I stand by my statement of "the last five."  The rest are just busy work for kids with mean parents who won't buy them a new game to play.  It's nice of Nintendo to give them something else to do, but I've got plenty of other stuff to play and I don't hate myself that much.

Haha, yeah, some of them can be quite infuriating

Still, I liked the fact that where the first 120 stars require you to perform tasks or just make it to the end of the level, the last 120 encourage you to explore and try and reach places you wouldn't have thought of going to otherwise.

The last 120 felt much more like the Mario 64 style of gameplay to me, which was nice.

Yeah, I actually count the final 120 as part of the total - I actually think I enjoyed them more than the initial 120 because I like exploration. XLord, out of curiosity, would you consider them to be "busy work for kids with mean parents who won't buy them a new game to play" if Nintendo had just given each galaxy double the number of stars from the get-go?  Because that's what this basically is...

Edit: I might also add that I LOVE how difficult they make some of them.  I never thought Nintendo would ever actively make me murder Yoshi. 

I guess for me the whole point is that I want to be having fun while I game these days.  When I was a kid, I would try for 100% completion no matter how tough because I only got six games a year and it was either play what I had or be bored.  With 115 stars, I had a great time and I enjoyed some challenging stages.  I feel like I've already gotten my $50 worth.  It'd be nice if the green stars would show up w/o having to complete the insane comet stars in the special world.  I might like to try for a few of them for fun, but there's no way I'm going through the frustration of some of the purple coin challenges in the special world in order to do that.  I love the exploration and thrill of controlling Mario in the Galaxy series, but I'm not much of a fan of the "collect x # of something in x min" challenges.  They're just annoying.

Totally agreed, which is why I loved the green stars so much. 

I was within a hair's breadth of smashing the game to pieces yesterday over some of the BS going on in World 5 (Fluzzard can go fly into a lit cannon, the monkey's ice-bumping game is Rare-level bonus-game bastardry, and shut up you stupid fat tank, I don't need to take a break, you need to shut your worthless gob), but you guys know exactly what to say to motivate me to keep going. I especially look forward to killing Yoshi and being rewarded for it.

I've been seeing similar complaints from other players, but it never bothered me.
He only says that when you talk to him. It's not as if the game is actually automatically paused for him to make his snide remarks.

Not in the JP version at least.

He also says it (unskippably) after every Game Over, which has been happening more and more in these later levels.

Ha! Yeah, I did the World 5 Fluzzard level yesterday as well and probably died 25 or so times (between both levels and going back to get the comet metal). I was PISSED. Just six stars to go...