2.5/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of Mario Party: The Top 100.

Platform: 3DS Time Played: 4 hours Status: Completed Okay, okay. After four shitty games of not listening to fans, and trying to ignore series history and all of what Hudson Soft had done right in the past and instead trying to find something new and thus making something uninteresting, NDcube finally decided to make a Mario Party game going back to the series roots… In minigame form only. Mario Party: The Top 100 is the first and only minigame compilation in the Mario Party series, compiling remakes of one hundred of the “best minigames” from “all” of the past games, “all” not including Advance or especially DS; the minigames pulled for this game only come from Mario Party 1 through 10. Now, what could possibly be wrong with this game? Why is it hated by so many longtime fans, to the point where some say that this game is worse than Island Tour, Star Rush, and 10? Well, this is a MINIGAME COMPILATION. When you play Mario Party with your friends, do you only play the minigames and nothing else? No! You think of the boards, think up strategies to beat your friends, and then the minigames make up the other 50% of the overall experience! Never, ever, should the minigames have been the ENTIRE package. This shit was practically a full-priced 3DS game when it launched SEVEN MONTHS AFTER THE SWITCH RELEASED. Now, inherently, the lack of board gameplay doesn’t make this game “bad” per se, but just serves to make the game extremely forgettable by just having fuck-all to do. Well, there is at least one board. While the main mode of the game is literally just Free Play mode for the minigames, the main multiplayer SIDE mode is Minigame Match, a mode that is… literally just Balloon Bash from Star Rush, with the same exact gameplay, slightly different items, and you can only play on a SINGLE BOARD that’s shaped like some kind of deflated snowman. This shit is so fucking stupid. So you COULD put it SOME kind of board gameplay, and even if its just Star Rush again, at least its SOMETHING. But to only have ONE board, and to advertise the board as “simple” in the mode’s description is just baffling. Like how lazy can you be guys? It makes it seem like this game was made a quick cash grab before the 3DS was fully overtaken by the Switch instead of being a loving homage to the previous Mario Party’s… Right?? Besides that there’s the single-player campaign, Minigame Island, which is actually really similar to the single-player campaign from Mario Party 1 of the same name. Almost like its some kind of homage, except this mode has nowhere near the same charm as that game’s Mini-Game Island. The lives feature is the same as that game, lose a minigame, lose a life, get ten coins for each minigame win, and get 100 coins to get an extra life. The difference here is that you aren’t required to get first place in each minigame, and you only really lose the minigame if you manage to get in fourth place or just quit out of the minigame. Depending on if you get third, second, or first, you’ll receive Mini Stars, getting three for first place, and one less for each place lower than that. You kind of earn stars like you would in Angry Birds or other mobile games with that kind of one to three star scoring system. There are three hundred Mini Stars total to collect across the game’s four worlds, with some special duel minigames giving you four Mini Stars and some minigames just giving you three Mini Stars for just winning in general. I’d say the worst part about this mode is when you have to play the minigames that are entirely based on chance. Trying to get all three stars in those is fucking brutal. Besides that, it's kind of cool that when you face off against Bowser in the final boss, that it’s specifically the final boss minigame from Mario Party 4; I just found that really neat. Overall a decent single-player mode, and a good one to bring back for the style of game that this is. Besides that you just have your basic, bland ass “be the first to win blank amount of minigames” in Championship Battles, and the always returning Decathlon mode, except this time there’s a Half Decathlon mode where you only have to play five minigames that aren’t in the main ten! But wouldn’t a half-decathlon just be a pentathlon? Fuck these guys are dumb. And that’s IT! All you have in this game, are one hundred minigames to freely play, a single-player campaign to play them all in, one shitty fucking board to play them on, and two extremely basic side modes. But wait! There’s a little Collection room where you can view descriptions of the first ten games, character bios of unique hosts from previous games and the items from this game-- Shut up. No one cares; this shit took no effort from NDcube, and the minigames show that clear as day. Oh yeah, the “Top 100” minigames from series history. Well is the selection any good? Well we’ve got a measly six minigames from Mario Party 1, thirteen from 2, twelve from 3, fourteen from 4, seventeen from 5, a sad nine from 6, twelve from 7, and INSANE THREE from 8, TEN from 9, and FOUR FROM 10. How the fuck do you put in four minigames from Mario Party 10, a game with nothing but shit minigames, but only manage to fit in three from Mario Party 8? Those numbers are including shit like that Bowser final boss, and the bonus sports and puzzle games which also return from previous entries, although I couldn’t give less of a shit about those. Out of the minigames that returned, are any of them still good? Well unfortunately a vast majority of the minigames here are definitely downgrades compared to their original versions if you were to ask me, with Bumper Balls being the only one to be a surprise improvement due to its much crazier knockback. Besides that, a lot of these are indeed inferior to the originals. Like one of my all-time favorites, Face Lift, has been reduced to a stylus minigame, with its accuracy ratings so harsh that it's almost impossible to know if you’ll win or not like it was by luck or some shit. Tug o’ War is a piece of shit to play with the Circle Pad. Hexagon Heat is made way too easy due to the less fucky physics from the original that that minigame was entirely based on. The Beat Goes On has simply been ruined due to them fucking up the music compared to the original, and the CPUs just fucking sucking balls at it. Paths of Peril now controls like shit so moving quickly with precise controls is out of the question. My highlights include: Bowser’s Big Blast, Bumper Balls, Cake Factory, Dizzy Dancing (improved simply by changing the minigame to be about collecting the most music notes, not just being the first to get one like in the original), Honeycomb Havoc, Looney Lumberjacks, Mecha-Marathon, Roll Call, Snowball Summit, Vine with Me, Booksquirm, Kareening Koopas (so glad that this made a comeback as just a normal ass minigame, wish they brought it back for Superstars though), Mario Speedwagons, The Great Deflate, Three Throw, Trace Race, Button Mashers, Dinger Derby, Hotel Goomba, Later Skater, Leaf Leap, Manic Mallets, Night Light Fright, Shy Guy Showdown, Triple Jump, Rocky Road, Snow Whirled, Monty’s Revenge, Pokey Pummel, At the Chomp Wash, Crank to Rank, Don’t Look, Jigsaw Jumble, and Peak Precision. One thing I do like here is that they decided to bring back some of the Mic Minigames from Mario Party 7 with the 3DS microphone by just reducing the function to having to blow into the mic which is nice, and some of the motion control games from 8 and 9 have been changed to either gyro controls or stylus controls, making minigames like At the Chomp Wash work really well, although like I said before, some minigames like Face Lift were changed to use it which I do not agree with, button controls worked fine then and they would work fine here. Overall a pretty damn good selection of minigames to bring back, but why so many from 9 and 10 man? You could have at least taken some of those out and put in some gold from Mario Party DS. Mario Party: The Top 100 is just plainly and simply a brief little package of nostalgia made to get some extra dough in Nintendo’s pockets during that brief period when both the 3DS and Switch were receiving new games at the same time. No passion was put into this, just NDcube looking at old content that worked so that they could quickly replicate it with the Star Rush engine and pump a game out quickly, or at least that’s what I’m assuming happening. Thankfully Super Mario Party released on the Switch only eleven months later, a game that would finally appear to be NDcube’s first step in the right direction with the Mario Party series in their six years of developing it.