Paper Mario Sticker Star

My latest GameFly game was Paper Mario Sticker Star. http://www.giantbomb.com/paper-mario-sticker-star/3030-31755/ (Sorry for the lack of hyperlink, I'm trying out the Blogger iPad app with a bluetooth keyboard and I can't figure out how to, ya know, hyperlink.)

When I first started it up, the cartridge still had a previous renter's data in there. The saved game seemed to be near the end, and was at 18 hours of playtime. 18 hours!? There's no way I can put that much time into a silly Mario 3DS game. But after an hour or so I was really looking forward to spending that much time in the funny little world it creates.

Most of the games in the Paper Mario series can be described as RPG-lite and this one is no exception. You use items on enemies in a turn-based battle that deal some amount of damage. If you press the A button at just the right times you can deal more damage or avoid taking some damage. Pretty simple. There's a little bit of strategy with pairing the right items or type of attack with the right enemy, but there's not much to that. The boss fights can get a bit more complicated since you'll usually want to save your more powerful, rarer stickers (attacks) for them. Picking the right one in the right order is the key there.

Other than that you just have to make your way around in the world and find things that will let you progress to the next section, adventure game-style. This is where the game sometimes falls flat. I spent a lot of time looking at a walkthrough to tell me where to go next since the game didn't always make it very clear. Several times, I had been to the place I needed to go and tried the thing I needed to do, but not in _exactly_ the right way. That can be pretty frustrating.

I got most of the way through the game (about 16 hours in) before I got tired of the tedium of "go here, do this, come back." I think level 4-3, the haunted mansion level was what finally broke me. Don't get me wrong, it was well done and pretty funny, but there was a _lot_ of walkthrough looking on that one.

While I wait for the next game I started up Zelda, Wind Waker. I'm playing the Gamecube disc on the Wii, using the trusty old Wavebird wireless Gamecube controller. I knew I kept those around for a reason.