When you watched of funny game developers, Nintendo isn’t a reputation that instantly rolls off the tongue. But lying underneath the outside of even their most stoic work is a mischievous streak as wide as a Wiggler’s wide bits.

Sometimes you might want to perform a little digging to discover it. You could unearth it between the lines of Zelda’s impish dialogue, or etched within the panic-stricken faces of Wii Sports’ Miis as they flee in terror from an errant bowling bowl.

Other times, their sly humour bubbles to the outside on its own – and no Ninty series froths with mischief greater than Paper Mario, Nintendo’s bizarrely-brilliant pulped-fiction RPG series.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star marks the series’ debut on a handheld console, and it retains an analogous tongue-in-cheek tone that made it the sort of cult hit on N64/GC/Wii. Veterans of the series will already know what to anticipate – always, the unexpected.

The series occurs in another reality Mushroom Kingdom where even the lowliest grunts are given a voice. What follows is twelve hours (give or take slightly backtracking) of surrealist Mario humour – of goombas who witter on about going for ice cream, of wigglers who insist on talking within the third-person regardless of how awkwardly it causes their sentences tumble out.

This isn’t a game of zinging one-liners, mind – so no use to fret about spraying your fellow commuters with laughter-slobber. The Paper Mario series instead prefers to weave its comedy around a hotter, more frivolous more or less wit, with the foremost source of mirth coming from light-hearted jibes on the tropes of the RPG genre and the Marioverse at large.

As an example, the helpful signpost tutorials scattered around the stages are explained away early inside the storyline as being a by-manufactured from the Toads’ OCD. Once something traumatic happens, their first instinct is to scramble for a pen and a post in order to write down their thoughts.

Visually it is a belter, too – the 3DS’ stereoscopic display brings Sticker Star’s papercraft diorama world to life, and there are some great uses of the screen’s depth perception, inclusive of parachuting bob-ombs who rain down the screen inside the foreground, and slaphammered goombas who fly inside and out of view like a deflating balloon.

Sticker Star’s charming presentation and cheeky banter make it a pleasure to exist in and to explore its world, and affords the sport plenty of goodwill from the player. Unfortunately, we need to report that Sticker Star needs all of the goodwill it might get, because in seeking to adapt its template to suit a handheld format, it creates as many problems because it solves.

The most important change is available in the manner combat works. After the faux-platforming misstep of Super Paper Mario, Sticker Star sees a return to the turn-based JRPG battles of the sooner games. But it uses a stripped down fighting system that eliminates the idea of levelling-up in its entirety.

This time Mario doesn’t come fitted with a moveset of his own, and doesn’t get to be told one either. Instead, his attacks are available the shape of 1-use only stickers, which peel off into the ether after being utilised.

Stickers could be sourced in different ways. They are often purchased in shops, liberated from question blocks or dropped by vanquished foes. Generally, you will see them stuck on various surfaces within the background. a handy guide a rough tug with the A button dislodges them from their resting place and glues them into your sticker album for safe keeping.

Initial fears that building your collection could get grind-y prove unfounded, as gathering up a workable collection is speedy, easy and curiously compulsive. The designers have done a terrific job of pacing out if you are introduced to other forms of sticker attacks so it doesn’t get samey, and the occasional appearance of more powerful ‘shiny’ variants helps capture the kleptic thrill of real-world sticker collecting.

Sticker attacks work much as they do within the previous Paper Mario titles – tapping buttons in rhythm with the on-screen animations increases the variability and/or the facility of any given attack. Since your moves at the moment are a depletable resource, getting the timing right is now more critical than it’s ever been.

Under this technique, success depends on canny resource management; as an example, are you able to defeat that chain of goombas without using any of your rare or shiny stickers A single koopa shell would likely take down the total line-up in a single fell swoop, but they’re relatively uncommon. Is a type of really more expendable than four-or-five swipes with the typical-but-utilitarian hammer stickers

After the poise and charm in their last beat-’em-up Bayonetta, Platinum Games delivers a completely different variety of fighter in Anarchy Reigns – one that’s clunkier and cruder and yet somehow every inch as stylish as their previous work. This, then, is ballet of a brawnier kind.

As a 3rd-person arena fighting game, Anarchy Reigns immediately invites comparisons to Power Stone, God Hand, even Streets of Rage. Attempts to realise Anarchy Reigns by other games as reference points are futile however because it – like several Platinum games – eschews conventions and is content to be its own thing. Nevertheless it does share some thing in common with the above-mentioned games: it realises that an important element of kicking ass is ensuring you look good while doing it.

And so Anarchy Reigns employs a rhythmic fighting system which makes it a hypnotic game both to look at and to have interaction with – a feat that’s doubly impressive considering its smeary visuals and browntown art direction aren’t, in isolation, the type of stuff that inspire poetry.

Compared to the extensive customisation available in previous Clover/Platinum works along with God Hand or Bayonetta, Anarchy Reigns’ combat system is disarmingly simple and static. Each character is provided with a small cache of moves – a throw, a lightweight attack and a heavier attack that serves as a launcher for juggling.

On top of that, all the 18 combatants has a singular special attack that needs to be recharged after use, either by looking forward to your gauge to replenish naturally or by hastening it by performing taunts. For defence, you have a guard, a roll and a panic button that floors everyone around you on the cost of a segment of your health bar. And that, for all intents and purposes, is all. Although Anarchy Reigns employs an XP system, this only affects your character’s ability to equip Call of Duty-esque perks. The moveset your characters are born with are those they take to the grave.

The tiny choice of moves at your disposal betray a fighting system with considerable nuance. Rhythm is the important thing; while button-mashing gets you to date you would need to adopt a more measured method of unleash the longer, more brutal combo chains. This you achieve by varying your attacks and timing your inputs in keeping with natural pauses within the fight’s flow.

It can take some time to get into the swing of items, because the threadbare tutorial section leaves much of the finer aspects of combat unexplained. But once it clicks and also you fall right into a rhythm, it sucks you into the zone like several good beat-’em-ups do. The measure of a terrific fighter is whether or not it’s fun to wade into gangs of goons only for the sake of fighting, and Anarchy Reigns passes that test with flying colours (shades of crimson, mostly).

That said, the only player mode doesn’t half push its luck on this regard. It is a series of side-challenges and boss fights, dotted around a succession of hub areas. Missions only unlock after you’ve wandered around whaling on enough enemies to fulfill the requisite points total.

This proves a boringly artificial method to extend the one-player campaign’s length, and poor pacing led us to become bored with it long before it ended. Fortunately, the particular missions themselves are frequently well worth the wait; an imaginative potpourri of survival challenges, time attacks, hovercraft races and – just while you think you’ve seen all of it – a battle to the death against an outsized squid. The boss battles too are creative and are bookended by some truly bizarre dialogue which rarely fails to lift a grin.

The single-player side of items is solely an aspect-attraction, however. A primer. By the point it’s done and dusted and you have unlocked the total cast of characters to be used in multiplayer, you’ll come to grasp why the academic originally was so vague; because it seems, the complete campaign is but a glorified keep fit exercise aimed toward readying you for the competitive multiplayer component – which, because it seems, comprises the $64000 meat of the sport.