3.5/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of Mario Party 5.

Platform: GameCube (played on Wii) Time Played: 14 hours Status: Beaten ⟳ After the letdown that was Mario Party 4, you’d think Hudson Soft would course correct and get back on track to try to create more phenomenal party games to rival the ones on N64, but no, Mario Party 5 is just as “decent” as the previous entry but for its own unique reasons. With Mario Party 4, everything was more peeled back and sterilized down to the formula’s core with not much originality in the overall package in my eyes. Here in Mario Party 5, the boards are back to being fully realized areas instead of just grids above a box containing the area’s theme, but at what cost? This game changes a lot of things up in the overall formula and is probably the most unique game in the series thus far, but mainly for the worse. This game introduces the Capsule mechanic, a complete overhaul of the item systems from past games. There are no item shops here, instead, you pass by a Capsule Machine that pumps out a capsule that contains an item in it. Now while you get the capsule for free, using it will cost you coins. Not to mention that each capsule can be laid as a space on the board or used on yourself, and I mean EVERY capsule. Just got the Hammer Bro capsule that says if used will take ten coins away from a player? At first you think if you use the item, a wheel will spin and whoever the wheel lands on, they’ll lose ten coins, but no, if you use it on yourself, you just straight up lose ten coins on top of the ten you’ve already spent to use the item. Items like this aren’t uncommon, where you don’t quite know how it's supposed to be used due to the sometimes vague item descriptions. Practically every board event from previous games outside of Happening Spaces are now relegated to being a capsule. The Koopa Bank? It's a capsule that has to be placed on the board first. Hidden Blocks? Have to be placed on the board first; costs five coins to place it anyway so you might as well use it on yourself, spending five to get back ten. Duels? Until the last five turns they’re also an item that has to be used. Chance Time? Yep, now it's just an item that has to be placed on the board first. I only witnessed one instance of Chance Time in the entire game, but at least the setup is better than Mario Party 3 and 4. Still, the item system in this game absolutely drags it down so, so much. Just the fact that at the start of every turn you have to cancel using an item first before the dice will appear is baffling. Like sure, this would make a little more sense if you already owned the items, but you don’t; you still have to spend coins on them, so most of the time you don’t want to use them anyway as you’ll lose out on your coins that go towards a potential star. And yet another issue is that you can’t just throw away your items if you don’t want to use them. You HAVE to spend the coins to use your item if you want to free up inventory for more items, because if you fill up your three item slots, that’s it, you can’t get any more items until you use at least one, regardless if what you have is shit or not. This isn’t helped by the fact that you can land on your own trap spaces, meaning that you pose even more loss by using trap spaces than the opponents you’re hoping to land on said space, as you’re already losing coins just to use it and get it out of your inventory, just for the chance of landing on it yourself for even more loss. This just leads to no one using any of their items besides Mushrooms which work as they always did, Hidden Blocks to get a couple of extra coins, Chain Chomps which act as the new Boo who will steal coins or a star from another player with the amount of coins you pay Chain Chomp slightly cheaper due to having to already pay coins to use him, and Wiggler who acts as the new Magic Lamp where you pay twenty coins to use the item and twenty coins to pay him directly to transform him into Flutter so he can take you to the star. Not to mention the Duel Capsule to initiate a Duel Minigame, Tweester to move the star, and the Bone to prevent a Chain Chomp from stealing from you. Besides those, all other items are essentially worthless in most players’ eyes, besides Bob-omb who costs no coins to use and will take coins from the third player to pass the space and stop their roll. There’s also the Miracle Capsule, which is worthless unless you manage to get three of them (only the player in last place can get the third and final one), doing so immediately transfers all stars from first place to last place, but good luck even getting that event to happen in the first place. And then there’s the Bowser Capsule which if pulled from the Capsule Machine will immediately be used, causing Bowser to appear and throw the Capsule onto a red space, turning into a Bowser space. All of that is to say that the item system in this game blows. Sure it shakes up the formula a fair bit, but shaking something up just for the sake of it, removing an intuitive system that has been present for several games is just a dumb decision. Having no choice in what items you get compared to purchasing them with the Item Shops, now instead getting them randomly AND having to pay to use them is just so counterintuitive. Mario Party 3 had the item system figured out so well, having multiple item shops with different inventories and Item Spaces that either gave you random items based on your response to questions or put you in a minigame where your skill determined what item you got, it all worked perfectly. Here, the item system has been brought to its absolute worst, with the Capsule mechanic being the biggest criticism I hear anyone say about this game in particular; because besides all of this shit with the Capsules, this game is pretty decent overall. As I said before, the board gameplay and board design overall have been improved on a visual level. Everything looks so much nicer and actually uses the GameCube’s graphical improvements over the N64 to make some pretty nice-looking boards. But none of them really have all that much charm unfortunately. None of them really stand out besides Pirate Dream, with Toy Dream, Rainbow Dream, and Sweet Dream all blending together in my mind as they’re all brightly colored, pastel boards with light browns seen in all of them. It's just that most of the boards in this game don’t have a whole lot going on, once again due to the item system, as a majority of each board is taken up by blue and red spaces to accommodate for the fact that capsules can only be placed on those two kinds of spaces, therefore the only events on the boards are Happening Spaces, which are few and far between. There’s also the odd Donkey Kong Space and Bowser Space. Oh yeah, Donkey Kong has been removed as a playable character and is now essentially a good version of Bowser, where landing on his space initiates either a minigame for you to rack up coins, letting you roll a dice that nabs you coins, or an event where if you out roll his dice roll you just straight up get a star. Landing on a Bowser Space typically starts a Bowser minigame where losing it will either cost you your coins, capsules (yippee!), or a star; otherwise, you got the usual Bowser Revolution, Bowser Shuffle, or he just straight up gives you a Ztar, taking away one of your own, although sometimes Donkey Kong just shows up and punches Bowser, leading to him only stealing ten coins from the player that initiated the space. Moving onto the boards themselves, Toy Dream is a fairly average board with not much going on. You just go around a little toy block-filled area trying to nab the star. There’s a train that can take you to the top if you land on the right Happening Spaces, being able to collect some coins along the way, but other than that there are just some Happening Spaces to take you off the path you’re on. Basically a super nothing board. Then there’s Rainbow Dream, a board with segmented islands where you have to pay five coins to summon a rainbow bridge to make your way over to the next island after landing on a rainbow space, with most Happening Spaces just serving as ways to get you to another island or to give you some free capsules. Still not much going on here. Pirate Dream is my favorite board in this game just due to being actually interesting in the slightest bit. Instead of rehashing what Mario Party 2 did with its pirate-themed board, Pirate Land, we are instead inside an underground grotto filled with minecarts, skeletons, and a lone pirate ship at the bottom, so in reality not much actual pirate shit, but still a cool looking and decently designed board nonetheless. Here there are several Happening Spaces that will spawn in a boulder, chasing people across paths; or Happening Spaces that will send you down a waterfall all the way down at the bottom of the board, potentially drastically changing your progress or taking you ever so closer to the star. There’s also a Thwomp and Whomp at the bottom of the board that when paid will move aside, opening up a new path for you that you couldn’t otherwise get to. All around this is a pretty decent board in my eyes with a lot going on compared to other levels, which therefore makes it a lot more interesting, and thus my favorite in this game. Undersea Dream is essentially Deep Bloober Sea from Mario Party 3 but if it was devoid of anything interesting. There’s some Happening Spaces that move you across the board with the dolphins to nab some coins, some to bring you closer to the star or right in front of it, therefore missing it, etc. Not much else here besides, oou, I’m under the water! Future Dream is very similar to Space Land from Mario Party 2 but is yet another segmented board. There are teleporter pads on the sides of each island to bring you to the other, with Happening Spaces placing you in rockets that send you to a random island, along with some others that let you collect some coins or some capsules. Not the best board with not a whole lot going on. Sweet Dream is a board based on cakes and cookies!... like Peach’s Birthday Cake in Mario Party 1, but this board is maybe a little better than it? Maybe? It's just a regular ass board with a similar bridge gimmick to previous games where crossing the bridge to one side causes the bridge to crumble and reform a bridge to another direction. Besides that, some Happening events to get you some coins, and that’s really it. Bowser Nightmare is your average Bowser board filled with lava and whatnot. This is a fairly small board with extremely punishing Happening Spaces, like one where landing on it causes Bowser to go on a little stroll, changing every space in his path to a red space while also taking coins away from any players in his path; one that causes Bowser to appear where he either sends you to the start or takes half of your coins, one where he shoots fire at you burning your capsules, or one that traps you in an area filled with red spaces (or Bowser spaces if that end of game event occurs). Overall, Mario Party 5’s boards are truthfully just as boring as they were in Mario Party 4, but more so due to lacking things that make each individual board actually interesting and not a lack of visual flair like in the previous game, although there was certainly a lot of charm missing here. In all honesty, it may be worse off. If your boards are boring to play on, it doesn’t matter if they’re bright, colorful, and look good. So how do the minigames stack up? Fairly well actually. There are actually a lot of really fun minigames here that I like a lot. Some personal highlights include: Coney Island, Ground Pound Down, Chimp Chase, Chomp Romp, Pushy Penguins, Leaf Leap, Night Light Fright, Pop-Star Piranhas, Dinger Durby, Hydrostars, Later Skater, Will Flower, Hotel Goomba, Coin Cache, Flower Shower, Fish Sticks, Flatiator, Squared Away (both super stressful minigames where you’re always just escaping your opponents grasp), Quilt for Speed, Curvy Curbs, Clock Stoppers, Defuse or Lose (super stressful as well), Mario Can-Can, Bus Buffers, Rumble Ready, Maniac Mallets, Astro-Logical, Tug-o-Dorrie, Countdown Pound, Shy Guy Showdown, Button Mashers, Pump ‘n’ Jump, Head Waiter, Blown Away, Merry Poppings, Piece Out, Wind Wavers and Sky Survivor. As you can tell, that’s an awful lot of minigames that I enjoy, and I didn’t even mention Heat Stroke which is bafflingly easy for the one so I bother ranking it in there. There are some minigames like Vicious Vending and Submarathon which just suck, and Random Ride is just Day at the Races from Mario Party 2 but even worse as whoever happens to get to pick their vehicle first just wins due to pure luck, similar to Get a Rope as Hudson seems to love their Duel minigames based on pure luck. Overall, I’d say the minigames in Mario Party 5 are on par with Mario Party 4, and bring up the game an awful lot when it comes to my overall thoughts on the game as a whole despite the boring boards and shitty item system. I’m surprised I’ve gone this far without bringing up this game’s story, although there’s no opening cutscene to even set up the damn thing as its all just in the manual for the game, the first time a Mario Party would do this, to the point where even if you chose to play Story Mode you’re just thrown straight into the middle of things. Anyway, the Star Spirits, the ones from Paper Mario 64, invite Mario and Co. to the Dream Depot, where all of the world’s dreams are held safely so that Mario and his friends can see the very worlds where dreams are made true (I guess they no longer watch over Star Haven). Bowser, feeling left out, attacks the dream worlds with Koopa Kid in an attempt to make his dream come true, which, spoiler, is that he wants to fight a strong opponent, with Koopa Kid’s being to just be beside Bowser, which is very sweet honestly. Anyway, you go through smaller versions of five of the game’s seven boards, fighting Bowser’s new cohorts, Red Koopa Kid, Green Koopa Kid, and Blue Koopa Kid, as you attempt to drain them of all of their coins by beating them in numerous minigames. Once you get to the end, you get to fight Bowser in what is honestly a pretty cool final boss. Story Mode here is nothing much. I appreciate that they tried to do something different from 3 and 4 where you just play through a round of every board until you get to the end and fight a final boss by making these smaller versions of the board and playing against the Koopa Kids in a unique gameplay style, but honestly it's just fairly boring with how often you play the same duel minigames over and over again. Besides Story Mode, there’s Super Duel Mode, a pretty neat side mode where points earned from the main multiplayer mode go towards mech parts to build your own mech that you can pit against others in arena fights, either to take out their HP, capture three flags, or defeat three Robo-Rabbits. Honestly the perfect Mario Party side-mode; not that fleshed out, but fun enough to throw on for a little bit instead of the main game, maybe waiting for more friends to arrive or something. In Bonus Mode, there’s also Card Party which is just a super small board made to look like an actual board game with no minigames, where players instead roll actual dies to move across the board, with each card being face down until a player gets to it, something with star events and some with item, whoever has the most stars by the time all star cards have been uncovered wins, with some star cards having two stars or a Ztar that will take away your already earned star, or put your star count in the negatives if you don’t have one yet. Not to mention an exclusive Ice Hockey minigame (which is just regular ass ice hockey), and the returning Beach Volleyball minigame from Mario Party 4’s Bonus Room except with some extra types of balls this time, which still doesn’t help the shitty controls. Mini-Game Mode also features a good amount of extra minigame matches where winning minigames either gets you forward in a race, lets you lay down spaces on a play area where whoever has the most by the end wins, a tournament with brackets, and a marathon with whoever scoring the most points by setting the highest record in minigames winning. Overall, Mario Party 5 isn’t the best, and is about on par with Mario Party 5 in terms of quality, making too many errors to actually end up improving over its lackluster predecessor, something I’m very glad that Mario Party 6 fixes fantastically. But still, the boring boards, shitty Capsule mechanic, yet fun selection of minigames don’t really add up to making an experience that I want to come back to with friends again and again. There’s a good reason why people always mention 6 and 7 as their favorite GameCube Mario Party’s and not this one.