Paper Mario: Sticker Star

We learned some more details about Paper Mario: Sticker Star at Nintendo’s press conference on Tuesday, but tonight Nintendo was able to show off some gameplay.

The game is all about collecting stickers. The stickers are used as a sort of inventory for attacks. You must collect a shoe sticker, for example, to perform the jump move in combat. The stickers are everywhere, both in the open and hidden, and you must scour the environment to find them.

Combat looks familiar if you have ever played a Paper Mario title, but you won’t be collecting traditional experience from the battles. Raising your attack power and health comes from finding special stickers in the environment and helping out characters in need.

In the demo a giant fan destroyed someone’s flower garden. The fan was not made of paper, but rather it is a fully three-dimensional realistic looking fan. Mario was able to grab the fan and put it in his inventory, and then use flower stickers to repair the garden.

To repair the garden, Paperizing mode is activated. Paperizing pulls the camera back to flatten the world like a piece of paper, of which Mario can then place collected flower stickers. After placing a few stickers, the garden sprang back to life, offering more stickers to Mario and plus-five health bonus item.

Up next we saw the fan that Mario collected earlier taken to a special Toad in a stall, who was able to convert the real fan object into a giant fan sticker which takes up a large chunk of Mario’s inventory. Mario finds a windmill in need of some wind later in the game, and placed the now screen filling fan sticker onto the world with the Paperizing mode, which got the windmill moving.

The last thing shown was a luck-based slot machine game that can be activated during combat to hopefully use multiple attack stickers per round.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star is coming to Nintendo 3DS this holiday, and you can check out a new 3D trailer on the 3DS eShop right now.