This is why Paper Mario Ditched RPG in Favour of Stickers

Curious as to why the Paper Mario on 3DS takes a slightly different approach to past entries with the toned down RPG elements? Miyamoto is the answer.

In a new Iwata Asks session, the Nintendo president spoke to various members of the team on the latest entry - Paper Mario: Sticker Star - why it's fairly different to past iterations aside from the art style and the decision to involve stickers.

The main reason being was that Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto had a stronger influence/input this time round, wanting to "change the atmosphere a lot" by two main requirements:

• "It's fine without a story, so do we really need one?"
• "As much as possible, complete it with only characters from the Super Mario world."

Because of the transition to portable format, the team abandoned the more RPG/intense storyline format and instead focused on smaller chunks that "packed in lots of little episodes and ideas" for shorter play time.

Miyamoto's desire to prevent new characters meant that the team had to rely on "toad in various colours". This rather large restriction didn't phase them though, as "I could feel that I became one with Toad", with each having their own personality and scope.

Creatively, restraints aren't necessarily a bad thing. A lot of new attractive features come out of that.

From these restrictions came the realisation that stickers could shake up the traditional RPG format, so gone were experience points and level building in favour of "gathering stronger stickers".

I had actually been thinking for a long time that I wanted to get rid of the RPG experience points. In the Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland28 game, which Kudo-san and I worked on together, the player-character didn't develop at all. We adopted a system whereby they solved everything with money.

The game relies on objects you may not have encountered in the Super Mario World universe before - like a kettle of a Beckoning Cat statue - these were justified because of the use of stickers. Miyamoto took the bait, it seems and the team developed the idea further by creating ancient ruins that depicted more realistic/human like properties.

No, there were times when Miyamoto-san has really gotten angry at me! (laughs) Like about treatment of Bowser. But the Super Mario games have an orthodox lineage that Miyamoto-san thought up as its creator. So while Paper Mario, as part of that, must preserve certain things, I think there is a point to tackling new and unusual things

In related news, Paper Mario Sticker Star received a respectable 36/40 in the latest issue of Famitsu magazine from four reviewers (9/9/9/9).

For more details on Paper Mario: Sticker Star be sure to read the Iwata Asks session on the official website.