Mario Party 4 brings the classic board game mayhem to the GameCube with a host of colorful boards, a wide variety of enjoyable minigames, and a playful cast of Mario characters. The core party experience is undeniably fun, especially with friends, but the pace can feel a bit slow at times, and the reliance on luck-based elements might frustrate competitive players. Still, for fans of the series or casual gatherings, Mario Party 4 offers a charming dose of lighthearted competition and zany minigame action.

Continuing my Mario Party excursions and excitement, I went back in time from 6 to a game I played a TON as a kid, Mario Party 4. This was a game I tried to 100% as a kid, doing the story mode with all eight characters, but got petered out with a few playthroughs left. To call this one “beaten” this time, I went through the story mode twice: once on normal, and then a second time on hard. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

The whole conceit of MP4 is that it’s a big birthday party! Who’s birthday is it? Everyone’s kinda XD. Playing through the story mode, it’s that particular player you picked’s birthday, going through boards made by the five party planners (Toad, Shy Guy, Koopa, Goomba, and Boo) to get their special presents customized for the character you picked. It’s a light dressing for a story, and the overall setting is certainly less striking than the “sucked into a storybook” pretense for MP3 was, but it’s more than enough for what we need to get our Mario Party on, and seeing what presents each character gets is always super fun and cute~.

As for the gameplay, the real meat and potatoes of the experience, that’s where things are a bit fuzzier. Mario Party was an annual series on the GameCube, with MP4 in 2002, and another game coming out every year until MP7 in 2005, and even though they had a year break between MP3 in 2000 and this, you can tell there were still a LOT of corners cut to get this out in time. First of all is the mini-game selection. It’s overall a pretty good spread of quite good mini-games (with much better 1v3 games than 6 would have, imo), but it’s also a very small spread of mini-games compared to how they usually were, and you’ll find yourself playing the same ones quite a lot. On top of that, letting the quite short dev time shine through a bit more, they’re often quite simple games as well, with not one but two of the 4-player mini-games being just mashing the A button as fast as you can. Item mini-games are also completely gone, and after duel mini-games were so hyped up and trotted out in MP3, MP4 doesn’t have them at all in any way, shape, or form. They don’t even have the board-specific ones like MP2 did. The overall mini-game quality is still pretty good, but it’s pretty lackluster in some pretty important ways compared to a lot of other games in the series.

The biggest fumble as far as I’m concerned is with the board game design though. I make it no secret that I’m absolutely not a fan of Mario Party 3, in large part due to how poorly constructed so many of its boards are. MP4 isn’t quite that bad, but it’s still far less than stellar, with six maps in total having 2 I’d say are awful (super random and easy to get screwed over very quickly, very hard just because of a few bad die rolls), 3 I’d say are just okay, and only one I’d say is really even decent. The boards are by and large better than MP3’s were, but there’s still a lot of the randomness-focused design philosophy DNA left over that’s still to be ripped out, and it makes the experience suffer pretty hard.

On top of that are the revamped items, with many new additions that MP3 got taken out and a good few new things put in. The most notable change is that normal and golden mushrooms (which gave you two and three die to roll that turn respectively) have been taken out, and mini- and mega-mushrooms have been added in their places. Mini-mushrooms make you small and give you only one die (or two for the better version) that goes from 1~5 to roll (vs. the usual 1~10 die), and mega-mushrooms making you large and giving you two (or three with the better one) 1~10 dice to roll. These are a neat idea, as sometimes you want to go only a short distance so an item is nice for that, and when you’re big with a mega mushroom, while you may steal 10 coins from every rival you pass, you also can’t activate any events (and that includes buying stars!). The bad board design really hampers what could’ve been some interesting design changes. In practice, with item mini-games gone and in their place spaces that give you randomly either a mini- or mega-mushroom, mini-mushrooms are useless trash that clog up your inventory, and mega-mushrooms are still far too good a tool to steal coins from your enemies and get you where you need to go, even with the added risk of not being able to get a star if you over-roll. It’s understandable that the gameplay is still very largely influenced by MP3, given that this is so clearly the preliminary outing for MP on the GameCube, but in retrospect, it holds up pretty poorly in design and mini-game selection to most games before and after it.

The presentation is solidly okay. The music is nice and the 3D models look pleasing as well, but it’s all very stock and boiler-plate feeling compared to just how striking MP3’s art design was. The taking out of the old pre-rendered 2D boards for big 3D environments look awful, with 3D tracks lying floating above poorly textured and ugly 3D planes to give each board their theme, it’s hard for MP4 not to feel like a steep cosmetic downgrade. It’s not bad in a vacuum, but in comparison to what came before (not to mention after), it’s difficult to be too kind beyond, once again, allowing for the context that this was the first one on its console.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. There is certainly worse Mario Party to play, but not by much. It’s missing a lot of features from my personal least favorite, MP3, but it’s also an exercise in higher lows and lower highs. It’s a perfectly adequate Mario Party experience, but whether on the N64, GameCube, or almost any console after that, really, you don’t need to look far for a Mario Party experience that will be much better than this.

Boring ass white bread of a Mario Party game.

Jungle Jam, Haunted Bash & Midway Madness just felt so nothing

Seaside Soiree had ideas but constantly taking things away from players without increasing anything is very lame

Greedy Gala is just constant gambling & gambling is badass so that gets a pass

Gnarly Party I'd need to play more to get an opinion on, but it was ok. Did laugh my ass off at how mean the bridge gimmick is with it punishing the last person to cross

Confucius once said, "Forgive the man who dislikes Mario Party 4, but despise the one making you play M&M Kart Racing." Mario Party 4 may lack the communist party vibes or the board game gimmick, but it's pretty damn good. As Enterprise wisely declared, "Twitter, Instagram is my round-the-clock ritual." And let's be clear, if you ask ScreenGAME about his Mario Party takes, he might just dive into duck rituals instead of enlightening you with his opinions. In the chaotic world of Mario Party, Mario Party 4 stands tall with a rebellious 9 out of 10.

I have the absolute fondest memories of this game so going back and being hit with a face full of shoddy map design shaped retrospect was a little disappointing.

In a way I'm quite nostalgic for it, but it definitely suffers from the early pixar-esque melted cheese CGI look. There's almost a sense of uncanny valley, where the maps should be full of life, and there are elements of life but they're so few and far between that they actually kind of exasperate the emptiness.

Top tier mini games though IMO, and at the end of the day that's what matters

This is a tough game to formulate my thoughts on because I don't have much to contrast it with. The only other games in the series I have substantial experience with are Super and 2, and this feels very in the middle between the former's universal lameness and the laters hilarious, chaotic, fun.

I played through all the maps and I think overall there are plenty of noteworthy positives amidst an overall blandness and confusion that's omnipresent throughout the game.

Starting with the negatives, I think everyone agrees that all the boards are disappointing, both visually and layout wise. I think on every map there is an opportunity to get stuck in a small loop and have to get lucky to get out, there are a lot of coin toss moments that decide which sections of the boards you can go to, and independent of the luck-based elements I feel like it just takes a long time to maneuver to different sides of the map. Every Mario Party board in the series forces you to go in a certain direction down each path, but the identical metallic paths on every board in this game with their perfect 90 degree turns make it feel more arbitrary and time consuming which directions around the boards you can go.

The production values certainly aren't great. While they definitely modernized the look of the characters, and the models and textures are objectively higher quality with the jump to the Gamecube, I've come to love the fugly, puppeteer-esque look of the N64 graphics and the goofiness and personality it brought to Mario Party. And the music is... there I guess.

And lastly the items are kinda lame. There's not much that's interesting or outside of the series staples. The mini and mega mushroom gimmicks are fine, but there are too many paths and minigames locked behind mini mushroom paths, and it's weird how they are locked to dice rolls instead of something like skeleton keys.

But on the positive side, there's a decent selection of minigames. There are definitely quite a few groaners, but even some of the rage inducing ones like Order Up and Stamp Out lead to a lot of the classic chaotic fun of yelling at your friends. SOME are bangers though: Dungeon Duos, Mr. Blizzard's Brigade, Hop or Pop, Right Oar Left, Chain Chomp Fever, and the BEST Mario Party minigame ever: BOOKSQUIRM!!! A game of Mario Party is not complete without Booksquirm!!!

I had a lot of laughs and good memories with my friends playing through this, it's definitely a decent baseline for Mario Party. But I'm also happy to move on to hopefully more consistently fun games in the series.

All the Mario Party games on the Gamecube are just as good as one another. If you are looking to play one of them, you cannot go wrong with any of them. With that said, I personally like this one the most for its more in-depth, albeit repetitive, story mode and its high-quality maps and minigames.

As this is the first Mario Party game on the console, there isn't anything for this game to set itself apart from the others. Its boards are basic, the minigames are simple, and the character selection is just right.

The negatives are pretty far and few between. While I like playing through the story mode, to unlock everything you have to play through it with every single character. That is super repetitive for completionists, and the payout isn't very interesting. Then there is the obvious issue, if you don't like the story mode and don't have friends to play this with then you won't get much mileage out of this game.

I still like this game and all the others in this series on the console. I think it's one of the best party games out there, so if you have the opportunity to play it I highly recommend it.

Despite being the first Gamecube Mario Party this one feels more like an N64 version, and in many ways is even worse than 2 and 3.

For one thing the boards are still flat, but they don't even feel like they're integrated into their settings anymore. Every board just takes place on a metal walkway, with all the fun stuff being put as decoration, only interacting with any of it when an event space triggers. Even the N64 games despite their limitations managed to make most boards feel like you were walking around their actual locations, not just having a generic board with stickers slapped on it to make it feel like it fits a theme.

It has a pretty forgettable selection of minigames. And yet, some of the best in the series, like Booksquirm and Dungeon Duos, but the majority are very plain, if not annoying. Plus in terms of the big 3 (4 player, 3v1 and 2v2) it actually has less in each category than the previous 3 games, except 2v2 which it has Mario Party 1 beat. It's not by a huge amount (this game has 9 2v2 and 3v1 while I think MP3 and/or 2 has 10 each in those) but with the amount of lacklustre games, it makes them stand out more.

Maybe the worst thing about the game is the mega and mini mushroom gimmick. It's pushed hard, and while on their own they're not bad. Mega mushrooms give 2 dice rolls, can crush opponents you pass to steal 10 coins, but at the cost of skipping any optional spaces, including stars, while mini mushrooms offer unique paths, access to mini-only events and make your dice roll 1-5, which itself is a useful thing in Mario Party even without the mini aspect. The main problem is to make them feel more important than they are, there are multiple "Mushroom" spaces on every board, which will give you one of the two. This is not optional, and you cannot drop or trade items, so if you happen to find yourself unluckily getting 3 mini mushrooms with no way to strategically use them, you're SOL if you wanted to buy that magic lamp. Plus it feels like almost every board event (the ones that have arrows to "enter", not the green ? spaces) other than lotteries are locked behind mini mushrooms now, making the boards feel more empty as a result when you're not using mini-mushrooms, which is most of the time.