it aren't easy to find, with the stronger variants only being found in 5-3.
  • Running from battle, of all things, turns out to be the biggest one. Its action command is simple and enemies rarely punish for you failing it, success costs nothing (unlike other Mario RPGs where you lose coins) and it makes the enemy vanish from the overworld as if you'd defeated them. Combined with battles costing you stickers and only rewarding you with coins, which are easily found outside battle and are only useful for buying more stickers, running from every random battle won't set you back. In fact, you'll even come out ahead on resources if you get a first strike, as that gives you coins!
• Goddamned Boss: While Tower Power Pokey isn't a particularly hard boss when equipped with the Bat Thing, two factors make it one of the most annoying bosses in the entire Mario series. One, it's a Damage-Sponge Boss, so even when its HP has been sliced apart by the Bat Thing, Tower Power Pokey will still take a while before it fully goes down. Two, the fight runs on Violation of Common Sense, as while Pokeys are normally immune to jump attacks and have to be struck with a hammer, Tower Power Pokey is weak to jump attacks and resists hammer attacks, leading to it being one of the most confusingly-designed bosses in the series.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Given how this game, Paper Jam, and Color Splash made use of generic Toad NPCs instead of the more colorful casts of the previous games or any other friendly mainline species, fans of the older games and others who aren't Toad fans criticized the newer games about their overuse, if not making memes about the whole situation. In The Origami King, King Olly takes the dislike of Toads a step much further, seeing the "scrawlings" on his body by his Toad creator as grounds for a Final Solution.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Before this game was released, people were making jokes about how Mario would be the final boss, because Bowser was in the first game, a possessed Peach was in the second game, and a possessed Luigi was in the third game, therefore making Mario the only main character of the series not to get this role. In Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, Mario is a boss (not the real Mario, but an evil copy of him created by the antagonist) — one of the first boss fights in the game.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Plot-wise, it gets this in comparison to the mainstream Mario series. While Paper Mario was well known for its previous two titles adding new storylines and having memorable new characters, Sticker Star only has a little bit more plot than a typical New Super Mario Bros. game, which typically have minimalistic plots on purpose. Within just the Paper Mario subseries itself, the plot is quite similar to that of Paper Mario 64, but that game focused more on the personalities of the classic characters while also introducing new ones, making the plot of Sticker Star seem especially uninspired.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Even a lot of the game's critics like the Thing Stickers for their bizarre and audacious animations.
• Lowest Common Denominator: The game attempted to appeal to longtime Paper Mario fans by bringing back the turn based battles, but also tried to attract non-fans by making Pre-existing Encounters easily skippable, significantly simplifying combat, and heavily watering down the plot. Unsurprisingly, fans were not happy about this.
• Magnificent Bastard: The Host Snifit is the charismatic head of Snifit or Whiffit, a game show that rewards winners with crucial items and punishes losers with death by poison gas. Introducing himself by holding a piece of Wiggler hostage, the Host Snifit forces Mario into four life-threatening rounds of Snifit or Whiffit to entertain the audience, before respectfully freeing the Wiggler segment when the plumber wins. Returning for Snifit or Whiffit: Seabed Edition, the Host Snifit, now guarding a Paint Star, welcomes Mario back before subjecting him to another seven, increasingly difficult rounds of his show under the threat of drowning to death. Despite his loyalty to Bowser and willingness to kill Mario, the Host Snifit nevertheless remains friendly and always honors his word.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "NYARGLEBARGLE!"^ExplanationThe phrase Bowser Jr. shouts when he starts crumpling a bridge into a ball.
  • The Goat sticker, as well as the new Mariachi Shy Guy enemies.
  • Kersti referring to and describing Kamek as a hipster.
  • Everyone is a Toad.^ExplanationProbably the most infamous thing about the game is that every NPC outside of select few is some version of a generic male Toad (contrast past Paper Mario games, where there were an abundance of species and even the Toads that existed all had unique designs). This is made more baffling by the fact the intro to Super Mario Galaxy showed multiple Toadettes- meaning that opportunity was available, yet ignored. Seen as the developers just being completely lazy and unwilling to experiment, it has become a point of ridicule among detractors of the game (and by extension Color Splash, which also uses mostly Toads, but in multiple colors).
  • "Sticker Star bad, upvotes to the left"^ExplanationWith backlash inevitably comes backlash to the backlash. Even years after its release, a large amount of people still make fun of Sticker Star, to the point of becoming a Discredited Meme. This phrase is used as a typical response on the r/papermario subreddit for memes making a criticism of Sticker Star that everyone's heard a million times before.
  • "I don’t care if I get hate because of this opinion, but this is my favorite paper mario final boss song."^ExplanationThis fairly innocent comment on the final boss theme has garnered infamy for somehow creating a massive war-zone in the reply section. With the users Dave Matthew and Aramaru 1837 being particularly noteworthy (the former for his constant usage of calling the other user, Aramaru 1837, a "little maggot", and the latter for being a Troll who belittles the original poster for not playing more games, despite admitting to only playing one other Paper Mario game) as well as the argument going absolutely nowhere. This entire gong show was showcased by Cr1TiKaL with the video, Angriest Comment Thread on Youtube.
  • Tower Power Pokey's Theme^ExplanationThe battle theme for Tower Power Pokey went memetic thanks to a rather... infamous animation by minus8 featuring Ankha Rule 34 set to this song.
  • For whatever reason, Tower Power Pokey himself started gaining an ironic following on the Paper Mario subreddit in October 2020.
• Mis-blamed:
  • Shigeru Miyamoto may have gotten the game's most noticeable restrictions on characters and story set into stone, saying that this game didn't need a complex story and advising to only use pre-existing characters, which is a good part of what caused people to think that he's anti-story. However, what many people may not realize is that the one responsible for generic Toads being the only recurring friendly species and the paper theme being overemphasized was actually the producer, Kensuke Tanabe, who later stated in an interview that since Color Splash, his team had complete creative control, and that at this point, Miyamoto barely had a role behind the development of the games by now, only coming a couple of times to check the builds and approve them. One more thing to notice is that Miyamoto did play the later build from the spring 2011 with the stickers changing from puzzle-solving items to be the focus of the combat and wasn't impressed by it, saying that it was boring, which led to the Things, and Miyamoto focuses a lot on the gameplay, but one of the major things that people disliked about modern Paper Mario, the gameplay and combat, especially with Sticker Star and Color Splash, was still kept in despite the criticism from Miyamoto. Thankfully, more and more people are becoming aware of this as of late, and now one is more likely to point the finger at Tanabe for Stickers Star's shortcomings, keeping the things that fans disliked in the games after it and not satisfying their demands than Miyamoto.
  • Likewise, beyond the whole "too much like The Thousand-Year Door fiasco", the man responsible behind the gameplay and especially its battle system was actually Taro Kudo, one of the co-directors, according to Iwata Asks.
• More Popular Replacement: Kammy Koopa was already a well-liked Dragon to Bowser, but Kamek is generally even better appreciated thanks to being The Heavy who repeatedly causes trouble throughout the Worlds, with hilarious boss battles and a catchy, jazzy Leitmotif. His reputation only improved in Paper Mario: The Origami King, where he became a partner and his character was fleshed out more.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Even with the backlash against the game, it probably wouldn't have been seen as that bad if it wasn't for one thing: the Magnum Opus Dissonance on Nintendo's behalf that is leading them to stick with the same style of game. It doesn't help that the general reception of Sticker Star means that Paper Mario fans aren't really interested in discussing anything about the game itself, instead preferring to talk about the impact it had on the franchise.
• The Scrappy: Kersti is widely considered to be the worst partner character in the Paper Mario series, with some going as far as to call her the worst character overall. This is due to the fact that she's a jerk most of the time, constantly belittling and yelling at Mario (and by extension the player) for things that aren't his fault, or for solving problems in a way she didn't like. Furthermore, despite being your Exposition Fairy, the banter with her almost never actually gives helpful hints, even in situations where the player could really use them. If you manage to defeat a boss without using its intended weakness, she'll call you out for not doing things the "correct" way, which given how rarely she actually helps, doesn't exactly make her any more endearing. Not helping matters is she's also an Ungrateful Bastard most of time, immediately yelling at Mario and insulting him for taking so long as soon as he rescues her from being kidnapped, and being more worried over him losing/wasting his stickers rather than his well-being, leaving a bad taste in players' mouth, even for those who tolerated her up to that point.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Stickers, due to combining Too Awesome to Use and Inventory Management Puzzle. Fortunately, likely due to the museum sidequest, every single type of them is renewable. Unfortunately, they're the only way to act in battles.
  • Oddly enough, basic combat has become this. Due to removing experience points and levels, most battles do not offer a real reward and as a result, feel like padding. Even Super Paper Mario, which was more of a platformer and the RPG elements were greatly reduced, had EXP in some way, and in that case EXP took the form of points, as by getting enough points, the characters level up and become stronger and with more HP. Battles in Sticker Star can offer you coins, and occasionally health and stickers, but you find the latter two in the levels themselves usually and you can find the former at the end of every level. Also, there's a limited amount of stickers that you can carry, and fleeing can fail randomly, especially when Mario has low HP, which causes him to lose his turn and punishes the player for taking part in battles. All of this results in making battles pretty much useless.
  • In combination with the two examples above, there is no option to skip your turn to prepare a strategy in case there's nothing you can do to deal damage to enemies. This gets especially annoying in battles where you can't hurt the enemy that turn, boss battles, and the battles where your stickers are all turned into Sandal stickers that deal fixed 1 damage and are useless against everyone but Kamek. This leaves you with two choices, either waste a sticker or use the closest thing to a skip button, running away and hoping it fails. And because whether the mechanic works or not depends entirely on how the Random Number God is feeling, you can accidentally flee from boss fights. Running away successfully in a boss fight ends up infuriating because not only have you wasted any stickers you used, you have to do the entire battle over.
  • Hammer stickers. The action command timing window is obscenely small and the visual cue for different ratings is hard to discern, and an Excellent command window lasts for close to 1 frame. The closest other Mario RPGs have come to an action command timing window this small are SMRPG's Super/Ultra Jumps and TTYD's Power Bounces, which are extra attacks that are so broken that giving them tough inputs that only kick in after a few jumps or capping them is the only way to balance them, while the hammer is one of your main attacks.
  • Boss fights have a big problem: being Puzzle Bosses with too much emphasis on "puzzle". Either you don't have the appropriate type Thing sticker, making them wipe the floor with you unless you prepared heavily, or you do have it and use it, weakening them so heavily that victory is nigh-guaranteed, thus making the boss battles very unbalanced: too easy with the right Things and hair-tearingly difficult without said Thing. Essentially, having skill and strategy to defeat bosses has been replaced with having the right item to win, and can make getting high-level stickers pointless. Also, with the exception of two bosses (one of which doesn't have a Thing weakness at all), there's only one type of Thing that can exploit the weaknesses, which compounds on the Guide Dang It!. What makes matters worse is that even if you do go for a Self-Imposed Challenge and try to beat a boss without using their weakness, the game will basically note that you wasted a number of stickers and brings up that you should have used their weaknesses anyway, courtesy of Kersti. Only the boss of World 4 avoids the aforementioned issues, thanks to being a snow monster with a Logical Weakness to any and all fire attacks.
  • Along with the examples above, the Things themselves might be one of the most hated things about the game, since they greatly contribute to the game's glaring design flaws such as Guide Dang It! moments and boss fights becoming a joke when using the correct Thing. There's also the fact that they're incredibly overpowered even when it's not the effective one, as most will deal a ton of damage by default, making the point of getting high-level stickers pointless since you can easily win by just spamming Things in battle. There's also the Overly Long Fighting Animations that come with most Things, which can get old very quickly especially when spamming them.
• Sequelitis: Sticker Star is widely seen as the weakest of the series, due to its revamped, overly simplified and overwhelmingly obtuse battle system, Excuse Plot, Flat Characters, generic locations, unoriginal character designs, Guide Dang It! puzzles, and several other reasons.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Those who like the game generally state that it doesn't really pick up until World 3. The first two worlds are the standard grasslands and desert, both being largely plotless and lacking much variation. World 3, in spite of its length, has a more interesting Bubblegloop Swamp environment, includes levels that deviate from the standard formula (including Rustle Burrow's Bag of Spilling mechanic and Stump Glade's game show), and it's the only world with an overarching plotline (retrieving Wiggler's parts and figuring out how to clean up the forest). Worlds 4 and 5 lose the overarching plot, but still keep adding new ideas to their themes (respectively, having an elaborate haunted house that portrays Boos as some sort of horror unleashed from a book and a minecart ride for a final dungeon; World 5 progresses from a fairly unique jungle setting with raft rides, to ruins, to a volcano).
• So Okay, It's Average: Many elements of the game, including the dumbed-down gameplay, the paper-thin characterization, the "have the right item on you or die" mechanics behind most of the bosses, a grand total of one new character, and the handling of Bowser's characterization (or lack thereof) add up to the response from those who don't hate the game being a resounding "meh." This wouldn't otherwise be notable if it weren't an installment in the highly acclaimed Paper Mario series. Overall, those who don't hate the game consider it okay when judged on its own, but it does not fill the shoes of the first three games, especially the second one.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Using a Fan sticker plays a song evocative of Also sprach Zarathustra as the fan rises slowly from the horizon.
• That One Attack: Basically, any boss attack that can crumple you. As well as being generally quite strong, they leave you unable to act for as many as four turns. That includes blocking and healing. Prepare for death.
• That One Boss:
  • The Giant Cheep Cheep at Surfshine Harbor. It starts off easy, but then the Cheep Cheep dives into the water and recovers all its health and remains in the water. At this point, you must use the Fishhook Thing (which happens to be decently well-hidden) to reel it out. Then, the Cheep Cheep will start puffing up until it pops and kills itself, killing you too if you don't have armor.
  • Kamek, especially the last fight against him. He transforms all of your stickers into Sandal stickers, so you better take note about which sticker was what, lest you use up some really valuable ones here. The first fight's not too bad, since he's alone. Come the second time, where he creates two clones of himself to ensure you need to get three sticker slots from the Battle Spin, can change altitude so no attack will hit, and will make a random sticker of yours disappear.
  • The Final Boss, Bowser, even though it's, well, the final boss, is a ridiculous leap in difficulty from the World 5 boss. 5 phases, each of which require at least one Thing Sticker to make them at least manageable, and the boss is spiked. Even after following a guide to the letter to prepare for it, it is still extremely difficult.
• That One Level:
  • World 3-9, Gauntlet Pond. Tricky jumps, maze-like structure, poison everywhere and the escort mission can be very infuriating if you manage to make the Wiggler segment drop and having to go through the poisonous swamp and restart that part again.
  • World 5-3, Long Fall Falls. You spend approximately 99% of the level on a raft, which is hard to control as it is. Add the fact that you're chased by a Cheep Chomp for the first half of the level, who has the ability to instantly kill you when you're not careful! It's not too bad the first time you go through the level, but the Cheep Chomp gets a lot more aggressive and harder to dodge as you get more comet pieces from that level. So if you missed a secret or just want to farm the Big Shiny and Megaflash-variation of the Infinijump-stickers, prepare to have a very hard time.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Along with Super Paper Mario, it's one of the games in which some fans aren't pleased with the gameplay changes, though this case was worse because what remained of the RPG elements, which were still present in Super Paper Mario, although noticeably toned down, was completely removed, and the minimal story, the severe lack of variety in character designs, especially with NPCs, the gimmicky combat system, the confusing puzzles with Kersti rarely giving suggestions and a humour with an obsession on paper puns, were also hated. Interestingly enough, one of the major motivations for the development team after Miyamoto insisted on no story (or at the very least, minimal story) was to survey Club Nintendo members to see if they liked the story in the previous games. Not even 1% responded that they liked the story or that they considered it interesting, and the response generated led the team to moving in more of the emphasis on paper. However, many have gone on to point out the many problems with this survey process, with the biggest offender being that the survey was limited to members of (and who regularly check) Club Nintendo. And considering that Paper Mario has a bit of a Periphery Demographic to begin with, it's not very surprising that most fans of the series claim to have never heard of this survey even existing. For that matter, it's reasonable to say that people who did do the survey thought it wasn't much more than a joke, considering how ridiculous the answers seem in context. The fact Sticker Star's surveys ^note which players likely would have filled in and more carefully worded in light of the above information were never mentioned in the lead up to Color Splash further cast doubt on whether Super Paper Mario's surveys were really the crux of the issue.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Surprisingly, Bowser falls under this. Despite his role as the Big Bad, he has no dialogue and barely features throughout the game. Considering this is the guy who delivered the infamous "It's Hag Vs Hag! Awesome!" line in TTYD, this is a bizarre omission. He can be a truly menacing villain Depending on the Writer in games such as Super Mario Galaxy, and Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story proved that his imposing side and hilarious side aren't mutually exclusive. Considering the personality Bowser displays through the rest of the Paper Mario series, this is really jarring. While Mario & Luigi: Dream Team pulled a similar trick, it's generally agreed that the game handled it much better in comparison to Sticker Star (even by detractors) by letting Bowser keep his hammy personality and by making Bowser's Big Bad status into an actual plot twist.
  • Luigi, who was hit so hard with the Demoted to Extra hammer that he was left silent and mostly exists as a series of cameos to find. Considering his mammoth role in Super and how there's an entire other series of Mario RPGs where he's the second playable lead, him not doing anything relevant here is especially bizarre.
  • Peach. Peach in the previous Paper Mario games was a far cry from her mainline self. Despite being captured in 64 and TTYD, on her playable segments she was still a formidable character, doing her best to deal with the situation and help guide Mario to his objectives. In the darkest hour in the final battle of the first Paper Mario, she and Twink the star joined forces to deal the final blow to a powered-up Bowser. And that's not getting into her playable status in Super Paper Mario. In Sticker Star, she only serves to get captured on the prologue and never shows up until the final Bowser boss.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The fact that Mizzter Blizzard, unlike other bosses who were either acting selfishly or just wild creatures, was a perfectly nice character who only wanted a body that wouldn't melt at the end of Winter, but when the Royal Sticker landed on him and granted his wish, it also made him Brainwashed and Crazy and led to him throwing the weather out of balance implies that the Royal Stickers aren't quite the benevolent artifacts the lore initially made them out to be, but the game never explores this any further due to its Excuse Plot.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Kersti is often portrayed as rude and rash, but it's implied that she is acting that way because she is stressed and/or frustrated because she can't return to the Sticker Comet unless the Royal Stickers are gathered. However, it's shown in the opening cutscene that she did nothing to stop Bowser from splitting the Comet in the first place, with even some Toads trying harder than her, and after the damage is done, the first thing she does is blame and yell at Mario. The whole situation is on her almost as much as it is on Bowser, and combined with the fact that she spends most of her other scenes yelling at Mario or getting him into otherwise-avoided trouble, it's hard to find people who sympathize with her. This isn't helped by her Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the game, because due to coming across as an Ass Pull, it ends up just feeling like the game is making a desperate last-ditch attempt at getting the audience to feel some sort of sympathy for her.
• The Woobie: Mizzter Blizzard, who was forced to either melt or go mad with a Royal Sticker's power. After Mario knocks some sense into him, he apologizes and seemingly melts. On the bright side, it's implied Mario could build him a new body in the future.

---