Kensuke Tanabe shares this question posed by Miyamoto during the development of Paper Mario Sticker Star:
Aside from wanting us to change the atmosphere a lot, there were two main things that Miyamoto-san said from the start of the project—”It’s fine without a story, so do we really need one?” and “As much as possible, complete it with only characters from the Super Mario world.
I’m with Miyamoto on this, and I think it’s why I gravitate more towards arcade games and Nintendo games. Story is a non-issue to me when gameplay is great. Story can even get in the way and ruin a good game when you’re dealing with cutscene after cutscene or reading huge amounts of text.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I’ve been so pessimistic about this latest generation’s AAA titles, and I think I’m starting to realize that I really don’t care about story in my games in a time when games are getting more and more story pushed into them. I know a lot of people will disagree with me on this, but I don’t think I’m alone either:
With regard to the story, we did a survey over the Super Paper Mario game in Club Nintendo, and not even 1% said the story was interesting. A lot of people said that the Flip move for switching between the 3D and 2D dimensions was fun.