LogFAQs > #949891555

#79 Mario Party (N64, 1998)


This might be my most "controversial" entry yet? I was paying attention to a conversation about the series on Discord a few days ago, but I mostly stayed quiet and only said that Mario Party 5 was comfortably my third favorite in the series. Anyway, I have a long history with the series. I own 10 of the Mario Party games (1-8, Advance, DS), and I bought my sister two others (Super and Star Rush). There are very few series that I have put more hours into than Mario Party. I absolutely love the first one, and I truly don't think that it's the nostalgia talking. I am more more nostalgic with Mario Party 4 and 5 because those were the ones that my friends would like to play a lot and we all played several days a week during the summer in back-to-back years.

There are two things that are integral to the Mario Party experience: Boards and Mini-games. Everyone would agree with that. While I think many people here are down on the original in those departments, I am the opposite. In some ways, I think the collection of mini-games are the most varied and creative with highlights including Box Mountain Mayhem, Buried Treasure, Key-pa-Way, and Piranha's Pursuit. In general, there's no overabundance on button mashers like I felt there was in some future entries. The joystick rotating ones were obviously a bad idea, but there were fewer of those than I remembered. One of the neat ideas surrounding the games that they eliminated almost fully in future games was that 2 v 2 or 1 v 3 games had your coins on the line. Perhaps to appeal to a wider audience, coins were super easy to come by and keep ahold of in later games, but I liked the idea of increasing the importance of winning the mini-games. Some of these games weren't balanced enough (Bash 'n Cash) or used the rotating controls (Tug O' War), but I loved the idea and they succeeded far more than they failed.

I did a ranking topic around 2010 for all the boards in MP1-8 and DS, and four landed in my Top 15 (Bowser's Magma Mountain, DK's Jungle Adventure, Peach's Birthday Cake, and Luigi's Engine Room). While future games added more mechanics to the Mario Party experience and constructed the boards with those in mind, Mario Party didn't have that. Each board had to stand on its own merits, and because of that, I am probably impressed with the boards here than any other game. With limited options to the player, and it sounds really silly to say this about freaking Mario Party, but there was certain level of strategic planning when going around the board, especially with courses like Eternal Star, Peach's Birthday Cake, and Mario's Rainbow Castle. It made the individual sessions a bit more memorable.

While some of the games are a little hard to go back to, I can always play the first one with my sister, and I even like to play it alone from time to time. Having turns take just like three minutes because they not bloated by extra stuff is also helpful.

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KCF can't actually be a real person but he is - greengravy
If you smell what the rock is cooking he's cooking crap - ertyu