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

This game is the blatant definition of missed potential. Lets start off with the good aspects first. The game is definitely a huge step up from Mario Party 9 and 10. It removed the god awful "car" mechanic and brought back coins and stars (instead of the mini-stars you would collect in 9 and 10). The game also very aesthetically pleasing, the graphics are great. The character roster, while not having Toad who I love, is also amazing. The character specific dice mechanic, while many have mixed opinions on it, I personally like it, albeit it need a bit of balancing. I also especially like the ally mechanic, it's a very interesting and unique idea. But its all downhill from here. Lets start off the negatives with the boards. This game only has 4 boards. FOUR. Every mainline Mario Party game before this one has had at least SIX. And Super Mario Party is on a NINTH-GEN console, where cartridges and disks have way more space than they did back in the late 90s and early 2000s. And the few amount of boards they have aren't really even that good. The boards in this game are extremely small, and there is no depth to them at all. All the boards are just overly simplistic and extremely anti-climactic loops with no fun gimmicks and very few branching paths. And it is especially insulting when you note that the boards in every Mario Party game before Super (yes, that includes 9 and 10) had bigger boards with more depth. Even the boards on the Nintendo 64 were better, and that console is from the 90s. Another thing I dislike about the game is how they lowered the price for stars and other items in the game, and they made it super easy to collect coins. For example, stars only cost 10 coins, which is half of what they used to cost. And since coins are so easy to get in this game, you can essentially always afford a star, which ruins the overall experience. And there is another item in the game that is cheap and ruins the gameplay as well. The Golden Pipe. This pipe allows you to teleport to where ever the star is. And for such an overpowered item, you would expect it to cost at least 20 coins, considering how easy coins are to get in this game. Well it doesn't cost 20, it doesn't even cost 15, this item costs 10 coins. TEN. Players can teleport to the stars with ease, only for the cost of 10 coins. This, as well as stars being cheaper, greatly affects the gameplay, and certainly not for the better. But one thing that always comes with quality in every Mario party game is the minigames. Does Super Mario Party have this? Well, yes and no. It has minigames (and some really good ones) but they lack variety. Most of the minigames are 4-player minigames, there are barely any 1v3 or 2v2 minigames. (Also it feels like there are less minigames in this title than in the earlier ones, but I have to look into that) There are some other gripes me and many others have with the game, such as how you are forced to use a single joy-con to play (which sucks for people with big hands) or how the in-game shop only has 3 items, unlike shops in earlier games which had way more but none of these compare to the last point I will bring up. The "online" mode is one of the laziest, lackluster online modes I have ever seen in my entire life. In our current day and age, online games and the internet in general are more popular than ever. An online mode is what greatly improves most games (hey, its what made Fortnite so popular in the first place). An online mode would have greatly improved the Mario Party experience, it would allow you to play with friends long distance, and it would greaten the popularity of the game. Nintendo must have notice this, so Super Mario Party advertised that, yes, it had online. So you may be wondering, what can you do in this online mode? Well, in this "online" mode, you can play minigames with other people online. No full Mario Party games, only minigames. How many of these minigames can you play with others? 10. Yes, TEN. Out of all the minigames in the entire game, you can only play TEN with other people online. Not 50, not 25 not even 15. TEN. And you can only play these minigames with random people online, which means if you want to play with your friends, you have to simply get really lucky. But the most atrocious part of this is that the online is UTTER GARBAGE. 90% of the time there will be lag and some times the game will just stop altogether due to a connectivity error. If Nintendo/ND Cube had just done what Hudson Soft did for the first 8 Mario Parties (having lots of big boards with depth, having stars be worth 20 coins, having lots of minigame variety, etc.) while also keeping the good aspects of Super Mario Party (The great roster, great visuals, character specific dice, allies, etc.), this game could have been amazing, maybe even the best game in the entire Mario Party series. But as it stands now, the game is a rushed mess. It's certainly not a bad game by any means, I've had some good times with it, it's just not a necessarily great game either.