Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1~50
51.
Wave Race 64 (N64)
52.
Bakushou Jinsei 64: Mezase! Resort-ou (N64)
53.
Mother (Famicom)
54.
Famista 64 (N64)
55.
Weird and Unfortunate Things are Happening (PC)
56.
Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (Wii U)
57.
Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
58.
Wario Land: Shake it! (Wii) *
59. Mario Party 8 (Wii) *
As a big Mario Party fan, this is a game I’ve played before and quite a bit. However, much like with pretty much every other Mario Party game I’ve written a review for, I played it so long ago that I never had a chance to actually write a review for it, let alone look at it with my current better understanding of what makes these games work. Going through a bunch of Wii games recently, it only made sense to put this one on the list as well. Playing the Japanese version of the game on real hardware, I played through the single-player mode and then did a 25~35 turn game on each of the game’s 6 game boards, and it took me about 15.5 hours to do it.
The premise of this Mario Party is the celebration of the Star Carnival! Presented by your gracious hosts, Bigtop and Ballyhoo (who are Kondu and Tohre in Japanese, though the wordplay there is admittedly lost on me), it’s the newest, funnest way to decide just who is the Super Star! Mario and friends are more than eager to join the fun and get to partying! With one of the biggest character rosters the series has ever seen (including the new additions of Blooper and Hammer Bro) and 6 boards to play on, it’s time to join the action on what would ultimately be the last Mario Party developed by HudsonSoft (before all those devs jumped ship to ND Cube and began just making games directly for Nintendo instead <w>). It’s as fine a premise for the action as ever, and it’s also genuinely interesting to reflect back on a game like this as it caps off a decade of nearly annual Mario Party releases by Hudson.
Naturally for an early Wii game, this game only uses Wiimotes. As a result, the 2-person-per-controller 8-player mode that Mario Party 7 sported is impossible to replicate here. In its place, we have a new dual mode that pits one player against another in smaller versions of the game’s 6 maps. This game’s single-player mode is more or less designed to show that off, with you having to face off against 6 normal-difficulty computers over the course of 6 boards. I found the objective-focused nature of the dual mode to be incredibly tedious. Unlike normal party mode, there’s no mini-game after every turn, so mini-games are only when certain spaces are landed on. The end result is a mode where every map feels painfully down to just lucky rolls and item pickups (EVEN for a Mario Party game), and I found it nothing short of merciful that I managed to complete it in only 3 hours. I’m certainly glad that the normal party mode is a lot more fun, but I’m frankly shocked that they managed to make a game mode worse than Mario Party 3’s awful luck-contest of a duel mode this many entries later.
And what a party mode it is! Taking a lot of inspiration from Mario Party 7’s design philosophy, each of the 6 game boards revolves around a different concept for how stars are acquired. There’s one in the traditional style where you go around the board to a rotating star location trying to find it, but the other 5 are new spins on concepts explored in Mario Partys 6 and 7. I was really ready to hate these, frankly, as (on top of the awful single-player mode) that first traditional board is one of the weakest in the whole game with how it’s put together. However, the gimmick boards ended up being one of the most fun parts of the whole game.
The team clearly took a good, hard look at how the maps in Mario Party 7, as these really adeptly polish up the biggest problems with those old game modes. For example, the board that’s just one big line has been improved massively by the stars at the end being free, so all the money you have is just dumped solely in getting you forward as fast as possible. Similarly, the board that is down to just picking the right path to hope the star lies at the other end now shifts the whole game board procedurally once the star is gotten, making it a constantly shifting contest to both have enough cash *and* guess the right way to go. My favorite edition is probably the hotel map, however, as unlike the windmill map in Mario Party 7, hotels can actually climb in value if more money is placed in them, which gives this map a far higher element of strategy as well as gives money a lot more value aside from just buying 3-dice block items.
The boards aren’t my favorite in any Mario Party game, I’ll admit, as I don’t think this really replaces the better constructed traditional boards in earlier games like Mario Party 2 or 6, but it was a very refreshing surprise with just how much fun I had on boards that seemed like they’d be nothing but torture. Good on the Mario Party team for not just totally throwing out the old gimmicks to replace them with new ones, but instead looking at what worked and what didn’t to make a handful of boards that make for really fun, close games regardless on if you’re playing with humans or CPUs. The CPUs as they are are fairly middle of the road in terms of quality, though I'd say they err on the side of one of the poorer variety I've seen in a Mario Party game. Even on Very Hard, they're remarkably beatable and/or laughably poor at most games that don't require a pointer, but any game that requires pointing at the screen is something even a Normal difficulty computer is frankly far too good at. However, on the board, they seem to act at seemingly random. They *seemed* to do it less on Hard or Very Hard, but computers always seemed incapable of making rational choices when going across the game board, and they constantly acted at what seemed like random in the items they used, bought and threw away.
And that's quite the important thing to be bad at, because one of the biggest changes in how this plays is the big change we’ve made to items for this game. Much like Mario Partys 5 though 7, we’re not using the old system of items that can (almost) only be bought. Instead, we’re still using that newer system where orbs that can be gotten for free as you walk along the board just as often as they can be bought for coins. However, instead of the old orb system, the new candy system has actually gotten rid of a staple of the orb system: No placing orbs on tiles anymore. In something of a mix of the old item system and the old orb system, candy can only be used as a consumable, and there are none that can be thrown on the board like orbs could. Where Mario Party 7 and especially 6 were all about placing orbs down to try and control as much of the board as you could, this change does a ton to shift the focus of the game to a more casual turn-by-turn strategy rather than the long-term strategies encouraged by the old orb system.
I’m of two minds about this change (outside of how much I love how Mario Party 6 handles its orb system, and I just wish they’d tried to polish up that system again). On one hand, I think orbs are given a bit too freely on most boards. While some boards have it as more of a problem than others, I found it to be a very consistent problem that money felt kind of worthless with how fast you accrued it. Especially in the haunted mansion map where stars are only 10 coins, even with shops being as relatively frequent as they are, it never felt like there was nearly the crunch for cash that the older Mario Party games pushed on the players. No matter how heavily I dominated the CPUs in the mini-games, it felt like there was just no meaningful way to cut off cash flow to any player. It felt like we could all just buy stars and items as we pleased without any real worry for how we could afford the next one because the game is just too generous with it. This thankfully isn’t as much of a fatal flaw in the game’s design as it is in a game like Mario Party 5, but it was still something that made some maps a lot more frustrating because it felt like nothing I could do could actually shift the flow of the game aside from getting luckier.
That said, on the other hand, I do overall like the way most of the candies work. I think there could probably stand to be more kinds of them to push you towards spending more money in stores more frequently (as it felt like we were getting 3-dice block candies for free far too often), but other than that, I think they do just about as good a job as they need to for how these new maps are designed. As frustrating as it often was to be unable to meaningfully bankrupt my opponents, that just meant that I had to be all the more aggressive in my own playstyle. Making lemons with lemonade ended up being a lot more fun than I had thought it would, and prioritizing hording high movement candies was an interesting new gameplay style to have to adapt to (even if it just does revolve around risk assessment on trying to roll as high as you can as often as you can). I think it’ll vary by player on how much you gel with the new system versus how the old one worked, but I came away with an ultimately positive feeling towards the candy system despite the rough first impression. If you’re willing to experiment and learn what the new system’s strengths are, I think there’s a lot of fun to be had here with just how quality the new map types are.
Of course, no Mario Party review would be complete without talking about the mini-games, and that’s even more important when talking about an early Wii game like this. As was the style of the time, this game LOVES motion controls. As an unashamed motion control dislike myself, I was ready to trudge through a lot of awful crap here, but I was once again happily surprised with how generally fun they were. There are a handful (especially among the 1v3 games) that are a bit too simple or badly unbalanced, but that’s the case with almost all of these games. Overall, I think this game has a surprisingly strong selection of mini-games to choose from, at least for an early-console generation Mario Party. I’d hardly say this surpasses the mini-game quality of a game like Mario Party 6, but it’s definitely nowhere near as repetitive as something like Mario Party 4 where you feel like you’re replaying the same mini-games constantly (and the fact that the game’s mini-game picker has an extremely heavy bias towards games you haven’t played yet no doubt helps a lot with that).
Aesthetically, I think the game suffers from similar things that a lot of early Wii Nintendo games did. As is very common in these early-generation games, maps are quite simple and often not very nice looking. Things often look weird and plasticky, and while it’s not as bad as something like Mario Kart Wii often has, I’d struggle to say the game looks better than the previous two GameCube Mario Partys. The game also runs terribly, and it’s honestly astonishing just how much the framerate chugs on the normal game board screens. It thankfully just about always runs fine during the mini-games, but it’s wild just how bad this runs despite the game putting massive vertical bars on the sides of the screen to force this wide-screen game into a 4:3 aspect ratio. The music is alright, but nothing special. Mario Party games don’t often have amazing music, but it’s never outright bad either by any means. This is another perfectly run of the mill entry in that regard.
Verdict: Recommended. I’ll be completely honest in that I went into this game expecting to hate it. My memories of it were mostly murky, and I have a lot of skepticism towards my potential enjoyment of any motion control-heavy game in the first place. However, I ended up having a remarkably positive time with this game. It’s definitely not the best Mario Party ever (even among the old Hudson-era ones), but it’s still in my top-half of quality, which is something I never imagined I’d be typing here when I started this a few days back. If you’re looking for a Mario Party and want something a bit different (and perhaps something with more simple control schemes so younger players can engage with it a bit more easily), then this is a pretty darn solid choice to go with.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
