This game is all about stickers. All of your attacks are each stickers. You have a sticker album where you keep your attacks. When you use an attack sticker it is gone forever and you must collect more. Fortunately, they do seem to be scattered all over the place, so usually you won't run out, but there are definitely times where you'll be forced to use your higher quality and more powerful stickers against a weak enemy because you don't have any other low quality stickers to spend on him. Although this adds a somewhat interesting ammo consumption strategy to all the fights, it also makes the fights a lot more frustrating since you can't always use the best attack against the enemy.
On top of that, the only way to get more than one attack per turn is to successfully get two or three in a row on a slot machine style spinner that costs 3 coins to use each time. And since there are only a few sticker types that hit all enemies and only one of those works on flying enemies, of which there are an abundance in this game, you are forced to get really good at that slot machine, really fast. Especially since, unlike other Mario RPG games (at least in my memory, which is admittedly faulty) even if you successfully time the button press to block incoming attacks, you still take quite a large chunk of damage. In previous games, you could either level up or equip some badge that would reduce how much damage you take, which would make this less of an issue. In this game, however, you're just as likely to get killed by an enemy you meet early on at the end of the game as you are the final boss. And this is precisely why I miss the stats. By the end of the game, I felt no more powerful than I did at the beginning. Fighting a Goomba (the weakest enemy in the game) at the beginning of the game and at the end of the game is the exact same fight.
This lack of stats also makes the boss fights more of a puzzle than a challenge of your combat skills. This sounds like it would be right up my alley, except the solutions to all of these puzzles is to bring very specific stickers into the battle. If you don't have those stickers or use them at the wrong time, combat is just slow and torturous and your little crown friend will berate you for wasting so many stickers on that battle. The only way, without looking at guides, to know which stickers are required is to try the boss fight and die at least once after watching the attacks, patterns, and clues from the background/enemy. So in order to solve the puzzle, you have to fail at least once and that is not the feeling you want to instill in your players. I don't care if losing doesn't cost me anything, it is not fun to be forced to die against a boss in order to succeed. I should only die if I couldn't figure out the patterns/strategy before my health ran out. But if I didn't happen to bring a specific sticker (which generally take up large portions of your sticker album and are thus very costly), there is absolutely nothing I can do, but play through a slow and boring boss fight, hoping I can somehow outlast the other guy.
I am very saddened by where this game series has progressed and would definitely not recommend this game to others. Even though there are still very clever uses of the fact that everything in this world is made of paper, both gameplay and comedic effect, having to go through all that combat with no feeling of progress and fighting puzzle bosses with no way to solve the puzzle the first time except through luck or reading a walkthrough just makes the game very frustrating. I really hope the next Paper Mario brings back some of the RPG elements that made me love the series in the first place.
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