While Paper Mario fans wait on a new game to eventually be announced, they’re left replaying all of the older Paper Mario games like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door which finally came forward to the Nintendo Switch just recently. But between The Thousand-Year Door which was regarded as one of the best Paper Mario games and its eventual rerelease, we got another Paper Mario game that didn’t fair nearly as well. That game was Paper Mario: Sticker Star, and even though it wasn’t held in high regard, a new discovery has been unearthed over a decade later to show the game in a new light.
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Back in 2010 during E3, Nintendo showcased a trailer at the gaming event to show off a Paper Mario game for the Nintendo 3DS. Despite it being shown off there, the trailer all but disappeared afterwards and was unobtainable, so if you didn’t see it around that time, you were out of luck.
That is, until, one person finally uploaded the trailer for everyone to see. The YouTube account Marionova which hosts videos for all things Mario-related shared the long-lost trailer for Paper Mario: Sticker Star back when it was still just referred to broadly as a Paper Mario game. The trailer itself just starts with “Paper Mario Preview” before showing off gameplay and ending with a “Thank You” without any mention of platforms (the Nintendo 3DS was also announced in 2010), but this is definitely the game that would later evolve to become Paper Mario: Sticker Star.
Given that this is Nintendo we’re talking about, there’s a chance this old Paper Mario: Sticker Star trailer may not stay up on the YouTube channel for forever, but it already seems to have been archived elsewhere as well. It’s out there now at least, so Paper Mario fans and those big on preservation at least don’t have to worry about it disappearing again.
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While Paper Mario: Sticker Star wasn’t necessarily a bad game, it definitely didn’t hold up compared to the original Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door that came after it. It introduced a sicker feature which was the center of combat and the puzzles in Sticker Star, a gimmick that wasn’t received as well given that the games already had a paper gimmick that everyone was just fine with. In most Sticker Star scenarios, the tedious sticker setup made it so that it made sense to avoid battle where possible thus defeating the purpose of even playing the game at all since the turn-based battles in the first two games were so enjoyable. Plus, there were no companions to follow you around in Sticker Star as opposed to the first two games.
The last mainline Paper Mario game was Paper Mario: The Origami King which released back in 2020. It wasn’t received as well as the originals, of course, but it was closer to them than Sticker Star or Paper Mario: Color Splash. Nintendo has not indicated any plans to release another Paper Mario game anytime soon, but with the Nintendo Switch 2 right around the corner, there’s no better time for us fans to get one.
