to be too similar to The Thousand Year Door. He requested the developers to greatly de-emphasise the game's story, saying that "It's fine without a story, so do we really need one?". Producer Kensuke Tanabe further elaborated on how less than one percent of players found the storyline in Super Paper Mario interesting, according to a survey on Club Nintendo. Taro Kudo, the game's lead writer, determined that the game did not need a complex story to "drive the action". As a Nintendo 3DS title, Sticker Star was intended to be played in short bursts; the episodic narrative and the world map and level system were implemented so that players could easily stop and resume play at any time. Characters In developer interviews for the 2020 title Paper Mario: The Origami King, Tanabe referenced that starting with Sticker Star, they were told from Nintendo that they were not allowed to create new characters or build upon previous ones, such as in age or gender. Due to this, focus was shifted much more towards text, as it allows the developers to express personality. In a 2012 interview of "Iwata Asks", Satoru Iwata suggested how traits and personality was rather a product of function and gameplay. Reception Sticker Star received "generally favorable reviews", gaining an aggregate score of 75/100 on Metacritic. The game sold 402,000 copies in Japan in 2012. , the game has 1,970,000 worldwide sales. The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences chose Sticker Star as the "Best Handheld Game of the Year" during their 16th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards ceremony. The introduction of stickers received mixed reception by critics; critics liked the strategy of managing stickers on hand. Philip Kollar of Polygon called the combat engaging, and like how each battle had its own gimmick that invoked logic deduction. Jeremy Parish of 1UP praised Sticker Star'''s playability by saying, "The sheer playability of Sticker Star goes a long way to offset the moments at which your forward momentum grinds to a halt and you're forced to traipse through old haunts for some arbitrary fetch quest." The use of Things received negative reception, criticized for being out of place and their function in game being a necessity. They were considered one of the game's weaknesses, criticized for inevitable backtracking and only having one solution for each puzzle. Jeff Grubb of VentureBeat criticized the use of stickers due to a lack of