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

Platform: Switch Time Played: 21 hours Status: Beaten Super Mario Party Jamboree, the “biggest” Mario Party ever, and Nintendo Cube’s first successful attempt at making an all-new entry to the party series, with fan reception for this game being at an all-time high, with some people even saying that its the best Mario Party the series has ever seen. Now what do I think? It definitely it ‘one of’ the best, but I wouldn’t call it ‘the’ best. Now of course that doesn’t by any means mean that Jamboree isn’t anything but great, because it really is something to behold. Initially, I just thought they went back to the “Super Mario Party” title because that was simply the better-selling game between it and Superstars, but after playing through the entire game, I can certainly see why they went with the final title. Jamboree is indeed the biggest Mario Party game. We got seven boards to pick from, only one less than Mario Party 1, tied with Mario Party 5, and those seven boards sure feel like a lot compared to Super’s four and Superstars’ five, with each of them being unique in their own way, and are all super fun to play on, and it's nice to see some more returning boards from the N64 games, leaving us with five original boards and two returning, with three of them being unlockable. Each ten-turn game will take approximately ninety minutes to complete, and while that definitely seems like a lot when compared to Superstars’ ten-turn games only taking approximately thirty minutes, I can assure you that those ninety minutes breeze by FAST, with most of the length being held within those last five turns. In addition to regular Mario Party, you also have Pro Rules, a much different rule set, locking Boo to only steal fifteen coins, no Hidden Blocks, only one Bonus Star with it even getting announced at the start of the game, minigames being picked by vote, players getting to pick what items they want from the start, and the game being set to twelve turns automatically. This makes the game a lot more competitive and is a really nice option for those who just can’t get into Mario Party due to all of the luck involved. Jamboree also features the most amount of minigames in the series at a whopping 112, only being seconded by Superstars’ 105. And heck, they’ve even brought back some of the minigames from 1-8 that didn’t get brought back for Superstars. Now granted there aren’t a lot of them here, but it's nice that these got to be brought back and recontextualized, like how Platform Peril is exclusively about getting coins instead of them just being an extra in a minigame about being the first to the finish line. But where this game really compares to Super Mario Party, is not just its story which acts as a continuation of that game’s setup, but the sheer amount of great side content on offer here. Its truly THIS that makes Jamboree so packed with content, and makes it into the ‘biggest’ Mario Party ever. Starting off, we’ve got Minigame Bay which features your typical minigame modes; be the team to complete this many minigames first to win in Tag Match. Compete in Daily Challenges and win the most of the three minigames to win with the list of challenges changing daily. There’s the online Survival mode where you compete against other players, with your online score going up or down depending on if you win or lose against other players. Compete in a series of Showdown Minigames (more on those later) with the player who earns the most by doing the best in each minigame wins. And lastly a Boss Rush mode that is pretty self explanatory). Now you may hear the bosses are back and think that they’d operate like they did in NDcube’s other entries, but no, they’re exclusive to this game’s single-player campaign, Party-Planner Trek, which I’m happy to report, is the Mario Party series’ new best single-player campaign to date. This campaign essentially combines all of the best concepts from each of the game’s single-player campaigns and combines them all to create just the best shit ever. Kamek needs more help setting up for the ‘biggest’ Mario Party ever, so he enlists your help to go around each “venue” (aka board) and solve tasks for people in exchange for Mini Stars. Now if your memory is good, solving tasks on a board sounds an awful lot like how Mario Party Advance’s Shroom City did things, and honestly Party-Planner Trek is just a significantly better version of Shroom City, and I welcome that shit with open arms. You get to move around each venue freely, talking to NPCs along the paths, with anyone that needs your help or are part of active questlines having a little exclamation mark above their heads to let you know. You can open up as many quests as you want, with there even being a log to keep track of which ones you’ve completed or are in the middle of. There are sixty Mini Stars to collect on each board, but once you reach thirty, a boss will appear, stealing the Mini Stars, and challenging you to a fight to get them back. Certain allies will come to assist you in the boss if you’ve helped them along the way, with some of these characters having you face off in their own Showdown Minigames, and if you win, that’s three Mini Stars, and an extra helping hand in these bosses, but some characters will just come help you after more simply quests. My only major gripe with this mode as a whole actually comes from the boss battles, and it's not that they suck or anything, they’re all just decent, but it's the fact that once you collect thirty Mini Stars and the boss takes them away, this purple fog will stay on the screen and the music that the boss is imminent won’t stop until you finally beat the boss and move onto the next board, so if you want to collect all sixty Mini Stars before fighting the boss, you’ll have to deal with that the whole time, or just go to the next board, and then just travel straight back the previous one to finish it up. It's just a minor gripe though, but still something that easily didn’t have to be there. The way minigames work in this mode is similar to how they did in The Top 100’s version of Minigame Island, where depending on what placement you get in the minigame, you’ll get a certain amount of Mini Stars. There’s also this neat little quiz with Lakitu where he’ll ask you a bunch of questions about the board you’re currently on, and for every right answer you give him, he’ll give you a Mini Star until you’ve answered all of his questions. Overall, this mode is just so fun. Just getting to casually walk around each of the game’s original boards, viewing them in an entirely new context, and getting to talk to cute little Goombas, Shy Guys, Toads, and Koopas; helping out their problems along the way is just so fun. This really is the best single-player mode that this series has to offer, and I really hope that this comes back for whatever game releases next in the series. Also this mode confirms that Skeleton Keys die upon use which is crazy. Girl really wanted to go through a red warp pipe as the last thing on her bucket list before we sacrifice her for the sake of a ritualistic party. Next up with side content is Motion Island, featuring three different motion control themed modes, those being Paratroopa Flight School, Toad’s Item Factory, and Rhythm Kitchen. Paratroopa Flight School is a small mode where you and another player play as Mario and Luigi, both holding a set of Joy-Cons in both hands, flapping your arms like they’re wings and flying and gliding around this small open area, either battling your friend to collect the most Biddybuds to add to your flock, even being able to steal some of your opponents’; cooperating together to deliver clients to locations throughout the map like a taxi, and a free roam mode where you can fly around the map to your heart’s content. I will say though, for me personally this mode is definitely the lesser of the three motion control modes. It just wasn’t the most responsive or intuitive to me. Definitely glad it only took like forty-five minutes to get through all of it. Toad’s Item Factory, while acting somewhat like a small single-player mode, can still be played with up to four players, where you guide small spheres along obstacle courses by moving the Joy-Cons with certain motions, moving the sphere along to the goal, with each sphere representing a material used by the Toads to create items for the main party. Overall a lot better than the previous mode, but I still felt like it wasn’t as responsive as I would’ve liked it to be, I guess you have to be holding your Joy-Cons upright at the start of each challenge or else it won’t really know what direction you’re pointing in accurately, although it was still a fun little brain teaser to pass the time. Rhythm Kitchen was my favorite of these motion control modes, with this mode literally just being the Sound Stage mode from Super Mario Party, but this time entirely themed around food, Sound Stage was one of my favorite parts from that game too, so I’m glad that they brought it back and spruced it up a bit, although I feel like some of this may have been a little lazy as they just straight up brought back the skewer and copycat pose rhythm minigames, although that isn’t to say that they aren’t good, as I actually like the skewer one an awful lot. I also really like the ones where the fruit falls down and you have to slide them to the beat, same with the Whisk Cream one and Short Stack Chef ones, I love how intuitive flipping the pancakes is right when they’re golden brown. On the Beet was also a really nice and intuitive one, probably my favorite of the bunch. My least favorite one was the sandwich one though, Footlong Frenzy, the timing and beat for that one were just so off to the point where sometimes I would miss the timing without even knowing that it was about to happen, shit was just too fast for my little pea brain I guess. Overall though this is still a really fun mode, and definitely one I’d flick on in some brief downtime with some friends after a long game of the main mode. The next few side modes fall under the Bowser Challenges category, those being Koopathlon and Bowser Kaboom Squad; what links these together is that both modes heavily center around Impostor Bowser, this new giant, threatening and menacing, version of Bowser with purple aura and glowing red eyes that’s actually a Toady disguised via Kamek’s magic. One thing that’s weird about this mode though is the fact that you can’t play as Bowser in this mode like you can in everything else, which doesn’t really make sense because it's Impostor Bowser you’re playing against, that’s like the whole point of Impostor Bowser existing, so you can play as Bowser in the other modes like you could in Super while still having Bowser Spaces present. Anywho, first off is Koopathalon, where players compete in a race, trying to be the first to complete a certain set of laps first, with you moving across each space by collecting coins in special minigames… Wait. This shit is literally just Coinathalon from Star Rush? They decided to bring back the ONLY decent mode from that pile of shit, make it really good, give it a new coat of paint, and no one has noticed? Well, you know what, if you were to bring anything back from Star Rush, it certainly shouldn’t be Toad Scramble or the Allies, its this mode right here. Each of the special minigames here and their unique levels are all pretty fun, with some being better than others. In my opinion, Brick Breaker, Spike’s Gambit, Down the Hatch, Lane Change, Coin Conveyor, and Sky-High Cannons, are lesser than Noggin Knock, Gold ‘n Brown, and Which Door Has More? by a long shot, but they’re all still fun at the end of the day, I would just rather have those latter three be the ones that I play during my run. Still, this mode is such an improvement over the original in Star Rush, to the point where I’m actually so glad that they brought it back in the form of a fun online mode where you compete with fifty other players. Oh shit, I almost forgot to mention the Survivathon Minigames in here too. Every time you get there a set of levels of the three minigames in your run, a special Survivathon minigame will play where all players will play in one single minigame to survive against Impostor Bowser, where losing will bring you back thirty spaces, potentially being a disaster if you’re far behind or in a close first or second, although these minigames are super tough, so not that many people will survive by the end anyway. Moving onto Bowser’s Kaboom Squad, this is a mode where you and seven other players all cooperate together to defeat Impostor Bowser in one giant raid battle, breaking open bomb crates, delivering said bombs to cannons, with twenty cannons being collecting to fire off and attack Impostor Bowser, with six cannons shots usually doing the trick, with Impostor Bowser having three sections of his health bar, with him getting more and more aggressive after each one is taken out. Coins are also scattered about on the map, and when 100 are collected, Bonus Time will start where all bombs turn gold, do double damage, and an infinite amount of them can be put inside the cannon until Bonus Time is over, potentially wracking up LOTS of damage against Impostor Bowser. After a set amount of time, the round will end, prompting a team minigame where all players must work together to earn a high grade, similar to the River Survival team minigames from Super, with the higher the grade meaning the better selection of items for players to pick in the fight against Impostor Bowser. These minigames are all just okay, none of them really stick out to me as overtly “good” unfortunately, and truthfully same goes for this mode in general. While it's a super neat idea, I just find this mode a little too long and too repetitive for my liking, but I still appreciate its inclusion here nonetheless. Welp, that’s all of the side modes, so now it's finally time to talk about the main mode itself, Mario Party. This game’s main gimmick is one that I actually really like, the Jamboree Buddy mechanic, essentially a MUCH better version of the Ally mechanic from Star Rush and Super. A couple of turns into the game, one of the game’s playable characters will randomly appear on the board, ready to join in on the action. That character will stay there for three turns until leaving, but if someone catches up to them, a Showdown Minigame will start, with the player who initiated it receiving some kind of advantage in the minigame that follows. The Jamboree Buddies that could show up are Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy, Wario, Waluigi, Yoshi, Rosalina, Donkey Kong, and Bowser. Jr, each of them with their own unique minigame centered around them where all four players compete against each other for a chance at getting the Jamboree Buddy and off of the perks that they come with. Each Jamboree Buddy has their own unique ability, like Luigi being able to hit your dice block a second time for a chance at increasing your roll, Peach being able to reduce the price of stars by half with Daisy reducing items' price by half, Mario adding between 3 and 8 to your roll, Waluigi stealing coins from your opponents, Wario gives you free coins, Yoshi makes copies of the opponent’s items that you pass, Rosalina will give you a cheap item at the start of each turn, DK will let you warp to a random space on the board, and Bowser Jr. will set a coin steal trap on whatever space you’re currently on at the start of your turn (oh yeah, trap spaces are back once again). These unique abilities aren’t the only things that Jamboree Buddies can do though, as whatever you do on the board while they’re by your side, they’ll do too. Buy a star, well they’ll use your coins to buy you a second one if you can afford it. Used Boo to steal coins from someone and only now you have fifty to steal a star? Well that Jamboree Buddy can use those newfound coins to steal it for you! Landed on a Lucky Space? Now you get to roll it twice! Landed on a Bowser Space?... Well you have to roll that twice too, with Impostor Bowser even kicking you out only to drag you back in if you have a Buddy by your side. Now this would be broken as hell if you just got to keep these guys for the rest of the game, so after three turns, your Buddy will go away, only for another to appear soon after (same thing if no one gets to the first one initially), and if any other player passes by you during their turn while you have a Buddy, they’ll just simply take them from you. No duel for it, they’ll just simply take it with not even a little cutscene about it, all of that competition in the Showdown Minigames for nothing. Getting back to the Showdown Miniames, if I’m being honest I think that a majority of the ones here are genuinely amazing, with the only exceptions being Waluigi’s Pinball Arcade which I just find lacks too much skill, and Jr.’s Jauntlet which is just way too difficult. The rest of the minigames are phenomenal though. Mario’s Three-peat is a gauntlet of three older minigames brought back just for this Showdown Minigame, including Leaf Leap from 5, Bumper Balls from 1 although the goal is just to stay alive and not to be the last one standing, and Shy Guy Says, specifically the Mario Party 2 version which is undebatably the better version. Luigi’s Rescue Operation is a fun gauntlet of great challenge rooms where you’ll be tasked with either arranging pieces of a portrait, pressing the button on the odd statue out, pressing buttons in a certain order, solving barrel puzzles, etc. Peach’s Day Off has you doing a bunch of chores for the princess like carrying her shopping bags, being the one to give her the most donuts, and filling up the most fireworks for the end-of-night firework show. Daisy’s Field Day is essentially just a giant game of Wipeout where the goal is to collect the most amount of Daisy tokens as you can, with some red ones that will give you three points being thrown in there every now and then. Wario’s Buzzer Beater is a fun and snappy quiz gauntlet where you’ll have to be quick on your toes to be the first to answer correctly for the most points. Rosalina’s Radical Race is a pretty decent motion control racer, although you can do tricks mid-air after using a boost pad to gain some extra speed, although the controls section never really tells you how to do that so it’ll just take trial and error until you finally manage to do it, which isn’t the best. DK’s Konga Line is a subpar rhythm game just simply due to the timing being ever so off, which wouldn’t be as big of a problem if Rhythm Kitchen wasn’t so tight and intuitive with its timing. And my favorite of all is Yoshi’s Mountain Race, an incredibly fun 3D platforming level where you and your Yoshi compete in a race to be the first team to get to the finish line on a track filled with plenty of platforming obstacles, just makes me wish for another 3D Mario game with Yoshi again. Overall a lot of these minigames are fantastic, and that just makes this an even more wonderful inclusion. Now the boards. Although I played through each of them at least once, they feel so large and expansive that I feel like I barely scratched the surface as to what goes on in most of them. Mega Wiggler’s Tree Party has this gimmick where using a bell will turn Wiggler angry, moving the path on his back to the other side of his little hole in the center of the board. Roll ‘em Raceway is a wide track played in racecars, with players choosing to either complete their lap on the bottom track to earn some extra coins, or the top track to pay ten coins to fill their inventory up with dice block items, not to mention that Event Spaces will launch players forward, with launch pads and items shops changing back and forth regularly. Goomba Lagoon features two gimmicks, one being the rising ride and the other being the Goomba Volcano itself. If a player passes by the volcano, there’s a chance that either Podoboos or Golden Goombas will shoot out and land all over the board; if its the former, then every time a player passes one they’ll lose coins, but if it's the latter they’ll gain coins as they pass by. The rising tide will come in every few turns, washing away players who were down in the parts of the board that are on the beach or sand, and stranding players who were stuck on small islands in between the beached areas until those turns pass and the tide goes away, or someone uses a Tide Shell to call it back (or in if that’s what you want). Rainbow Galleria takes place within a mall, with several deals available to players, not only when it comes to items but also to stars, especially during their flash sale halfway through the game. There’s three floors in the mall, with the third being accessible from the bottom via an elevator, and the rest being accessible being escalators. There are several unique stores available like a store only able to be used by the player in last place, and a thrift store owned by a Whomp who will forcibly take one of your items in exnchae for coins. Both Western Land and Mario’s Rainbow Castle return from their respective games, unlocked when reaching silver and gold rank after completing so many achievements in the game, with the boards being practically unchanged in terms of mechanics from their original counterparts, although the boards are a fair bit more condensed than the originals, but it’s still super nice to see them continue to bring back some nostalgic classics, especially these two as they felt like shoe-ins for Superstars. The last unlockable board in the game is King Bowser’s Keep, the Bowser board of the game, this time though, Impostor Bowser is constantly looming over the center, allowing for this really cool moment when landing on a Bowser Space where instead of being teleported to this dark void where Impostor Bowser awaits, he just picks you up right off of the board for the event instead which is really neat. Otherwise, the board’s gimmick is just that the center platform can rotate around after specific Event Spaces are landing on, sometimes causing players to have to loop all the way around again even if they were just one space away from the star. Personally, I’d say that this is the weakest board in the game and not one that I’d really replay but that’s just me. Overall a pretty good board selection. These boards feel a lot bigger and more grandiose compared to those in Superstar which were super tight and compact and felt a lot snappier to play through, while here just moving ten spaces can feel like a jaunt with spaces being a lot more spread out, but honestly I got used to it the more I played the game and eventually came to the conclusion that I’m fine with this direciton. Sure I prefer how Superstars handled things more, but this is definitely not a bad alternative. Now moving on to the minigames, I would say that overall, a good chunk of the minigames here are absolutely great, and I’m glad that they went back to having motion control minigames unlike Superstars, and though while I understand why Superstars didn’t have them (it was so that you didn’t just have to use the Joy-Cons like in Super, making the game more accessible), it’s nice that you can turn off motion control minigames here so that you can have a more smoother experience if that’s how you want to go instead of just using one tiny little Joy-Con to play the game. Although it does suck that they didn’t take advantage of the motion controls here to bring back minigames from Mario Party 8 that didn’t show up in Superstars, instead of just focusing on minigames from the early N64 and early GameCube entries. Still, this minigame selection is great, and I’m glad they at least brought some classics back. My highlights are: Lumber Tumble, Camera-Ready, Scare-ousel, Snag the Flags, Sandwiched, Thwomp the Difference, Domination (my favorite button-mashing minigame finally returning from Mario Party 4 after so long), Three Throw (making a comeback), same with Grantie Getaway, Night Lights, Hammer It Home, Tiny Triathlon, Pickax Dash, Platform Peril, Trample-line, Cookie Cutters, Cage Catch, Snow Brawl, Rocky Rope Race, Pickin’ Produce, Prime Cut, Robo Arm Wrestle, Jump the Gun, Two-Axis Taxi, Coin Corral, Fast Fishing, Slappy-Go-Round (possibly one of the best duel minigames ever), Fuzzy Heights, and All the Marbles. Sounds like a pretty great selection there if you ask me. There’s only a few minigames that stood out to me as ones that I actively didn’t like, those being Gate Key-pers and Tricky Turntable, both for just being too damn long, more so Tricky Turntable though, as you also barely come out with as many coins as you would normally get from winning a regular minigame anyway. Still though, Jamboree features a pretty damn good minigame selection that pairs nicely with its pretty damn good board selection. To finally conclude, Super Mario Party Jamboree, while not being a game in the series that I would consider as “the best” is still an absolutely great entry in the series nonetheless; not being up there in the same ranks as Mario Party 2 or Superstars for me, but instead being up there with the likes of Mario Party 3, 6, and DS in terms of quality for me. Still, Jamboree does deserve the title of “biggest Mario Party” with its wide variety of decent to great side modes that can all prove as a nice distraction from the main party, but even then, the main party itself is pretty damn good. With Jamboree following up Superstars, I’d say this series truly is finally back on the right track, with its future looking bright, I’m patiently excited to see whatever is in store for what’s ahead in three years time when the next installment inevitably comes out.