Current Events > Sticker Star is morbidly fascinating.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I finished the game for the first time a few minutes ago. Very late to the party there. Probably would've been angry about it, but I didn't pay for it so I can't say I have buyer's remorse.
But yeah - the dev meetings for this must've been insane.
"How about we do away with all of the RPG elements aside from having a health bar?"
"How about we implement the most awkward resource management system for battles?"
"Won't that discourage getting into random battles, though?"
"It'll make random battles outright worthless! Except for money, but we'll just make that abundant without battles. Also let's make the boss battles complete nightmares to balance it out, unless you happen to know the exact combination and timing for the thing stickers, alright?"
It's like they were taking every RPG convention they could and doing it wrong on purpose.

Also, I know it would've been somewhat cliche in itself to do this, but they missed a really easy plot point regarding how the Royal Stars make the bosses go insane. They could've shown Kersti falling into the same state with each one you collect, and then have a grand betrayal at the end where she either joins Bowser or takes the final Royal Sticker for herself, then it's you and Bowser against her. Or something like that. As it is, the story is as bland as it could be.

Iunno - this game borders on avant-garde, where they were trying to see how much they can break everything and still have it be a game.
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The whole sticker system needed literally one tweak to make it work: make all used stickers replenish at save points.
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interviews basically say every change from the 64/TTYD formula slowly happened over development to accommodate the sticker system which they were dead set on adding from the start, which is baffling with just how much they had to amputate in order to get it not really working

personally I find it more practical to fight fights for coins than to avoid them and rely just on stuff from required encounters and backtracking, but the issue is fights just tend to be zero fun, everything has the same action commands, enemy attacks for blocking are flat, and fights are drawn out either by overtly inflated HP counts or huge enemy teams without reliable methods of hitting multiple targets

I stopped doing most random battles midway through world 3 and never had money problems. Between all of the stickers you find just there in levels, and the waterfall of coins you got at the end of most levels, I was fine.

The high HP counts (on bosses at least) definitely made things feel dire...but then using thing stickers correctly to cripple them ruins that.
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I'm not even talking the bosses, even just the trash mobs start getting drawn out as fuck later on, and that's the real encouragement to skip fights

I think the game would be far more enjoyable if they just had some sort of deck or folder system for your battle stickers with a "hand" being dealt to you every turn, and then used some sort of resource or pairing system to dictate using multiples at once rather than a fucking roulette, and you would still consume loose ones sitting in your inventory to solve puzzles and such

hell, partnersone of the things they cut because they couldn't figure out how to make them work with the stickerswould work with the sticker system then, just give each partner a unique folder of stickers only they have access to, boom

I got halfway through and quit
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its amazing that the first three mario rpgs could be so awesome, and end up taking such a total turn downhill afterwords
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Second_Chances posted...

I'm not even talking the bosses, even just the trash mobs start getting drawn out as fuck later on, and that's the real encouragement to skip fights

Iunno, I found keeping up with the various tiers of sticker (normal/shiny/flashy) ensured things fell pretty quickly.

I'll note that, though I avoided random battles when I could, enemies started showing up in more inconvenient locations, so I still had to do a fair number.
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