3/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of Super Mario Party.

Platform: Switch Time Played: 13 hours Status: Beaten After miss after miss after miss, NDcube finally decided to take a step in the right direction with their first Mario Party release on the Switch, Super Mario Party, their first game where they finally, after so long, went back to the formula that Hudson Soft established back in 1998, roll dice on a board, get coins from minigames, use them to get stars, and whoever has the most by the end wins. So, did they do a good job? I mean, sure. But when what fans have been clamoring for for years, the main Mario Party mode, is the lesser mode out of the entire package, that’s still a bummer in spite of the game overall being not that bad, and still NDcube’s best entry up to this point. Super Mario Party tries to be ambitious, having multiple extra modes to play through, but I feel like as a result of all of these additional modes being so high quality and overall fun, it made the main Mario Party mode take a backseat, as it really does feel like the most underbaked part of the game. Unlike previous games, I’m gonna change things up and talk about the side modes first and THEN get to Mario Party mode. First off is River Survival, a mode that gives off similar vibes to Paddle Battle from Mario Party 1, but instead, everyone works together as a team, with two players on each side of the raft, rowing the boat using the Joy-Con’s motion controls, in an attempt to get to one of the five goals at the end in the time limit. Players can increase the amount of time left by running into red balloons that appear along the path which will initiate one of ten co-op minigames, with your final rank determining how much time will be added to your total. I’d say that most of these co-op minigames are pretty fun, with my favorites being Net Worth, Sort of Fun, Isthmus Be the Way, Miner Setbacks, and Fetch Quest, although I do find Penguin Pushers, Go with the Flow, and Suit Yourselves to be fairly slow in comparison so I’m not the biggest fan of them. But regardless, River Survival is actually a really fun side mode that my friends and I enjoyed beating, definitely my favorite part of this game. You might’ve caught that I just said “beating” the mode, and yeah, Super Mario Party gives the player rewards for playing every board, path, version, etc. of a mode in the form of Gems that are supposed to represent each aspect of a true Superstar. When all of the boards are played once in Mario Party, you get the Gem of Tenacity; play all of the boards in Partner Party, get the Gem of Love; play hard mode in Sound Stage, get the Gem of Spirit; complete all paths in River Survival, get the Gem of Courage; and once you unlock all of the minigames, you get the final mode Challenge Road which is another Minigame Island type campaign from Mario Party 1 and The Top 100 where you traverse across a linear map across multiple worlds, playing through each of the game’s minigames as if they were a level, and for it, you get the Gem of Passion and therefore beat the game upon collecting all of them. You see, just like at the start of Mario Party 1, our typical cast of characters are arguing over who is the Superstar, with Toad and Toadette offering to host a “classic” game of Mario Party to figure out who it is, but then Bowser and his troop show up, also wanting in on the fun, so Kamek decides to be the third host so that all sides are equal in the biggest bash ever. Honestly, a super fun setup that I think works really well, a setup that would continue into Jamboree. Back to side content, Sound Stage is actually a super neat rhythm game utilizing motion controls that I actually found super fun. You typically play through three rhythm minigames during a run of Sound Stage, six if you pick Remix as you’ll play through the three minigames once, and then a sped-up, harder version of them after. Your score is determined by how accurate your movements are to the rhythm in each minigame. My personal favorite rhythm minigames are: Strike It Rich, Take a Stab, Wiped Out (my absolute favorite), and Fiddler on the Hoof. Time to Shine is another good one but I didn’t find it to be as responsive, but that might just be me. The only other big side mode in this game is Partner Party which is… Star Rush? But good? Yeah, I never thought I’d be saying this but they bring back the Toad Scramble / Balloon Bash style of gameplay with the four main boards in the game and it actually works surprisingly well due to the main boards already being fairly… grid-based… It was when I realized this that I felt like there was a decent chance that Super Mario Party was initially just going to be Star Rush HD but with significant improvements until they finally decided to give those measly four boards a proper layout in order to finally give fans what they wanted, and that decision to finally give in to fan demand is what finally gave NDcube some success, so, in a way, I’m glad that this was the outcome at the end of the day. Now all of that “Star Rush HD” shit is obviously speculation on my part with no evidence to back my argument up, but when you play both modes back to back, and the boards FIT the Star Rush style much more than the OG style, you’ve got to wonder, especially with the Ally mechanic still being here in Partner Party exactly as it was in Star Rush, with the exact same gimmick being applied to the main mode. But still, Partner Party here works really well, and honestly, I found it to be more fun than that of the main mode just due to how much more interesting the boards feel here. You’re required to work in teams of two, fighting against each other for the most stars and coins. Each player moves on their own turn, instead of everyone moving at once like in Star Rush, with minigames taking place after everyone’s turns like in the OG formula. In order to nab a star, you need to actually LAND on the space, which is easier said than done depending on what you rolled. Stars also only cost TEN COINS this time around, with this being the same in the main mode, a decision that I’m not the biggest fan of, although they do compensate by only giving you five coins in the main mode, and ten coins here since you’re two players, and two fives is ten. Duh. Anywho, I genuinely do think that this mode is fun, and is such a significant improvement over the piece of shit that Star Rush was that it’s not even funny, although I’m glad that they finally moved away from this style of gameplay for future installments. Before I finally move onto the main mode, there’s a few other smaller side modes that aren’t as emphasized, like Mariothon, where players compete in five minigames and whoever completes the most wins; Square Off, a side mode where for every minigame you complete, you get to fill out a tile, and whoever has the most tiles by the end wins; and lastly Toad’s Rec Room, a mode that allows players to physically pair up two Switchs with two copies of the game, allowing for unique minigames that take place across two separate screens. So that’s really it. Now finally, the main experience, the mode that had everyone hoping that the series proper was finally back in full swing, and it's just okay. Still fun with the right group of people as any party game is, but in the end it's still just a mediocre way to play Mario Party, with this being far surpassed by its successors that kept down this path. Anyway, Mario Party mode. You start out with a piss poor three boards here with a fourth unlocked after playing the first three once. What a poor showing. You finally brought back the original formula and you could only give us four boards? The least the series has ever seen? Not to mention that each of the boards are so basic in terms of their structure, with all of it just feeling and looking like a grid that had strict paths painted onto them last minute, which once again just makes this return to form feel forced. The Ally feature from Star Rush returns but is now applied to the OG formula like I said before, but this is really the biggest hindrance gameplay-wise. The basic dice block is still limited to 1-6 like in previous NDcube games, but every character in the game has their own exclusive dice block with most of them being pretty shitty, so you’re better off just rolling your 1-6 dice which while it makes more sense to have a lower die for these smaller boards, it still sucks to roll so little to the point where you feel like you’re getting nowhere, and boards that feel so tiny aren’t the most fun. But if you do manage to get an Ally by landing on the specific Ally space, then not only will you be able to gain access to your Ally’s exclusive dice block, but they’ll also add an additional one or two to each of your dice rolls, helping you traverse across the board faster. To talk about the boards themselves, Whomp’s Domino Ruins is essentially just a lesser version of DK’s Jungle Adventure from 1, with the board being set in ancient ruins deep in the jungle, with Whomps blocking certain paths unless you cough up some change, not much else here. King Bob-omb’s Powderkeg Mine has the unique gimmick of having the titular King Bob-omb in the middle, and if you land on the event spaces surrounding him enough times, he’ll explode, taking away coins from the players standing directly around him. There’s also a little Bob-omb ally at the top of the board who will subtract one from your roll if he doesn’t roll a zero that is, although he doesn’t stick around for that many turns. Megafruit Paradise is the game’s only segmented board, and it's perhaps the worst one in the series in my eyes, this shit got nothing on Wario’s Battle Canyon or Mystery Land. Here you have four fruits, both connected via bridges. On the bottom section, the bridge will collapse if enough players cross it, but the top bridge is covered in event spaces, with a Blooper sending you off if you land on them. There’s also a sparkler event space on the watermelon in the top right, with the second person landing on it being rewarded a star. You get to the other islands by landing on the event spaces that take you inside one of the Warp Pipes, but that feels easier said than done, and with how winning one minigame gives you ten coins per usual in this game, which is now enough for a star, by the time you finally get to the island that the star is on, that shit is already gone. The last board is Kamek’s Tantalizing Tower, probably the most interesting board of the bunch. The star stays at the end of the board, with players heading back to the start once they make their way there. Every time a star is purchased, a bingo ball machine is activated that will determine the price of the next star. There’s also a little corner that you can get to by landing on certain event spaces with Lakitu hanging out around there, he’s the one who takes coins and stars from players in this game, not Boo. Otherwise, that’s about it. One thing I should also mention is that during the last five turns, Toadette (who has the stars) will double the number of stars that can be purchased to two, and sometimes even three if you’re on the right board, but like Balloon Bash in Star Rush, you’ll just receive however many stars you would normally be able to afford, you don’t have to buy all of them at once. Getting back to Lakitu, you can steal someone else’s star through him by only paying him thirty coins, which is a RIDICULOUS amount as that is so cheap in comparison to how many coins you make through minigames, although he is pretty hard to reach depending on the board. So is Flutter, who is the host of most of the item shops in the game (a Toady hosts an item shop in Tantalizing Tower where you’re forced to buy an item). He typically has two inventories, one with a dash mushroom, a poison mushroom, and a coinado jar; but his harder-to-reach shops have custom dice blocks, golden dash mushrooms, and golden pipes for fairly cheap. The Golden Pipe is only fifteen coins and takes you straight to the star. Now unlike Mario Party DS where this item was broken, you can only buy one item at a time, but in a game where stars are only ten coins and the golden pipes are only fifteen, that fucks up the economy so much, but sometimes, like in Megafruit Paradise, a golden pipe might be your best shot. There’s a few other items here, like an Ally Phone which just lets you get an Ally, the Dueling Glove returns, but sadly no traditional Mario Party duels are here, it's just the shitty Star Rush ones, just like with battle minigames, which are also fairly similar to Star Rush’s duels, although they’re all brief microgames to do with rumble and timing. Anywho, unfortunately, Super Mario Party isn’t the best when it comes to its board gameplay, being super generic and boring, maybe due to being a little too close to comfort to how Star Rush handled its shitty new ideas. But, how do the minigames stack up? After all, the ones from River Survival and Sound Stage were pretty good, so how are the main ones? Well I’m inclined to say that this game is finally a step up in the minigame department compared to NDcube’s last few entries. There are a lot of motion control minigames here that take advantage of the Joy-Con’s improved gyro and motion detection, and while some people may not like that, I think it's used well here and created some fun minigames that I enjoy returning to. My personal highlights are: Trike Harder, Sizzling Stakes, Senseless Census, Social Climbers, Can Take Pancake, Precision Gardening, Fuzzy Flight School, Soak or Croak, Looking for Love, Look Sharp, Absent Minded, Stake Your Claim, Rattle and Hmmm, Metal Detectors, Smash and Crab, Dust Buddies, Sign, Steal, Deliver; Block and Load, Bopping Spree, Pie Hard, Tall Order (I actually really like this one), Making Faces, Tow the Line, Perfect Fit, Juice Box, (the following are team minigames that bring in your Allies on the fun) Pull It Together (Tug o’ War but mashing instead of palm scraping) and Half the Battle. Overall, I’d say that that’s a pretty good minigame selection, not the greatest or anything, but some real fun ones in there. Super Mario Party, while not being the best in terms of its board gameplay despite it being the series’ “return to form!” but for what the main mode is lacking, the side modes certainly make up for it. I still managed to have fun with my friends when playing this, although with two much better Switch Mario Party’s released after this, it leaves little to no reason to ever go back to this one. So weird that this still manages to sell practically an equal amount of copies as Superstars yearly even six years later.