Mario Party DS is the first Mario Party game I've enjoyed enough to play singleplayer and I loved every second of it. There's so much charm in this game, especially in the story mode which has a cute storyboard-like art style to tell a narrative between levels.
The boards were relatively simple and fun, nothing too complex like I've seen in other entries of the game but they have enough going on to make them unique and stand apart from one another. After each board, there is a boss fight you must beat before progressing to the next one, and these are so cool and a nice reward for beating a level; the only one I didn't love was the last one which felt a bit underwhelming.
I recommend this game to anyone who has yet to give the series a try. A series with as many entries as Mario Party can be quite overwhelming, especially when hearing how hit or miss they are but this one seems to be a great place to start.
The boards were relatively simple and fun, nothing too complex like I've seen in other entries of the game but they have enough going on to make them unique and stand apart from one another. After each board, there is a boss fight you must beat before progressing to the next one, and these are so cool and a nice reward for beating a level; the only one I didn't love was the last one which felt a bit underwhelming.
I recommend this game to anyone who has yet to give the series a try. A series with as many entries as Mario Party can be quite overwhelming, especially when hearing how hit or miss they are but this one seems to be a great place to start.
No matter how old I get, the Nintendo DS will never fail to impress me. Like, you already managed to fit in an expanded port of Mario 64 and a Mario Kart game with twice as much content as Double Dash, but now you're putting in a Mario Party game with mechanics on the level of 6 and 7? Wild. Anyway, the boards are pretty solid and the minigames are fun despite some annoying touch controls. Overall, it's just a really solid title.
Holy nostalgia. I used to play this so much on car rides as a kid, and going back to it today was so bizarre to see it after all these years. I haven't thought about star pipes or hex coins in ages!
Never been a huge Mario Party fan but I guess this is my favorite one, which is weird since it's a handheld spinoff.
Never been a huge Mario Party fan but I guess this is my favorite one, which is weird since it's a handheld spinoff.
This is the first real portable Mario party game, and for what it's worth this game carries over all the traits of the original quite well. Each of the boards are fun and varied, the minigames are diverse and interesting, and there are a lot of modes to play through both by yourself and with friends. The best part about this game is that you only really need one copy of the game to play with as you can send download codes to your friends so that they can play on the board with you.
With that said, this is still a Mario Party game, so if you are not a fan of these kinds of games then you won't get much out of this. Other than that, this is easily one of the better titles in the franchise.
With that said, this is still a Mario Party game, so if you are not a fan of these kinds of games then you won't get much out of this. Other than that, this is easily one of the better titles in the franchise.
Perhaps it's my fault that I never tried playing this game with others, but this handheld Mario Party just didn't do it for me. It's inherently harder to get several folks to play a handheld MP together in the first place, so in my opinion, the Mario Parties on GBA, DS, & 3DS were already stumbling at the first hurdle anyway. Nothing beats an MP on console.