4/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of Mario Party 8.

Platform: Wii (played on Wii U) Time Played: 11 hours Status: Beaten ⟳ I feel like out of everyone I know, it’s either Mario Party 8 or Mario Party DS that they played the most growing up, and while I grew up playing Mario Party DS and not much else from the series until the Switch era, a lot of my friends’ most nostalgic Mario Party game is this one, and Mario Party 8 is one of the best entries that this series has to offer and a great final send-off for Hudson Soft’s home console entries in the Mario Party series. This game entirely takes place inside the Star Carnival hosted by original character MC Ballyhoo. Every single board in the game features a distinct gimmick on how to obtain stars, essentially the final evolution of what Mario Party 6 and 7 have been building up to. Instead of Orbs which have been used for the last few games we now have a new Candy item system, which acts practically identical to the item systems from 6 and 7 but with no trap or character spaces. Instead, all of the candies except for the ones related to dice transform your character somehow, like with the Bowlo Candy that lets you steal every player you pass turning you into a literal ball. The Vampire Candy turns the player character into a Wario Land-style vampire and will let you steal one, five, or ten coins from every player. The Bitsize Candy turns your character into a 3D 8-bit version of your character, earning you three coins for every space you pass with your dice roll among other items that’ll turn your legs into a spring, or a tornado, will give you electrical or fiery aura, turn you into a statue of your head, give you a Bowser suit, a rocket, or split you into three. Duels are also limited to the use of the Duelo Candy which will let the player roll two dice and duel the first player they meet on their turn, ending their turn after the duel, with the swapping of assets acting similar to Mario Party 7 where the winner of the duel must throw a dart at a dart board which will determine how many coins you’ll take from them, and I could be wrong but I don’t think you can take stars from another player via a duel but I’m unsure. Donkey Kong and Bowser spaces have also been changed a fair bit. Depending on the board or mode, Donkey Kong will assist the player either by giving them a ton of coins, or a free star, he could throw you to the star, give you a free item, or appear on the board to give the next player who comes across him a free star. Bowser will do the opposite. He’ll do whatever he can to fuck up the player if his space is landed on, typically stealing the player’s star, but sometimes doing things as little as moving the star’s location. The last five turns event in this game has also been changed significantly, where all that happens is that the player in last place receives a free item catered to the specific board’s win condition, and blue spaces have a single coin on them, and red spaces have five coins on them that players can snatch up as they pass by said coins. Anywho, the boards. First off we have DK’s Treetop Temple, one of the lesser boards in the game, which acts as the only “typical” Mario Party board in the game, is just a fairly basic jungle-themed board, with the real only distinction compared to boards from previous games is that this one is entirely laid out in 2D outside of ladders to get up to the next level. You got some Happening Spaces that will send some Ukiki on barrels down your way taking ten coins from anywhere in your path, one that will send you down three levels via a water slide, and some where Piranha Plants will take your coins. Anyway, this board isn’t the best and is honestly fairly boring, especially compared to some of the more interesting boards in this game. Goomba’s Booty Boardwalk is a linear board where the players’ sole goal is to make it to the other end of the board where Captain Goomba will give the player a star for free for their efforts, leading all coins earned to be put towards moving across the board faster whether it be by buying dice candies or by paying the Dolphins at their stations to bring you further along on the board, although there are some Happening Spaces near the end where some Goombas will send you back to the start. Out of all of the linear boards in the series, this one is by far the best as the system surrounding getting to the end is super intuitive thanks to the choice to have the star be free by the end letting your coins be used for progression really brings it all together. Fantastic board. King Boo’s Haunted Hideaway is another fairly mediocre board. This board’s whole gimmick is essentially that the layout is changed every time a star is collected by a player finding King Boo somewhere on the map. At the start of the game, no one really knows where to go as the board’s map is only unveiled as players work their way through the manor. There’s also a dead end that has the unfortunate player that comes across it falls into a pitfall sending them back to the start unless a Donkey Kong space is landed on where he’ll block the pitfall and anyone who goes into that room gets a free star, whereas King Boo will charge the typical twenty coins, but if you can’t afford it, all players are on their fucking way to King Boo to swipe that star. If a player lands on Bowser, he’ll block the pitfall and take a star from the first player to come across him. Anywho, this board is just okay. Sure the random layout is a neat idea but it leads to a lot less strategy than your typical board and just ends up falling a little flat. Shy Guy’s Perplex Express is yet another linear board, except unlike Goomba’s Boot Boardwalk the star is at the halfway point from the conductor Shy Guy and you have to loop your way back around after passing it instead of just going straight back to the start. This board gives very similar vibes to the Excess Express from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door which is really fun. While not as good as Goomba’s Booty Boardwalk as a linear board, this one is still pretty fun, but there are a few other better ones that I like a lot more. Koopa’s Tycoon Town is one of the best boards in the entire series. This board is essentially the final evolution of Windmillville from the last game where players run around the board investing their coins into hotel properties. If you’re the first to invest with any amount of coins, you own the hotel and thus get one star, but any player can come in and buy you out if they invest more coins than you have. If more than twenty total coins get invested into the hotel, it becomes a two-star hotel and thus the player that owns it now has two stars, and fifty total coins invested will turn it into a three-star hotel, that being the max. Donkey Kong will invest coins into a hotel and give it to the player that landed on his space if that were to happen which is real fun, and Bowser will take invested coins out. Anywho, this board is by far the best in the game and definitely one of the best boards in the series. Truly a phenomenal gimmick that will always prove fun. Bowser’s Warped Orbit is the final board in the game and is unlocked by completing the single-player campaign. This board is essentially a different take on the Chain Chomp star-stealing boards Snowflake Lake from Mario Party 6 and Pyramid Park from Mario Party 7. Each player starts with five stars and are tasked with collecting Bullet Candies or Bowser Candies that will transform the player, stealing one or two stars from the players they pass depending on the item used. This board sounds fine, but the fact that the board is just one linear loop really ruins this board and makes it one of my least favorite in the entire series up to this point. It turns what previously worked with branching paths and well-thought strategies to get behind your opponents with a Chain Chomp to steal their star into pure luck as you not only have to make enough coins to consistently buy the candies you need to steal stars, but you also need good enough dice rolls to reach the player ahead of you, and even then, they have little areas where there are two paths with a 50/50 chance of sending you down one or the other, meaning that if the player ahead of you is in the opposite side than you, you just miss the, fucked up your chance at stealing their star, and now you’re in front of them so if they have the right candy, now your star is theirs. The only real event that changes things up here is some Happening Spaces will swap the direction in which players move on the board, turning players who are about to be fucked over into players who are about to fuck someone up, although it doesn’t really feel like it changes a lot. It's also kind of whack that all Donkey Kong does is give the player an item whereas Bowser will permanently take a star from the player that lands on his space. Anyway, this board sucks, I do not find any redeeming qualities from it whatsoever. This shit is just not fun. So with all of that, you’d think my overall thoughts on the boards from this game wouldn’t be all that good. One fantastic board, one really good board, one good board, two meh boards, and one really bad board; not the best track record. And even graphically these boards look weird as hell. It's like they brought back those shitty realistic graphics from Mario Party 4 just because they leaped forward another console generation from the GameCube to the Wii, but it just… doesn’t look all that good. I mean sure, it fits together a lot better than Mario Party 4, but it just makes the game look a lot grimier, making Mario Party 6 and 7 end up looking a lot better visually. Like even my friends who played this with me asked why this game looked so shit compared to the one we had just played before. Anywho, even though some of the boards and the visuals in general aren't the best, there’s still something that draws me to this game, and perhaps it's the minigame selection. The minigame selection in this game takes significant advantage of the Wii’s motion control and thankfully it doesn’t feel forced whatsoever. Every minigame that utilizes motion controls really feels like it fits right in with the rest of the series minigames, and regular button control minigames being mixed in makes it all the better; I always find myself having such a blast with this set of minigames. My personal highlights are: Speedy Graffiti, Swing Kings, Water Ski Spree, Punch-a-Bunch, Crank to Rank, At the Chomp Wash, Mosh-Pit Playroom, Mario Matrix, Sick and Twisted, Shake It Up, In the Nick of Time, Scooter Pursuit, Alpine Assault, Picture Perfect, Winner or Dinner, Sugar Rush, Boo-ting Gallery, Lean, Mean Ravine; Aim of the Game, Saucer Swarm, Attention Grabber, Lob to Rob, Frozen Assets, Breakneck Building, Surf’s Way Up, Eyebrawl, Settle It in Court, Snipe for the Picking, Pour to Score, and Stampede. One thing that I was quick to notice is that when it came to duel minigames, there were a lot more of those than any other category of minigame, and that was because a lot of minigames from other categories were given 1-v-1 versions to play during duels which are honestly pretty cool. The Extras Zone side mode in this game is entirely dedicated to just housing eight extra minigames that aren’t seen during normal play, and while like two of them are pretty fun to the point where I wish they were in the main game, most of them suck. Star Battle Arena is this game’s single-player campaign, acting similarly to Solo Cruise from 7 where you just go through each of the game’s boards completing a given challenge like getting a certain amount of stars first or reaching the end with a certain amount of coins, with the final board being Bowser’s therefore resulting in a final boss against the Koopa King. You can actually play these specific board variations in Party Mode by selecting Duel Mode when setting up your game, and while this is nowhere near as fun as how the regular boards are set up, it's still nice that the option is still available. The Minigame Tent features very similar side modes from the last several entries. Your Decathalon mode, modes where winning a certain amount of minigames lands you the win, ones where winning minigames lets you select spaces on a little board and whoever has the most by the end wins, and a mode that’s a cross between Tic Tac Toe and Connect 4. Not a whole lot of fun to be had here per usual, but that’s okay, Mario Party side modes don’t have the highest bar anyway. To conclude, Mario Party 8 just somehow works for me. Despite all of its shortcomings with its boards, weird realistic graphics, dialed-back item system, and fun but whacky selection of minigames, along with the real weird UI that revolves way too heavily on the Wiimote’s pointer controls, especially the weird minigame preview screen UI; this game just works for me and I always find myself enjoying it when I play it with friends. For Hudson Soft’s last home console Mario Party, it was a pretty damn good one, although personally, I know that Mario Party DS, their real last contribution to the series, is their true swan song as that shit is fantastic.