LogFAQs > #968062586

In honor of the announcement on the Nintendo Direct two days ago...

#13: Mario Party Superstars

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/4/AAA-H0AADrVK.jpg

Oh my god, they finally did it. They made the definitive Mario Party. And it's online! I never dreamed they would actually figure out how to do this. But they did! Man, Switch-era Nintendo is just built different.

I've been playing Mario Party games for a dumbass long time, and I don't really know why. The first Mario Party sucked, but it was hella addictive for some reason. The embarrassing thing is, I didn't even really have that many people to play with. I played with my mom a lot, because the two of us just played a lot of video games together, and on very rare occasions I'd convince a group of friends to play it, but I did a lot of Mario Partying solo. Which is, frankly, a sort of sad experience. It's like drinking alone. Even as a kid I felt slightly ashamed of it, playing these hellishly random board games with AI opponents who cannot be my friends and don't even feel schadenfreude when I get fucked over by chance time. But for some reason it's still kinda fun? Mario Party is just colorful and exciting and most of the minigames are really fun and the N64 games had a lot of stuff to unlock so they kept me pretty busy.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/5/AAA-H0AADrVL.jpg

I loved the first three Mario Parties and I got a ton of playtime out of 4 as well, but by the time I got to 5 I kinda started to feel like the series wasn't growing in a positive direction. MP5's gimmick was to have these weird capsules that you had to put on the board in lieu of items, and they just weren't very fun - in theory the idea of modifying the board should be fun but it never felt like it amounted to much and they weren't as fun to use as items. I didn't play 6 or 7. 8 just wasn't as fun as it could have been - the Wiimote wasn't always applied in the most fun ways and the board designs didn't allow for a lot of strategy, as far as I recall. Then 9 and 10 just went in a lame direction with the whole 'everyone's in a car' idea. Didn't play 9, but 10 is just one of the worst games I've ever played. The outcome of the game just feels incredibly arbitrary, even moreso than usual, and it makes the whole thing a chore.

Super Mario Party was a pretty good return to form, though. Not a huge fan of 1-6 dice blocks and smaller boards, but it's a defensible choice. I liked the huge roster and the character-specific dice blocks, although a lot of them didn't amount to very much. Felt like the minigames were back to being pretty good. Thinking back on it, I didn't have it in my top 100 list of the past decade, and I've only just now realized as I'm writing this that I completely forgot it this whole time. Oops! It should've been on there. SMP was good.

But ah, Mario Party Superstars. It feels like they finally figured out the winning formula here. We're back to the standard Mario Party formula established in MP3-MP4; 1-10 dice blocks, 3 items, nice big boards to traverse. And it just... works. MP3 and MP4 had already gotten pretty close, in my opinion, but MPS really figures it all out - balancing the item prices, giving you plenty of money to work with, and fine tuning the boards so that it really feels like you actually have some say in the matter. It feels polished. It feels right.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/6/AAA-H0AADrVM.jpg

It's funny to see a Mario Party game go with the whole nostalgic throwback remake idea, since I didn't really figure that there'd be a ton of N64 Mario Party nostalgia, but since people seem pretty happy about the games being announced for NSO this week, I guess there was enough demand for it. There is something kind of comforting about these familiar boards and minigames, after so many Mario Parties that just weren't that good - it feels like they're just dialing it back to what worked. I like hearing all these familiar tunes that I didn't realize I remembered, and I like seeing the little screenshots of the N64 game when they describe the boards. It kinda tickles my late-90's nostalgia brain.

But oh man, it's so much more polished. I'm really pleased with the minigames they chose and how they decided to touch them up a bit. Of course, they still managed to find a way to include some stinkers - the damn Piranha Plant skateboarding game that the skateboarder always wins, for instance. If I could add one feature to this game, it would be the ability to curate the minigame list, because there's a few games that I wouldn't keep in there if I had the choice. But it's not *too* bad, because overall by drawing on mostly the best games from past games, I feel like this is overall one of the best minigame lists in the series.

And of course, the online play. They added it to Super Mario Party in a free update recently, which I think led people to speculate there'd be online in an upcoming Mario Party, and so there was. This is what I've really been waiting for since the early 2000's. I couldn't play with friends very often, so I dreamed of the ability to play Mario Party online - after all, there's so many nerds out there like me who stupidly binged these games solo who also need friends to play with! But, alas. It took a long time for Nintendo to even figure out the whole 'online play' concept at all, and even by the time they started they didn't include Mario Party in their plans. Maybe they thought that online play in such a longform game wasn't feasible, or maybe they just thought it wasn't worth developing, but it's been maddening waiting for it.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/7/AAA-H0AADrVN.jpg

But thank god they've finally come around on online play, and it turns out it fucking slaps! It's as fun to play this game with friends as I had always hoped it would be - no more AI who can easily be exploited in minigames and who feels nothing when they screw you over and never ragequits. Online play always seems really stable to me and it plays great. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention stickers - whoever came up with those is a fucking genius. Every single emote you can spam on screen is solid gold in its own way and the memes that organically spawn from it make the online experience really come alive.

So yeah, the wait was worth it! Mario Party Superstars is just about as good as I could ask for. Playing it with friends online is a blast and makes it easily the best Mario Party to date. I really, really wish this game had more than five boards. All of the boards we got are fun - I'm really partial to Yoshi's Island and its bifurcated map where you have to pick the right side, it feels like there's so many fun tactics you can pull off there - but five boards just isn't enough, especially when there's so many more boards from the old games you could draw from. I feel like if this game had another 5 boards, to make it 10, that would be perfect. That would be just about the most perfect Mario Party. As it is, it's really close, and it almost pains me to not rank it higher, but it IS just Mario Party. Even drinking with friends is something that should only be done in moderation.

Next up: I WILL talk about this game again in the future, but I'm going to talk about it now anyway.