Nintendo Everything Names Paper Mario: Sticker Star Among Worst Nintendo Games

Nintendo Everything has published a new ranking of what it considers the worst games Nintendo has ever released, singling out Paper Mario: Sticker Star, Pokemon Rumble U, and Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival as some of the publisher’s most misguided efforts. The outlet made clear it deliberately excluded Hotel Mario and other Phillips CD-i titles, since those were never actually developed by Nintendo itself.

What makes the list notable isn’t just the games chosen, but the reasoning behind leaving other frequently-maligned titles off it entirely. Nintendo Everything argued that games people love to hate, like Star Fox Zero or the more divisive modern Pokemon entries, don’t actually belong in the same conversation as genuinely broken or misconceived releases.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star Cited as the Franchise’s Biggest Misstep

According to Nintendo Everything, Paper Mario: Sticker Star for 3DS represents less a badly-made game than a deliberately misguided one. The outlet points to solid visuals and a strong soundtrack undercut by baffling structural choices: a silent Bowser as the main antagonist, no unique characters recruited to the story, no in-battle partners, and a sticker-management system that replaced the beloved RPG mechanics fans associated with the series since its Nintendo 64 debut.

That framing matters right now because the Paper Mario series is in the middle of a comeback. Nintendo Everything notes that the franchise feels back on track thanks to the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, which restored the turn-based partner system and character-driven writing that Sticker Star abandoned. That context also lets the site partially rehabilitate 2016’s Paper Mario: Color Splash, which it argues doubled down on similar gimmicks but executed them far better than Sticker Star ever did.

Pokemon Rumble U’s Amiibo-Adjacent Failure

Pokemon Rumble U, a Wii U spin-off that predates amiibo with its own line of NFC figures, is flagged by Nintendo Everything as one of the lowest-reviewed and most forgettable entries in the entire Pokemon catalogue. The site’s criticisms centre on overly linear stages, shallow combat, and heavy repetition across the campaign, issues that suggest the toy-to-life tie-in was rushed out ahead of Nintendo’s more polished amiibo rollout a year later.

It’s a useful reminder that Nintendo experimented with physical figure integration well before amiibo became a mainstream hit, and that not every experiment landed. For collectors curious about Nintendo’s toys-to-life history, Pokemon Rumble U stands as the awkward dry run that got largely forgotten once amiibo took off in 2014.

Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival’s E3 2015 Baggage

The excerpt from Nintendo Everything’s piece begins setting up its take on Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival, tracing the game’s origins back to Nintendo’s 2015 E3 presentation, where the board-game-style spin-off was unveiled alongside a wave of dedicated amiibo figures and cards. Historically, that title has been criticised for functioning more as an amiibo-selling vehicle bundled with minimal gameplay than as a genuine entry in the beloved life-sim series, a reputation that has followed it ever since its Wii U launch.

Why Star Fox Zero and Modern Pokemon Were Left Off

Nintendo Everything explained that it deliberately excluded Star Fox Zero from the list despite its frequent appearance on similar rankings elsewhere. The outlet acknowledged the Wii U shooter’s dual-screen gyro controls are widely seen as complicated and slow to master, and that its story leans heavily on retreading the original Star Fox, but argued those flaws don’t reach the same severity as the other games included.

The site applied similar logic to modern mainline Pokemon titles that fans often criticise for technical shortcomings. Nintendo Everything’s reasoning is that even the weakest recent Pokemon games retain the franchise’s addictive catch-and-train loop, whereas the titles that made its actual list lack a compelling core gameplay hook entirely, making their problems far harder to overlook.

For long-time Nintendo collectors and retro gaming fans across New Zealand and Australia, these games remain firmly out of print on modern hardware, meaning most players will only encounter them through secondhand Wii U and 3DS copies or emulation discussions. With Nintendo now steering the Paper Mario series back toward its RPG roots and continuing to lean on amiibo-adjacent features for Switch and Switch 2, Nintendo Everything’s list serves as a pointed reminder of which experiments the company would probably rather fans forget.