“Mario Party” has provided the last few generations countless of hours of fun and enjoyment. So many controllers and friendships have been lost to the grind of mini-games in the never-ending quest to gain favor with the RNG gods and pray that you wind up in the winner’s circle.
However, that changed when Nintendo went through with a strange decision to clump all of the players together into a car. Instead of the normal aspect of making the correct decisions on the game board to get yourself into the right position for a star, now the board was just a giant sprint towards the finish where you were only in control of 25 percent of the game.
Personally, I believe this change, made in “Mario Party 10,” was due to Nintendo’s fear of the reputation Mario Party had gained. While raking in massive success, Nintendo wanted no part in the game due to the fact that people knew it as the game that “ruined friendships.” Nintendo had been cultivating an image of a family friendly get together that you can enjoy on a video game console, and “Mario Party” was the antithesis of that idea from “Mario Party 1” to “Mario Party 9,” and so the changes were made in order to coincide with the company’s ethos.
This change made “Mario Party” near unplayable, and the world reacted in suit, with countless corners of the internet lamenting that the game had gone the way of “Donkey Kong” and “Pac-Man” and other older games that had changed due to company meddling and lost their touch.
“Super Mario Party” released Oct 5, and in it the franchise has come back to its roots and brought back the original idea of four people separate on a board vying for stars, coins and positioning.
My god, the game is fun. It’s so nice to be able to sit around with the family to play a “Mario Party” game again and enjoy it the entire way through.
My whole family—from my parents to my sister—are diehard “Mario Partiers.” We’ve played through “MP9” on our Wii countless times this year, and so it may be important to keep in mind the nostalgia factor that I bring into this piece, as admittedly it is a simple game by franchise standards and that may pull people away.
The boards are smaller, the standard (and I’ll get to that) dice only go to 6 and the stars only cost 10 coins instead of the normal 20. While that may put people off, I find it both a crutch and a welcome change at the same time. The new systems they put in place necessitates the older, longer games. Now you can get allies to accompany you and the boards need a certain amount of people to hit the green spaces for some of them to truly go off, but if you are a casual player who wants to get through the game in half an hour, you can now easily do so.
Now let’s get into those systems, because I think they are great. So first off—the dice. Going along with the standard die of 1-6, each character has a die that is specific to them. Mario, the all around star, has a die that has a 1, 3, 3, 3, 5 and a 6 on it, meaning that he is likely to go an average amount of spaces, where Bowser has a riskier die that has 9, 10 and 11 while also having two -3 gold faces, meaning that while he has the chance to go farther, he also can lose gold and just sit on the spot he is already on.
This new feature is brilliant, as now each character has a unique style of play that makes character selection more than just picking a skin to play with. Mario and Peach reward a constant but slow pace, while Bowser and his minions reward a faster pace but also one that stays on the same space every once in a while. I liked playing certain characters and hated playing others, and it was so much better than just picking Luigi because he’s Luigi.
The ally system that I talked about before is how you vary your dice usage. When you land on an ally space, a random character drops down and follows you for the rest of the game. They also hand over their dice to you, so if Mario follows you as Goomba you can now get the Mario die to increase your slow and steady pace. On top of that, there are now games where allies count as extra lives and can help you extend your chances of winning. The only downside to the system is that it doesn’t seem to happen enough, and it’s very likely for one character to get 2-4 allies, while the rest of the players have none—making them a shoe-in to win those ally games.
Also, the increased usage of the Switch’s motion controls is interesting, but is still a gimmick, and team games are actually rewarded more coins if the group does a high-five motion after winning, which gets old after the first few games.
So all in all, it is refreshing to get a “Mario Party” game that feels like a “Mario Party” game. While not necessarily being a return to form, I’m very happy to see the game in the shape I originally fell in love with and I’m looking forward to playing it more and on top of that seeing where this franchise can take the new mechanics put in place by this fun game.
Eric Ryan is a fifth-year student majoring in English. ER821804@wcupa.edu