Mario, in of himself, is not that great a character. He's world-famous, easily recognizable, and stars in some superb video games, but if you asked me to talk about who the character is, I'd falter.
Here's a quick list of things that are really off the top of my head (no really, I'm just now trying to think these up) about Mario:
He goes "yahoo" a lot.
He's very upbeat.
He's always willing to save a princess from dragon turtle things.
He likes to go-cart.
He once had a talking, water-spraying jet pack for a sidekick.
He gets along well with dinosaurs.
Different types of plant life do different things to his body.
That's a pretty bland character, because there just isn't much personality there. Mario doesn't ever really say anything besides "okie-dokie," "let'sa go," or "it'sa me!" Luigi, on the other hand, has a lot more depth, since we know he's a bit of a coward, but still willing to walk into danger. He's fiercely loyal to his brother. He tends to be a bit clumsy, and acts goofy at strange times. He can be a little lazy, and doesn't really get into the pomp of ceremonies thrown by the princess ("What, another cake? Wake me when this kingdom discovers booze.")
Now, there are some small exceptions to this rule, and they tend to come in the RPGs featuring Mario.
In both the Mario and Luigi series and the Paper Mario series, both brothers get a lot more depth. Well, okay, Luigi gets a lot more depth, Mario just gets slightly less shallow. We see his determination, we get to see him be surprised and startled by things. We see side characters plead with him to help them and know he'll do what he can for them.
But it still usually falls to the secondary characters to provide the real character to the games, whether it's Luigi, a Goomba who's also his biggest fan, a female ghost, or a talking sticker.
It's that last one that's relevant now.
Now, when I first started playing this game (having been a big fan of the previous Paper Mario franchise games), I was a bit perplexed. The game gave me a sticker album and told me to collect stickers, and instead of just attacking bad guys, I had to choose a sticker (that was then lost) with the attack I wanted, so there was a chance I might run out of stickers or be stuck with attacks that wouldn't do anything.
I thought this game was going to be terrible, and for the first hour I was debating just stopping and selling it.
It has now been two weeks. Not only have I completed the sticker museum with one of each kind of sticker in the world, not only have I sought out all of the bonus hearts to increase Mario's health, and not only have I unlocked every hidden door, but I'm just now finally ready to face Bowser as the final boss. This game managed to hook into a long dormant part of my brain, a forgotten control panel that once echoed with commands of "Gotta catch 'em all," but still had a direct link into the rest of my actions.
The game is still pretty dumb in that you have to collect tokens to act as your attacks, but it does compensate by essentially burying you in stickers from the word "go" so that you can usually find something you need around you.
Gameplay-wise, combat is pretty simple. You pick the sticker you want to use, and you attack whichever bad guy is in front of the pack. A few attacks target multiple enemies, but for the most part you often are forced to wade through bad guys to get to the big guy during a boss battle. Attacks are also timed, so if you push a button at just the right time, you do extra damage or get bonus coins that you later use to...well, to buy more stickers.
One clever aspect of the game is the inclusion of "things." That sounds really vague, but it'll make sense in a moment. "Things" are three-dimensional objects you come upon, whether it's a fan, a fridge, a lucky cat statue, or a pair of scissors. You can turn these into stickers by flinging them against a large wall (don't try to figure out that logic), and you can later use them through the game. You need to cross a sea of lava? Slap a sticker of a fridge into the background and chill the whole area down. The boss you're fighting is made up of a stack of stickers? Use the fan to blow a bunch of them away. The boss keeps summoning minions to get between you and him? Pull out a stapler and staple the hole they come out of closed, then summon a giant pair of scissors to cut the bad guy into pieces.
This manages to give the game some variety, but it can be a bit frustrating when you reach a stage and realize you need to go back to earlier ones because you don't have the right "thing" yet and you need to look around a bit more.
There is one stage that I'll admit frustrated me, but it might be because I never read the manual and it might, perhaps, have a simple explanation of how to complete it. In one stage you're floating on a river on a raft, and a giant fish appears that can eat you and the raft in one bite. It lunges forward, either charging or jumping, and you have to move your raft out of its path.
When it lines itself up and suddenly charges forward, I swear it's almost impossible to dodge, and it's a one-hit kill. Stupid fish. Oh, and the best part is that there's multiple exits from the stage to go different paths, so odds are you have to go through it more than once.
The game does have the standard Paper Mario sense of humor, using self-awareness and characters that used to be blank slates to bring comedy, drama, and tension into the game. Being stuck in a game show created by Bowser's minions and having to solve puzzles while poison gas was pumped into a room was made interesting when I could tell that at first the crowd seemed eager to see me die, but as I moved forward they seemed to start to cheer for me.
I think that's possibly my favorite part of these games, is the depth that minions and sub-bosses get, since they might not be really eager to do what Bowser says, but it beats the alternative of being killed by him. Bosses might be intimidated by Mario, or show extreme hubris. They might be masterminds or just giant brute labor. Some of the bosses are actually rather intimidating, such as a giant ice statue shaped like Bowser that you barely stand taller than its feet (spoiler alert, bring ovens and radiators to melt it).
Overall, it's been a fun game, but there is still that part of me that gets frustrated that, at its core, it's about looking around for things I need to be able to progress, because the attacks I already have aren't effective. The game doesn't always do a good job of warning you ahead of time what kind of sticker you might need, so you could encounter a boss, realize you don't have an essential sticker, and have to either die and restart or run away to be able to get what you need.
Overall, it's a fun little game, and the humor and intelligence behind some of the details was enough to keep me going through it, but when I finally complete it, I don't really expect I'll come back to it at some point in the future. Not while I have the other Paper Mario games that seemed to just do it better without the sticker gimmick.
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