I know the Mario Party games are best played with friends, but I didn’t really play any of them until I started going through the N64 library as an adult, and due to circumstance I had no choice but to play them by myself. Even so, the first three Mario Party games were still quite fun even if you’re a sad loner who had to play them alone.
The first Mario Party was decently fun, but was also incredibly unbalanced and unfair. I understand that this is a party game with a lot of similarities to a board game, and board games are often a mixture of skill and luck. But ideally you want to balance things so that, all else being equal, on average the more skilled you are the better you’ll do. The first Mario Party was a bit too reliant on luck, with the winner being decided largely by chance rather than by how well or poorly any of the players performed making their way across the board or playing the mini games. It deserves credit for starting the series, but beyond that it’s not really worth revisiting.
Mario Party 2 was a lot better, and a lot more balanced. Skill finally felt like it mattered, though there was still enough luck involved to keep you on your toes. In terms of overall presentation and style the game is fantastic and just incredibly charming. Speaking as someone who has absolutely no nostalgia for any of the Mario Party games, I can see why Mario Party 2 is many people’s favorite.
Mario Party 3 was also really good, but it didn’t click for me the same way that Mario Party 2 did. It was still good, but the presentation and style didn’t quite have the same magic to them. Even so, on its own merits it was a good game, and while Mario Party 2 was a vast improvement from the first game in terms of making sure things were balanced and ensuring skill was rewarded, it did still have some stuff that was overly reliant on luck, and Mario Party 3 smoothed things out to be even more balanced. Mario Party 3 also introduced the ability for players to hold up to three items, rather than only being limited to just carrying one, which was a much appreciated improvement. I liked Mario Party 2’s style and presentation more, but looking at the core gameplay and overall balance Mario Party 3 is the better game.
So after enjoying the original N64 trilogy of Mario Party games, I was rather looking forward to the Mario Party games for the Gamecube, even if I would have to play them by myself again due to me not having very many friends. Let’s take a look at them one by one.
Mario Party 4
Right off the bat the improved graphics are an appreciated addition. The N64 games are fun, but they’re not always easy on the eyes, and it’s nice to see the characters looking more like themselves and less like paper dolls. Having each board hosted by a different Super Mario Bros character is a cute idea that does lead to a lot of creativity, and the boards themselves are pretty well designed.
I also like the addition of the mini Mushrooms, and how there’s more of a risk reward to using the Mushrooms. Using the Mushrooms that let you grow bigger allows you to move across more spaces, but you risk passing by areas that would be useful, while using the Mushrooms that shrink you limit how far you can go but allow you to access certain areas you otherwise couldn’t reach. One thing I don’t like is how if you’ve eaten a Mushroom that makes you bigger and you pass another player you steal 10 of their coins. I think that’s going too far, and it would have been more fair if it was only 5 coins.
I really appreciate the fact that they cut the item mini games and streamlined the process of getting items outside of shops, as the item mini games in the previous games were a real pace killer and rather tedious to sit through if you weren’t the one playing them. I’m not a big fan of the lottery shops they introduced, as they also slow things down, but not as bad as the item mini games did, and overall it’s largely harmless.
The mini games in Mario Party 4 are also incredibly creative and, for the most part, fair. This seems to be a general positive trend in terms of how balanced and fun the mini games are. The mini games in the first game were a very mixed bag, with some being fun and fair, while others were neither. With each passing game the mini games on the whole became more fair and balanced, and while Mario Party 4 does have a few mini games I didn’t like, the vast majority of them are great.
Overall this was a really fun game, and a pretty solid title for the Gamecube’s first Mario Party. The only question is if the other games will be able to maintain the same fun and charm of the first four.
Mario Party 5
Oh dear. It seems we have the first disappointing game in the series, at least in my opinion. It’s by no means bad, but it’s a step in the wrong direction. Mario Party 2, 3, and 4 all did their part to refine and polish the formula established by the first game, and pretty much all of the changes they introduced were either positive or neutral. But the changes Mario Party 5 made to the formula were actively detrimental. I understand that doing the same thing over and over again can get stale, particularly when it comes to games with a narrative focus. But for a lighthearted and purely fun focused series like Mario Party there’s really no need to massively change up the formula each time. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, otherwise you risk breaking it.
The main change that Mario Party 5 made was getting rid of the item shop altogether, and replacing it with the capsules, a new set of randomized items with varying effects. This was a bad idea for several reasons. For one, it removes one of the best parts of the older games, namely strategizing. You could plan to swing by an item shop, purchase an item you chose, and use it at the most optimal time. Now, all of that’s gone, as what item you get is completely random, so it’s much harder to plan or strategize in any meaningful way.
Another problem with the capsules is how you use them. You can either use them right away at the cost of a few of your coins, or you can place them on a space and make it so that anyone who lands on that spot will be affected by that item. But there’s no way to know if your opponents will ever land on a bad spot, or if you’ll land on a good spot, and it’s just as likely that the reverse will happen. This is especially true because each symbol marking a space that’s been affected by a capsule is incredibly generic and represents more than one thing. In the first four games you could tell exactly what would happen if you landed on a space just by looking at it, while in Mario Party 5 you can’t. The end result is that the events that happen as the game unfolds are often too random and too cluttered.
The capsule system also renders coins much more useless. There was one match I played where I had more coins than everybody else, but because the stars kept appearing closer to my opponents I was losing pretty badly. In the previous games I would have been able to use my coins to improve my situation, either by going to an item shop and purchasing a useful item, or by swinging by the Boo house and stealing someone else’s star to give me a fighting chance. But in Mario Party 5 neither of those things were an option.
I’m guessing the developers were trying to streamline the game a bit, and the matches did tend to go by faster than in previous games. But faster isn’t always better, and I think removing a core feature and replacing it with one that’s much more reliant on randomness and chance was a bad call. A good board game always has a healthy mix of skill and luck, with skill ideally being the priority. The Mario Party games were getting better and better at making sure things were balanced, rewarding skill while still having enough luck involved to keep things interesting. But in trying to streamline the matches Mario Party 5 ended up ruining a lot of the experience, and tipped things over so that luck is a more prominent factor than skill.
While the capsule system is the biggest flaw with Mario Party 5, I do have a few other issues with the game. I don’t really get why they switched around the roles of some characters, and I didn’t appreciate the disruption of tradition. Again, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Donkey Kong is no longer a playable character, apparently because they wanted him to have his own dedicated spot on the board to serve as a counterpoint to Bowser’s spot. I can understand the reasoning behind having a character to contrast Bowser on the board, but I don’t understand why it had to be Donkey Kong.
Boo is now a playable character, despite the fact that that makes no sense, he can just fly around, so why does he have the same abilities and limitations as all the other playable characters? Since Boo isn’t fulfilling his role of lurking somewhere on the board to help players steal coins and stars, that role has been taken by the Chain Chomp, although thanks to the capsule system it’s significantly less reliable. I also didn’t like how the genie from the previous games was replaced with a weird caterpillar thing.
There are good things about this game. I do like the dream aesthetic that the game went for, and it was neat to see the Star Spirits from Paper Mario serving as the main mascots of the game. The boards are all pretty good, and the mini games this time around are still creative and fun. Maybe not quite as fun as the ones in Mario Party 4, and there are a few duds, but overall they're quite enjoyable.
On its own merits Mario Party 5 is a perfectly fine game, and most aspects of the game are really good. It’s just the capsule system that’s really bad, but it’s such an integral part of how the game works now that it really does sour things. While I’m not entirely sure how I would rank all of the Mario Party games, I am prepared to say that Mario Party 5 is worse than Mario Party 2, 3, and 4. I’ll rank it higher than the first game given how unbalanced the first game was, but this is the first time I’ve been disappointed by a Mario Party game.
One last thing of note, something about the sound effects in this game awoke something in the back of my brain. In particular the sound effects of the characters walking across the board and the sound effects of them getting a capsule from the capsule dispenser sounded eerily familiar. I’m not certain, but I think I may have played this game once at a friend's house when I was a kid. That was a long time ago though, and aside from those oddly specific sounds nothing in this game seems familiar. Maybe I’m just imagining things.
As I said, on its own Mario Party 5 is a good game, it’s just when it's measured up to its predecessors that it falls short. I suppose if you’re not super competitive and you like matches to be more expedited then you might enjoy this game just fine. But while I did have fun with this game, it was less fun than 2, 3, and 4. Now I’m a bit worried about what I’ll get when I try Mario Party 6.
Mario Party 6
The biggest problem with Mario Party 5 wasn’t the fact that it was trying to streamline the format of Mario Party, it was that it did it rather badly, and that’s thrown into sharp relief by Mario Party 6, which contains a lot of similarities to Mario Party 5 but does them right. The capsules are replaced by orbs, though functionally they’re basically the same thing, but the orbs are an improvement in several ways. First of all, they introduced orb shops that you can swing by in order to purchase specific ones. While it doesn’t give the player as many choices as the old item shops did, they at least give the player more agency and options in how to play than the capsule system did. Another appreciated change was that they simplified the process of getting orbs. Instead of having to sit through a cute but tedious animation of the capsule falling out of the machine every time you wanted an item, now you just pass over the orb spot on the map, and boom, you get one just like that.
By far the best change is the presentation of the items. Like in Mario Party 5 you can mark certain spots with hazards to trip other players up. But this time each spot that has a hazard on it has the icon of the player who placed it there, and the board’s appearance is much clearer and less confusing. In Mario Party 5 the icons were a mess, and you couldn’t tell what would happen if you landed on a certain spot just by looking at it. While you still can’t always tell what will happen on a certain spot just by looking in Mario Party 6, you will always be able to know if it will be good or bad, and it’s always possible to know which spots will benefit you, and which ones you should try to avoid.
The sun and moon aesthetic that the game goes for is a cute idea that does lead to some creative ideas and events on the boards. I also appreciate that some of the boards try something a bit different from the usual format of just chasing stars, and they were a nice change of pace. I’m still not a fan of Boo being a playable character, as I still think it makes no sense, but they did incorporate the Red Boo on a few of the maps to do the same kind of thing that Boo did in the older games, so I guess I’m okay with it. And Donkey Kong serving as a counterpoint to Bowser is an idea that I wasn’t fond of at first, but after going through this game the concept has grown on me. Given Donkey Kong’s history as a character I guess it does kind of make sense, and he feels like he has more personality here than he did in Mario Party 5.
The only major area where I think Mario Party 5 was better is the mini games. The mini games in Mario Party 6 are not bad by any means, but in general they feel less fun and less creative than the mini games of the previous games. I mean, this is the sixth game in the series, I suppose it’s understandable if ideas are running a little dry by this point. It’s also possible that I might be getting a little burnt out on Mario Party by this point. Another admittedly minor flaw is Bowser’s voice. My god, what did they do to him? In the first five games he sounded like an intimidating monster, but now he just sounds like some boring guy doing a really bad impression of Bowser. Like I said, a minor gripe, but one worth mentioning.
Overall Mario Party 6 was a definite improvement over Mario Party 5, and with the capsule problem fixed I was able to enjoy this game a lot more. It also feels like the game found a better balance between skill and luck, and now the changes that distinguish it from the other games just feel different rather than detrimental like they did in Mario Party 5.
Mario Party 7
If Mario Party 6 was basically Mario Party 5 but better, Mario Party 7 is basically Mario Party 6 but worse. The first four Mario Party games all felt fresh and full of life. Mario Party 5 and 6 felt like the series was getting a little tired, but still had plenty of energy and creativity. Mario Party 7 feels like it’s running on fumes, and that doesn’t bode well considering some of the things I’ve heard about 8, 9, and 10. Still, Mario Party 7 was the last Mario Party game for the Gamecube, so for the moment I’m done, which is a relief since I was getting a little sick of Mario Party.
Mario Party 7 is very similar to Mario Party 6, but pretty much all of the changes it made were negative ones. But unlike 5, which shook up the formula quite a bit, 7’s changes are smaller. While I preferred the old item system, I thought the orbs worked pretty well in Mario Party 6, and they actually were okay in 5 too, at least compared to what they did with them in 7. The main reason is that the orbs in 5 and 6 gave the players that used them a slight advantage, and the hazards they created would give players that landed on them slight disadvantages. Since the orbs were largely randomized this was essential to make sure that things remained balanced and fair while still incorporating a decent amount of chance. But in Mario Party 7 a lot of the orb items are too powerful, and the game ends up being incredibly unbalanced as a result. Mario Party 6 felt like it found the right balance between skill and luck, and in general Mario Party 7 once again tips things too far into being luck based.
I also really didn’t like the Bowser time mechanic. Bowser’s job in the Mario Party games has always been to cause trouble and shake things up, but that’s a role that needs to be handled carefully. In the other games whenever Bowser showed up I always went “Oh no!” but whenever he appeared in Mario Party 7 I just sighed in exasperation. He worked as an occasional unpleasant surprise, but changing it so that he’s a constant hindrance just makes him extremely irritating, and by extension just makes the game incredibly annoying.
But even if we ignore the major flaws, this game isn’t all that exciting. On its own merits it's a good party game, but after going through all the previous games I’d say that overall Mario Party 7 is fine but lackluster. The maps are okay but not great, the mini games are decent but nothing special, and the aesthetic theme of a cruise ship they went for this time is alright but pretty unremarkable. It’s the first time I’ve felt bored while playing a Mario Party game, and while that might be in part because I’m tired of Mario Party, I think it mainly is because the game wasn’t all that engaging. After being disappointed by Mario Party 5 I was prepared to be unimpressed by 6, but 6 managed to win me back, and I actually went into 7 somewhat optimistic. So if my optimism couldn’t be sustained after playing through 7 that’s a pretty good sign that the game did something wrong. I actually enjoyed 5 more than 7 despite its flaws, because it was still fun and it still felt like it was trying. 7 just feels kind of tired, and while it has its moments I don’t really feel like playing it ever again.
So those were my rambling thoughts on the Mario Party games for the Gamecube. I hope this was at least a little interesting to you, but if not, oh well. I mean, you read this far so it must have been at least somewhat engaging. I haven’t quite decided which of the four games is my favorite. It’s definitely either Mario Party 4 or Mario Party 6, but I’m going to have to think for a bit before I can determine which one I like more. Feel free to let me know what your favorite Mario Party game is, and I hope you’ll stick around for more of my reviews.
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