Many 3DS players welcomed Paper Mario: Sticker Star into their game library at the end of 2012, and the game itself was well-received by the gaming community. But recently, it’s come out that some elements of the game were sliced and diced from the final product, due to time constraints—including some mini-games set in Bowser’s Castle.
Game producer Kensuke Tanabe was interviewed about it by The Official Nintendo Magazine, and he mentioned that not all of the creative team’s new ideas made it into the final version:
“In Bowser’s Castle, we were planning on having the player complete a number of different mini-games as they went along, but unfortunately we had to cut this because we didn’t have time.
I’m sure these mini-games would have been very silly and fun, so that was a bit of a shame.”
It’s too bad, but on the other hand, Intelligent Systems had so many ideas they wanted to put into the game that they felt each one needed to be unique—and if they’d gone ahead with these other ones, it would have taken extra time and pushed the release date into the future.