4/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of Mario Party 9.

Platform: Wii (Played on Wii U) Time Played: 13.4 hours Status: Beaten After finally getting to the first game in the Mario Party series to not be developed by Hudson Soft, I can’t help but feel that this game is overhated, as it was definitely one of the more fun experiences I’ve had playing through this series, with an excellent set of minigames, a great set of boards, some great music, and honestly the car gimmick really isn’t that bad in this installment. Firstly, the graphics are a major step up from what was in Mario Party 8. The settings are much brighter and more colorful, while also being closer in line aesthetically to the mainline Mario games at the time of this game’s release in 2012. Actually, this game seems to reuse a lot of assets from New Super Mario Bros. Wii, specifically within the minigames. A lot of background and foreground elements in the minigames look like they’re taken directly from the worlds of that game, with some objects even looking the same. But this isn’t that big of a downside. Moving onto the main gimmick of the game itself, the car. All the players are together in the same vehicle, and they all move alongside each other. If one player rolls a six, everyone moves six spaces forward. The captain of the vehicle makes all of the decisions in terms of directions, and they even get bonuses after boss fights and during Captain Events. To accommodate for this, all boards have a somewhat linear path, with each game ending once the players reach the end of the board and face against the boss. Another accommodation added is that dice can now only roll from one to six, like a normal cube dice. The only items in this game are extra dice that fulfill different purposes. One to at rolls only four to six, one that rolls one to three, one that lands on one or zero (this can prove very helpful if you don’t want to lose and Mini Stars or you’re a few spaces away from a bad space, a slow dice that essentially lets you choose your roll, and one that lets you roll from one to ten. Alongside the car gimmick are the new Mini Stars and Mini Ztars, which replace both the original games’ Stars and Coins with one single resource, acting more so like the original games’ Coins. Mini Stars can be collected in several different ways; they’re laid out across the board, and the captain that passes by them collects them, players collect them depending on what place they score in the minigames, along with several events and other methods of collecting them. This means that blue spaces now act as item spaces, which provide the player a special dice, instead of three coins. There are also Mini Ztars spread across the board that take away from your Mini Stars count. Both Mini Stars and Ztars have bundles of three, five, or ten when found on the board. In terms of when minigames are played, there is no longer one player after all four players have their turn. Instead it is played when a player lands on a minigame space. A VS Space for a Free-for-All minigame, 1v3 space for a 1v3 minigame, and a Bowser Jr. Space for a minigame where the player who lands on it and a randomly selected player fight against Bowser Jr. where losing will make you lose five Mini Stars, where winning will let you win that same amount. There are also Swap Spaces that change the turn order of the players, and a Spin Space where a random event happens to the player(s) which usually ends up doing something with the players items, but can sometimes grant Mini Stars or other events. Bowser Spaces act similarly to how they always have, except there is a new event with new Reverse Minigames, where the player who loses first gets ten Mini Stars. Most of these minigames end within seconds and are super easy to lose first, with you essentially having to get hit by the first object you see, and once you get hit, the entire minigames ends. Except for Chain Event, which takes a lot of skill and precision to get hit by pretty much every spike on the way down the chain in order to place in last. To end off talking about the new formula in Mario Party 9, I truly think that they did everything as perfectly as possible in order for the new way of playing through the boards to be as fun as it could possibly be without straying too far from the original formula, and the change is honestly a welcome one. Moving onto the boards themselves; Toad Road is your simple grassland stage, inspired by World 1 and 5 of New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Bob-Omb Factory is a simple factory theme. Boo’s Horror Castle, Blooper Beach, and Magma Mine all have a similar gimmick where some kind of force is chasing after the players and if they reach them, the captain loses half of their Mini Stars. In the case of Magma Mine, there are spaces exclusive to this board that increase the amount of spaces the magma moves up, potentially sending the captain to an early loss. Bowser Station acts as the Super Mario Galaxy 2 inspired board, with a unique jackpot system. If a player lands on certain addition spaces, whatever amount is labeled on the space is added to the jackpot. Once the jackpot reaches twenty or more Mini Stars, a minigame is played, but the amount of Mini Stars given to each place is greater. A player can also land on Lucky Jackpot Spaces that just gives them however many Mini Stars the jackpot has, and restarts the jackpot’s counter. DK’s Jungle Ruins is seemingly based on Donkey Kong Country Returns, and is the most unique board of them all. Mini Stars are replaced by Bananas, and Mini Ztars are replaced by Z-Bananas. Every single space has one or more positive or negative bananas, and the board is only a small circle. The players have to pass around the board twice in order to reach the end. This board also has Banana Minigames instead of a boss, where the players play a shirt minigame where they collect as many bananas as possible, and they get to keep all the bananas they collect in the minigame afterwards, similar to Coin Minigames in previous entries. All of the boards look great aesthetically and none are worse than the others, they’re all great. Moving into the minigames themselves, as I previously said, they are all great and fun to play, except for a very small few. My favorites are, in no particular order: Pinball Fall, Launch Break (the only button mashing game), Pianta Pool, Skyjinks (the obstacle course minigames), Growing Up, Upward Mobility (essentially this game’s version of MP6’s What Goes Up), Ring Leader, Peak Precision, Tuber Tag, Twist Ending, Manor of Escape, Flinger Painting, Don’t Look (this game’s free-for-all version of MP2’s Look Away), Snow Go, Piranha Patch, Plunder Ground, Billistics, Pit of Platter, Goomba Spotting, Magma Mayhem, Pizza Me Mario, Fungi Frenzy, Tackle Takedown (normally ends in mere seconds), Weird Wheels, Hole Hogs, and Pix Fix (similar to MP4’s Photo Finish but with motion controls). The Bowser Jr. minigames are also fairly fun. And the boss minigames are all pretty great, some more than others. My favorites of these are Sock It to Lakitu, Cheep Cheep Shot, Spike Strike, Wiggler Bounce, King Boo’s Puzzle Attack, Blooper Barrage, Chain Chomp Romp, and Bowser’s Block Battle (once you defeat Bowser a similar animation to his defeat in Super Mario Galaxy 2 plays out). The others not named aren’t as good. But playing against bosses in a multiplayer setting to mark the halfway and end of the boards were a really fun addition that I wish they did in Mario Party 10. Solo Mode was pretty average. The opening cutscene was pretty cool, but other than that it is just basic games on each of the main boards, which this time around we’re much harder to win due to the hazards that take away half of your Mini Stars, which becomes essentially an immediate loss in this mode. The computer players also have insane luck, while I seemed to always be granted the worst luck. I even had to replay Boo’s Horror Castle six times in order to finally beat it because the RNG was so bad in my favor. All in all, I believe that Mario Party 9 is an overhated game that deserves more recognition as it is definitely one of the more solid experiences in the series up to this point. I will definitely be glad to revisit this game one in the future, with no specifications on what board I want to play. Please do the same as me and give this game another chance!!