Phenixx Gaming

For a while, the Mario Party franchise was considered to be in a rut. Mario Party 9 changed the franchise’s formula of characters running all over the board for stars, to everyone moving in the same car set down a nearly linear path. While people have seen the franchise to be stagnant, it was not a formula change that was well received. Mario Party 10 was just a continuation of this formula while Mario Party: The Top 100 was just a mini-game collection. How about Star Rush? Well, more on that later. Point is, Mario Party, in trying to change itself, ended up becoming something alienating.

However, the Switch iteration, Super Mario Party managed to bring in new ideas whilst not straying too far from what people liked about the games. Super Mario Party‘s premise parallels the old Mario Parties where everyone debates on who is a superstar and chooses to have a party to decide it. This time however, Bowser and his minions want in on the action, in contrast to Mario Party 10, where Bowser was only playable in a unique mode. With Toad, Toadette and Kamek running the show, a whole new party begins.

Let’s get into Mario Party, the main meat of the game. Super Mario Party rewinds board traversal to the pre-9 style, but adds a few things to keep it fresh. The 1-10 dice block is replaced with one that rolls a normal 1-6. However, each character can choose to roll their own, special dice block. Mario’s block favors rolling threes, Wario’s dice block has 4 sixes but the last 2 sides have him losing money without moving, etc. I do like this because it gives an incentive to pick characters based on something other than appearance; but it is flawed in that some characters are blatantly better than others. Like, why pick Wario when you can pick Bowser, who loses slightly more coins on his bad rolls but can also roll an 8, 9 or 10?

Of course, you don’t need to play that specific character to use their dice, as you can use other characters’ dice through the game’s ally mechanic. Landing on certain spaces or using a certain item summons a random character to act as an ally. You gain access to that character’s special dice and when you roll, all of your collected allies will roll a 1-2 die to add to your total. While gathering allies enables you to move farther, I felt that it undermined the special character dice. Unless you use the item that just lets you pick how many spaces you move, you can’t strategically use stuff like Shy Guy’s die (which is almost all 4s) because your allies will just add onto your total. Like, might as well just pick the characters with the greatest chances of moving ahead, ya know?

There are four boards, each with its own gimmick. My favorite one is the secret one you get for playing the others, where the star stays in one place, but the price changes and you can buy multiple stars at once. It really hones in on the sense of greed I get playing this game. I wish there were more boards, but they still have a lot of playability. I can tell that my sister and I will be playing this game for a while.

As is Mario Party tradition, everyone plays a minigame after every turn. A lot of them have simple controls, though a few of them rely on motion control. Thankfully, the motion control minigames are simple enough that it’s pretty responsive. Super Mario Party also has a nice quality of life feature that lets you practice the minigame within the rules screen, which is helpful for the more esoteric minigames; like the one that requires you to move the joycon in a specific motion to peddle a tricycle. I do not remember enough of past Mario Parties to remember their minigame collections, but what Super Mario Party has on offer is pretty solid. Well, mostly solid.

New to Super Mario Party are rhythm minigames and team minigames. I’ll focus on the latter since I’ll talk about the former later. Team minigames drag all your allies into the fray, usually acting as extra lives for whatever danger you’ve put yourself in. While it’s still possible to win a team minigame without allies, you’re at a severe disadvantage if your opponents have a bunch, as I highlight with my misery above. As gathering allies is mainly a luck based thing to begin with, team minigames are essentially influenced by luck. As someone who hates luck based minigames, I hate the team minigames and wish that there was some sort of balancing, like there is in 1-v-3 minigames.

There’s another party mode, called Partner Party. Partner Party actually follows in the vein of Mario Party: Star Rush. In Partner Party, two teams play in non-linear versions of the game’s boards, where most of the spaces are blank and you have to land exactly on the star space to buy one. Team members roll the dice together and move the same amount of spaces by picking a path through the grid-like board. Unlike Mario Party 9, teams can choose to split up to cover more ground, which offers a degree of strategy; well, as long as you aren’t playing with computer players. Instead of coin spaces, there’s a limited number of coins scattered around the board, which places a greater emphasis on performing well in the minigames to get ahead.

While I still prefer the main party mode because four players competing makes things more hectic, Partner Party’s actually a pretty worthy alternative that my sister and I got really into.

Of course there are other, more gimmicky modes. There’s River Survival, where players all row a boat down a river, playing co-op minigames to get more time. While I like these minigames, you’ll run out of them real quick if you’re trying to unlock Donkey Kong and/or 100% the game. Another problem is that it’s just too easy? The score rankings for minigames are too generous, as are the time rewards. My sister and I consistently finished our sessions with more than 150 seconds left on the clock and we have no desire to play more after we unlocked Donkey Kong.

Challenge Road is in a similar boat. This mode is pretty much where you play through every minigame with requirements. It is not bad but it’s forgettable and not something you’d wanna play again after clearing through it.

Another mode I actually liked was Sound Stage. There are a unique set of rhythm minigames where you move your joycon to the beat of the music. It’s very much a discount Rhythm Heaven. Sound Stage has you playing through a collection of rhythm minigames in a playlist, with a final score given out at the end. As somebody that likes Rhythm Heaven, this was a very welcome addition. In fact, my only actual problem with this mode is that I wish there were more rhythm minigames.

In talking about the modes, it’s time to address the elephant in the room: the online functionality. When this game was originally announced, people wished for there to be online play. Nintendo ended up letting people down by relegating online play to just minigames, which disappointed a lot of people, because it’s the combination of minigames and board game that makes the Mario Party experience. So, I was initially somewhat understanding of this because, well, Mario Party has an infamous reputation of making people hate each other. There’s no guarantee that people will actually finish a standard online game without quitting.

However, I’ve since learned about a Mario Party-like game called Pummel Party, an indie game with full online play. Despite the hatred games like Mario Party can instill in people, it’s actually reasonably successful for an indie game, with its SteamSpy page estimating that a minimum of 200,000 people own the game. In the course of writing this, I looked up its Twitch page and saw popular streamer XQC playing it. The thing is, the Mario Party experience can work online. It’s something people want, despite the rage it can induce. If a small indie studio can create online Mario Party, Nintendo really should, too.

There’s definitely some missed opportunities with Super Mario Party. It tries to do some new stuff; some of it works, some of it doesn’t. However, as a different take on a beloved local multiplayer franchise, it still works well. Super Mario Party is a fun and engaging experience, as long as you have someone to come over and play with you.

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Super Mario Party

$59.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Fun for local multiplayer.
• Classic Mario Party with a new flavor.
• Partner Party offers a fun new alternative.

Cons

• Lack of good online play hurts playability.
• Most of the other modes are boring.
• The character dice and ally system are hit-or-miss.