Amazing multiplayer experience but not as good single player.
Didn't play much of it because the boards are honestly kinda boring
Most of the minigames are pretty decent and I loved the little 'high five' sequences but that doesn't save the game for me
Most of the minigames are pretty decent and I loved the little 'high five' sequences but that doesn't save the game for me
Come on, this game was gas. Getting all of the gems was fun as hell and actually challenging. Game was just a banger.
This game is so perfectly in the middle. Boards suck ass and there are so few of them. There are so many playable characters, with some of those actually having their first playable outing here. It sucks that Blooper did not make it. The character specific dice are so cool, but completely unbalanced and they actively punish you for playing as some of the newcomers like Monty Mole and Goomba. Idk man the minigames are mostly okay, but there is not much here if I am being honest.
Good mini games TERRIBLE boards.
Wahoo!
it's aight
the cast of characters is the best part of this game like why did they put playable pom pom in such an underwhelming title
The most empty mario party game I've ever played but is still better than Mario Party 10 for not having the train
It's mario party, a great game to play with friends. I will say the lack of boards makes the game very unrepeatable but the mini game selection is decent. I've yet to play mario party superstars so who knows how it compares to that
best couch game to play with friends. Board game makes me rage a lot though.
made my friend turn bisexual best party game ever
I don't really have people over much these days, and when I do we always just play Jackbox Party games if there's more than one of us. That being the case, I was absolutely ready to give Super Mario Party a pass on the grounds that I'd just never have a good excuse to play it, but after seeing the praise on the Switch thread here on Racketboy and catching one of Nerd-Cubed's Twitch streams of it, I was absolutely sold. It's not the 100% BEST Mario Party ever made, but it's damn near up there (and depending on whom you are, it may well be the best ever for you). "Beating" the game to see the credits involves unlocking all the characters, mini-games, and winning on each board/route of each mode once, and that took me about 20-ish hours, but it was very fun, even mostly by myself :P
The Mechanical Changes
Super Mario Party is at once a return to form as well as an evolution of the old and new. From the older Mario Party's 1-8, we have a lot of the aesthetics/themes of Mario Party 1 (in Nintendo's current trend of nastolgia-pandering in EVERY game it releases, granted I'm not complaining about it) as well as individual movement of each player. Gone are the mini-stars and group-car from the more recent games, and now each player can once again move on their own to traverse a board, earn coins, and reach the star location to purchase one and get ahead in the rankings. Depending on what spaces they land on, they'll get a 4-player, 2v2, or 1v3 mini-game at the end of each turn (although battle mini-games and item-mini games are both absent here). Even items are back (no orbs!), and you can hold 3 at a time. The items are all great too. There aren't any that are super circumstantial or flat-out useless like in the old games. Getting an item is always a good thing now!
From the more recent 3DS entries as well as from 9 and 10, it takes a more balanced approach to make the game a better party game and not just a wash for the person who owns it (and who is best at the mini-games). First place for a 4-player mini-game gives 8 coins, but 2nd place gives 4 coins, and 3rd place gives 2 coins. No longer can the best mini-gamer shut-out the other players simply by matter of being good. This, combined with how stars only cost 10 coins, means that while doing well in mini-games is good, it is by no means an assurance of victory. From the most recent 3DS entry it also makes your choice of character more than just cosmetic. In addition to their normal 1-6 die, each player has their own special die they can roll whenever they want (for example, Mario has a die with 1,3,3,3,5,6 on it, and Wario has a die with two 0's that make him lose 2 coins as well as four 6's). This adds a TON to how Mario Party is now actually a good board game.
Several core features have been seriously changed to make Mario Party not only a more accessible party game but also a much better board game. While the boards (of which there are 4) are more the traditional Mario Party-style, they're much smaller, meaning where you go on them is very important but also very doable, even with only 10-turns (10, 15, and 20 are the options for each board, and 5 turns is about 30 minutes) to go around it. Stars are also now only 10 coins, so it's very difficult for a player very good at mini-games to shut-out the other players from ever being able to afford one. Cheaper stars combined with the special die and smaller boards means that how you move and where is now a very important strategic decision, and the strategy of how you move as well as the chances you're willing to take on your special die are much more likely to win you the game than just earning tons of coins in mini-games.
This is all on top of the new ally mechanic. If you land on an ally space, you'll randomly get a character who isn't currently one of the 4 playing as an ally. This not only means that you'll get their character die to roll whenever you want, just as you can your own, but your new ally will also roll a die each turn that has an equal chance of giving a 1 or a 2, and that roll is added to whatever your normal roll is! Allies are by far the most important part of the new mechanics, because you can have up to 4 allies at once! The ally spaces are quite uncommon, but when they get landed on they can really be game changers.
My only real complaint with the new mechanics is that the AI can be kinda dumb at times. I've had enemy AI on hard mode (the 2nd highest difficulty of 3) go the entire game without using mushrooms or golden pipes (the new magic lamp items) for absolutely no reason. I think there may be some issues with how the AI hits flags on when it thinks it should use items.
The Mini-Games
The mini-games are good quality, but suffer sometimes from a kinda lack-luster AI (although that isn't a huge problem, as I'll explain in a little bit). Most mini-games are very quick (under 30-seconds), and also very simple. Almost none of them require more than two button pushes or a waggle of the joycon, meaning they're very easy to just pick up and start playing even having not done them before. Intros to them have been massively improved as well. There is no longer an initiation of a practice for the mini-game. Now, where there used to be a demo-screen of the AI playing the game, THAT is your practice where all 1-4 of you can practice the mini-game just as it will be when you're really doing it. Add onto this how instead of one player pressing START, EVERY player now must ready-up for the mini-game by pressing both shoulder buttons (buttons never used for anything else), and you have a situation where a player should never have to go into a new mini-game feeling unprepared just because another player hit a button by accident or was impatient. Finally, this game can ONLY be played with a joycon (no pro-controller or even handheld-mode), so you can do 2-player right out of the box, and there are only 6-buttons on the controller to worry about. All this means that the mini-games are now more party-friendly than ever as they're super accessible to new players.
There are 80 mini-games (and 4 special ones in a side area, Toad's Rec Room) that you could play between the modes. They're all good quality and fun, but none especially stick out to me as fantastic new ones. They're very much there to support the board-game element rather than the other way around (as imo the previous entries really leaned on). There is a interesting tilt away from 2v2 games during the normal Mario Party (I think I played 3 out of 50 turns of different boards), but I think that's because you play SO many (one about every other turn) in the Team Party mode.
One interesting part about mini-games is how the game encourages good sportsmanship very subtly through the "high-five" system. Whenever you win a game you were on a team with, you can coordinate with the other players to all pump the joycon (or just press A) in unison to do a group high-five for a job well done. This isn't just flashy, but also gives you 2 extra coins (so instead of 8, you get 10!). It's a very clever team-building exercise that tries to emphasize how you're all in it to win, but you all do still need to work together (even irl) at the end of the day, so being a good sport pays literal dividends :D
The only real dampener on the mini-games is the lackluster AI I mentioned before. The AI is very good at most of them, but has some serious issues navigating in some others. This is largely due to how a lot of the mini-games have been designed to be very good games for humans to play together, but not so much for AI to navigate. Especially mini-games that require rowing, some of the motion-controlled timing ones give the AI a LOT of trouble and they're either trouncing you or they had no chance in hell of ever winning. Perhaps the Very Hard AI is better balanced, but I haven't given them a try yet.
New Modes & Features
Aside from the normal Mario Party mode, there are 4 other main modes in this game.
First up is Team Party mode. In this mode, 2 teams of 2-players compete against one another in drastically revamped versions of the 4 boards from the Mario Party mode. For starters, there are no set paths! You can move anywhere you want, from square to square, using the rolls you get each turn. You and your partner each roll a die, and you each get the sum total of those dice to move (although any ally bonuses or used items apply only to the player who has/used them). It's a really cool mode that I really want to give more time to play with real people. It makes the strategy of picking a character a lot bigger simply on the grounds that you need to think of whose character die syncs well with or makes up for the shortcomings of whose. My only real complaint is that you're playing the same 2v2 mini-games over and over a lot in this mode, because there are far more 4v4 mini-games than 2v2 mini-games. An extra 10 2v2 games really would've made this mode's mini-games feel less repetitive.
Second is River Survival. This is a completely co-op mode where 4 players work together to row a river raft down a raging river. There are 5 different ends at the end of a series of forks in the roads, but reaching them isn't too easy: you're on the clock! You need to coordinate your rowing to both avoid obstacles to maintain speed as well as collect stopwatches (for +3 seconds) and hit mini-game balloons to do 4-player co-op mini-games that are only in this mode (which can get you up to an extra 40 seconds (and an extra 3 if you nail the high-five ;3)). To "beat" this mode, you need to get to the end of each of the 5 paths, but as with Team Party this mode really suffers from a dearth of mini-game variety. There are only 10 of these special co-op mini-games, so you're playing the same ones a TON to get to the end of this mode. At least playing by myself with 3 computers, I thought this mode got really boring because of how often you were playing the same mini-games, and was by far my least favorite part of the game. 1 character is locked behind completing a few of these, and I was glad I unlocked him ASAP XP.
Third is the Sound Stage, which has 4 players competing in a series of mini-games that involve waggling the joycon properly in rhythm to a series of 3 mini-games. It feels almost like competitive Rhythm Heaven and it's really fun! There are only a total of 10 rhythm mini-games, but to "beat" the mode you only need to beat each sequence of them once, so it doesn't wear out its welcome and it's something I'm looking forward to trying out with friends sometime :D
Last is Challenge Road. It's a mode that will seem very familiar to people who've played the first two Mario Party games, as it's a sequence of every mini-game in the game (you need to have unlocked all the other mini-games in order to play this at all) and you need to do well enough (usually either just win or get however-many points/coins that they tell you to) in order to finish it. It's WAY easier than past ones though, as not only do you have unlimited lives, you can even skip one you're having trouble on if you fail at it 3 times. All you have to do to beat it is reach the end, and that doesn't mean beating every single challenge, really just the challenge at the end of each of the 6 worlds. This means that even though two character are locked behind completing worlds, even if you REALLY suck, as far as I can tell you only need to beat 6 challenges (the one at the end of each world) to beat the whole of challenge road.
The last new mode I'll comment on is the Mariothon Mini-Game Challenge, which is this game's online mode (although not having Switch Online I never tried it out). Bafflingly enough, despite Switch Online launching just a few weeks ago, Super Mario Party has no way to play the actual Mario Party (the ones with the boards) online. The only online mode this has is the Mariothon, which is a series of 10 mini-games that you play against others online to see who does the best out of 10. And the selection of mini-games isn't chosen by you, it's chosen by Nintendo which mini-games are competed in on a rotating basis (like how Splatoon 2 has some modes available on a rotating basis). You can play with friends in this mode, but I really just cannot fathom why this game doesn't have a proper online mode when I would assume the hardest part for latency (the mini-games) have been proven to work well enough online that they're actually a part of the game. Perhaps Nintendo has said something about making the actual board modes playable online eventually, but I am unaware of anything like that as of the time of this writing. It's not a deal breaker for me personally, but I wouldn't fault anyone for having gripes at its omission to the point where they wouldn't want to spend the $60 on the game.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. The lack of proper online play will certainly turn off some, but for those who want to play alone or couch-multiplayer, this is one of the best Mario Party games in a LONG time (perhaps the best ever!). The new elements of strategy as well as the simplification of needlessly messy UI and introductory elements have reborn Mario Party as an actually good party game in the mold of the older games (which weren't very good party games). Absolutely a good pick-up if you're at all a fan of Mario Party
The Mechanical Changes
Super Mario Party is at once a return to form as well as an evolution of the old and new. From the older Mario Party's 1-8, we have a lot of the aesthetics/themes of Mario Party 1 (in Nintendo's current trend of nastolgia-pandering in EVERY game it releases, granted I'm not complaining about it) as well as individual movement of each player. Gone are the mini-stars and group-car from the more recent games, and now each player can once again move on their own to traverse a board, earn coins, and reach the star location to purchase one and get ahead in the rankings. Depending on what spaces they land on, they'll get a 4-player, 2v2, or 1v3 mini-game at the end of each turn (although battle mini-games and item-mini games are both absent here). Even items are back (no orbs!), and you can hold 3 at a time. The items are all great too. There aren't any that are super circumstantial or flat-out useless like in the old games. Getting an item is always a good thing now!
From the more recent 3DS entries as well as from 9 and 10, it takes a more balanced approach to make the game a better party game and not just a wash for the person who owns it (and who is best at the mini-games). First place for a 4-player mini-game gives 8 coins, but 2nd place gives 4 coins, and 3rd place gives 2 coins. No longer can the best mini-gamer shut-out the other players simply by matter of being good. This, combined with how stars only cost 10 coins, means that while doing well in mini-games is good, it is by no means an assurance of victory. From the most recent 3DS entry it also makes your choice of character more than just cosmetic. In addition to their normal 1-6 die, each player has their own special die they can roll whenever they want (for example, Mario has a die with 1,3,3,3,5,6 on it, and Wario has a die with two 0's that make him lose 2 coins as well as four 6's). This adds a TON to how Mario Party is now actually a good board game.
Several core features have been seriously changed to make Mario Party not only a more accessible party game but also a much better board game. While the boards (of which there are 4) are more the traditional Mario Party-style, they're much smaller, meaning where you go on them is very important but also very doable, even with only 10-turns (10, 15, and 20 are the options for each board, and 5 turns is about 30 minutes) to go around it. Stars are also now only 10 coins, so it's very difficult for a player very good at mini-games to shut-out the other players from ever being able to afford one. Cheaper stars combined with the special die and smaller boards means that how you move and where is now a very important strategic decision, and the strategy of how you move as well as the chances you're willing to take on your special die are much more likely to win you the game than just earning tons of coins in mini-games.
This is all on top of the new ally mechanic. If you land on an ally space, you'll randomly get a character who isn't currently one of the 4 playing as an ally. This not only means that you'll get their character die to roll whenever you want, just as you can your own, but your new ally will also roll a die each turn that has an equal chance of giving a 1 or a 2, and that roll is added to whatever your normal roll is! Allies are by far the most important part of the new mechanics, because you can have up to 4 allies at once! The ally spaces are quite uncommon, but when they get landed on they can really be game changers.
My only real complaint with the new mechanics is that the AI can be kinda dumb at times. I've had enemy AI on hard mode (the 2nd highest difficulty of 3) go the entire game without using mushrooms or golden pipes (the new magic lamp items) for absolutely no reason. I think there may be some issues with how the AI hits flags on when it thinks it should use items.
The Mini-Games
The mini-games are good quality, but suffer sometimes from a kinda lack-luster AI (although that isn't a huge problem, as I'll explain in a little bit). Most mini-games are very quick (under 30-seconds), and also very simple. Almost none of them require more than two button pushes or a waggle of the joycon, meaning they're very easy to just pick up and start playing even having not done them before. Intros to them have been massively improved as well. There is no longer an initiation of a practice for the mini-game. Now, where there used to be a demo-screen of the AI playing the game, THAT is your practice where all 1-4 of you can practice the mini-game just as it will be when you're really doing it. Add onto this how instead of one player pressing START, EVERY player now must ready-up for the mini-game by pressing both shoulder buttons (buttons never used for anything else), and you have a situation where a player should never have to go into a new mini-game feeling unprepared just because another player hit a button by accident or was impatient. Finally, this game can ONLY be played with a joycon (no pro-controller or even handheld-mode), so you can do 2-player right out of the box, and there are only 6-buttons on the controller to worry about. All this means that the mini-games are now more party-friendly than ever as they're super accessible to new players.
There are 80 mini-games (and 4 special ones in a side area, Toad's Rec Room) that you could play between the modes. They're all good quality and fun, but none especially stick out to me as fantastic new ones. They're very much there to support the board-game element rather than the other way around (as imo the previous entries really leaned on). There is a interesting tilt away from 2v2 games during the normal Mario Party (I think I played 3 out of 50 turns of different boards), but I think that's because you play SO many (one about every other turn) in the Team Party mode.
One interesting part about mini-games is how the game encourages good sportsmanship very subtly through the "high-five" system. Whenever you win a game you were on a team with, you can coordinate with the other players to all pump the joycon (or just press A) in unison to do a group high-five for a job well done. This isn't just flashy, but also gives you 2 extra coins (so instead of 8, you get 10!). It's a very clever team-building exercise that tries to emphasize how you're all in it to win, but you all do still need to work together (even irl) at the end of the day, so being a good sport pays literal dividends :D
The only real dampener on the mini-games is the lackluster AI I mentioned before. The AI is very good at most of them, but has some serious issues navigating in some others. This is largely due to how a lot of the mini-games have been designed to be very good games for humans to play together, but not so much for AI to navigate. Especially mini-games that require rowing, some of the motion-controlled timing ones give the AI a LOT of trouble and they're either trouncing you or they had no chance in hell of ever winning. Perhaps the Very Hard AI is better balanced, but I haven't given them a try yet.
New Modes & Features
Aside from the normal Mario Party mode, there are 4 other main modes in this game.
First up is Team Party mode. In this mode, 2 teams of 2-players compete against one another in drastically revamped versions of the 4 boards from the Mario Party mode. For starters, there are no set paths! You can move anywhere you want, from square to square, using the rolls you get each turn. You and your partner each roll a die, and you each get the sum total of those dice to move (although any ally bonuses or used items apply only to the player who has/used them). It's a really cool mode that I really want to give more time to play with real people. It makes the strategy of picking a character a lot bigger simply on the grounds that you need to think of whose character die syncs well with or makes up for the shortcomings of whose. My only real complaint is that you're playing the same 2v2 mini-games over and over a lot in this mode, because there are far more 4v4 mini-games than 2v2 mini-games. An extra 10 2v2 games really would've made this mode's mini-games feel less repetitive.
Second is River Survival. This is a completely co-op mode where 4 players work together to row a river raft down a raging river. There are 5 different ends at the end of a series of forks in the roads, but reaching them isn't too easy: you're on the clock! You need to coordinate your rowing to both avoid obstacles to maintain speed as well as collect stopwatches (for +3 seconds) and hit mini-game balloons to do 4-player co-op mini-games that are only in this mode (which can get you up to an extra 40 seconds (and an extra 3 if you nail the high-five ;3)). To "beat" this mode, you need to get to the end of each of the 5 paths, but as with Team Party this mode really suffers from a dearth of mini-game variety. There are only 10 of these special co-op mini-games, so you're playing the same ones a TON to get to the end of this mode. At least playing by myself with 3 computers, I thought this mode got really boring because of how often you were playing the same mini-games, and was by far my least favorite part of the game. 1 character is locked behind completing a few of these, and I was glad I unlocked him ASAP XP.
Third is the Sound Stage, which has 4 players competing in a series of mini-games that involve waggling the joycon properly in rhythm to a series of 3 mini-games. It feels almost like competitive Rhythm Heaven and it's really fun! There are only a total of 10 rhythm mini-games, but to "beat" the mode you only need to beat each sequence of them once, so it doesn't wear out its welcome and it's something I'm looking forward to trying out with friends sometime :D
Last is Challenge Road. It's a mode that will seem very familiar to people who've played the first two Mario Party games, as it's a sequence of every mini-game in the game (you need to have unlocked all the other mini-games in order to play this at all) and you need to do well enough (usually either just win or get however-many points/coins that they tell you to) in order to finish it. It's WAY easier than past ones though, as not only do you have unlimited lives, you can even skip one you're having trouble on if you fail at it 3 times. All you have to do to beat it is reach the end, and that doesn't mean beating every single challenge, really just the challenge at the end of each of the 6 worlds. This means that even though two character are locked behind completing worlds, even if you REALLY suck, as far as I can tell you only need to beat 6 challenges (the one at the end of each world) to beat the whole of challenge road.
The last new mode I'll comment on is the Mariothon Mini-Game Challenge, which is this game's online mode (although not having Switch Online I never tried it out). Bafflingly enough, despite Switch Online launching just a few weeks ago, Super Mario Party has no way to play the actual Mario Party (the ones with the boards) online. The only online mode this has is the Mariothon, which is a series of 10 mini-games that you play against others online to see who does the best out of 10. And the selection of mini-games isn't chosen by you, it's chosen by Nintendo which mini-games are competed in on a rotating basis (like how Splatoon 2 has some modes available on a rotating basis). You can play with friends in this mode, but I really just cannot fathom why this game doesn't have a proper online mode when I would assume the hardest part for latency (the mini-games) have been proven to work well enough online that they're actually a part of the game. Perhaps Nintendo has said something about making the actual board modes playable online eventually, but I am unaware of anything like that as of the time of this writing. It's not a deal breaker for me personally, but I wouldn't fault anyone for having gripes at its omission to the point where they wouldn't want to spend the $60 on the game.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. The lack of proper online play will certainly turn off some, but for those who want to play alone or couch-multiplayer, this is one of the best Mario Party games in a LONG time (perhaps the best ever!). The new elements of strategy as well as the simplification of needlessly messy UI and introductory elements have reborn Mario Party as an actually good party game in the mold of the older games (which weren't very good party games). Absolutely a good pick-up if you're at all a fan of Mario Party
Es muy divertido por sus minijuegos con los controles de movimiento, solo que los tableros están muy cortos y son muy pocos.
i fw heavy but no too heavy
You know what, I'm a Super Mario Party apologist and I'm not ashamed of it. I think criticisms of its lack of boards fail to consider the rest of its offerings that are quality, if a little unsubstantial. It tries to innovate the series and polishes everything to a beautiful shine. Seriously the leap in presentation from 10 to this is underappreciated. The game is gorgeous. And I would play it more if I wasn't so chronically alone
Fuck it i thought it was fun. Motion control can be fun if you don't have a worm in your ear telling you that thats the reason you suck at the game
a great selection of minigames (I really like motion controls) but a somewhat lackluster roster of boards (some of these really don't have much going on) would've made this a really meh entry, but I like some of this game's ideas, even if I would've liked to see them expanded upon : character specific dices is a cool concept but makes the whole thing pretty unbalanced, a coop game mode I love in concept but the execution here makes it not that interesting and the visual flare of it isn't anything groundbreaking (though I really like the soundtrack for some reason??)
A Mario Party game with no items, terrible boards, only 4 boards, terrible pacing, awful comeback mechanics, and a character tier list for some reason.
Glad to have classic party back, but man this was such a miss.
Glad to have classic party back, but man this was such a miss.
Not the best Mario Party, but a good time with friends.
I'm never really in the mood for this game and it's pretty slow to play but by nature of being a multiplayer game, your interactions with others will still end up making it enjoyable.
It's a decent enough return to form, but not much more than that. There are only 4 boards and none of them are particularly good. Plus, a lot of the new mechanics are neat, but they're really unbalanced and lead to games taking way longer than needed. IMO, they should've focused more on improving the core gameplay instead of the side modes people will play once and never touch again. Also, online Mario Party is cool, but it should've been in the game at launch rather than an unceremonious update 2 years later. On the bright side, this might be my favorite collection of minigames in the series. I don't think there's a single bad one here.
You know, is it the Mario Party with the least amount of content? Yes. Does it feel kind of soulless? Yes. But goddamn it's still Mario Party and it's still fun with friends. However, because of the stuff I've previously mentioned it does get old after a while.
It may not be bad, but it’s one of the most boring ones in the series. At least 9/10 were bad in a “fuck this” type of way.
Pretty solid overall and partner party is a great alternate to the main mode, though the pacing is way too slow, the dumbed down economy sucks, and 4 mediocre to bad boards drag this game way down.
A LOT of fun with friends, but a disgusting lack of boards. You could only add 4??? 10 boards for the next one please
i like the cokoig meat cube game
My siblings and I have overplayed this one haha, wish there were more maps
Team mode will always be fun to play with friends, the teamwork is always fun
I wish the minigames were more enjoyable and didn't rely on Joy-Con luck though lol
Team mode will always be fun to play with friends, the teamwork is always fun
I wish the minigames were more enjoyable and didn't rely on Joy-Con luck though lol
goomba
With very limited boards and considerable luck-based gameplay, it felt like Nintendo were just sort of "thumbing it in" with this one. I went from loving every session of this with friends and family to QUICKLY becoming frustrated and bored. Wasted potential.