Played for the Tarvould's Quest Mario Party League, viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNiBuIKkhNOcetedJo2kjJwenDNYqHsFt
This was actually my first Mario Party. Way early on, after my family got our GameCube, we borrowed this game for a weekend. Truthfully I no longer remember how we borrowed it; I seem to recall it being lent to my father by a coworker, but it just as easily could've been a Blockbuster rental. Anyway, I did a pretty decent amount of the game's single-player offerings during that weekend, but it didn't hold my interest enough for me to clear all the boards while we borrowed it. For years, I always wondered about it, as I'd see the game logo crop up every time I viewed my memory card saves on my GameCube. There it was, towards the top of the list. My family got a lot of mileage out of Mario Party 6, which we'd buy for ourselves a few months later. Would we have had as much fun with 4?
I mention all this because, now that I've had the time to play through and sit with 4, those years of wondering probably represent the most fun I had with Mario Party 4. Maybe I would've liked it okay if I'd played more of it as a kid, but as an adult? There's little for me to hold onto.
Hudson basically cranked out one Mario Party a year from the first to the eighth release, but they took two gaps, one with each console generation gap. I'm not sure how true this is, but part of me imagines that much of this delay was so the team could take the time to adjust to the new console by rebuilding character models, assets, etc. This would've marked the GameCube debut for a lot of these characters, so a LOT of the Mario series regulars would've needed to be redesigned for the console shift (and I know most of these guys appeared in Melee as Trophies or whathaveyou, but they used their N64 designs there; compare Daisy's skintones from Mario Party 3 to Melee to Mario Party 4, for an easy comparison). And I will say that for its era, a lot of this looked pretty good. There's a big focus on photorealism and modeling precise physics and graphics, with something like the mini-game "Makin' Waves" a visual showcase in a lot of the same ways Super Mario Sunshine was working towards.
Problem being that there's little soul to how these characters and these worlds look. There's such a focus on photorealistic, sterile environments that a lot of the game doesn't "feel" very Mario. Since I mentioned it, compare Super Mario Sunshine to Mario Party 4. Isle Delphino aesthetically makes sense in Mario's world, with the Piantas, the Nokis, and so on feeling like characters that could conceivably co-exist in a world with, say, Koopalings or Bob-Omb Buddies. Mario Party 4 would've been developed in tandem, so I don't think it's fair to expect Isle Dephino and its denizens to show up. Still, the island locations we see in some of the mini-games, and the worlds of the boards themselves, don't really feel like places that exist in or around the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario Parties 1-3 were generally great at inventing boards and settings jammed with Mario-like flavor. I think of Horror Land's playful take on an unfamiliar genre for Mario, with its giant ketchup spill, and party of ghosts wandering the highway and its hidden Mad Piano; or Wario's Battle Canyon leaning into lore established in Mario 64 and presenting a war conflict like a stage play; or Creepy Cavern having Dorrie, Swoopers, and those Whomps playing their own version of Mario Party (Matryoshka Party?). By contrast, the Mario Party 4 boards feel less like places that might come out of Mario's world and more like places from the real world that are full of Mario characters. There's a sense of sterility to it all, particularly in the play area being on elevated pathways rather than integrated into the environment. Everything uses sophisticated renders, but it doesn't "feel" right.
This is without even getting into the actual content of the game! Frankly, I think all the boards this time around are duds, save Bowser's Gnarly Party (but Bowser Boards are usually hard to screw up). Goomba's Greedy Gala is funny for how dickish it is, but after the initial joke there's little to hold onto. I can't tell if Thwomp's two Extra Boards are deliberately poorly-designed or what, but I'm not much a fan, short and inconsequential as they are. Everything else is just there to be a big fat waste of your time, ESPECIALLY Toad's Midway Madness, where the nature of the board guarantees that a player will periodically get screwed over in that initial teacup loop regardless of how they actually play.
This is in no small part a consequence of the game's MiniMega system, the first of the series' many forays into ill-conceived gimmicks. It's a decent high-concept, playing into series identity in a way that codifies the existing Mushroom items. In practice, it's pretty terrible. Mega's benefits are pretty straightforward (double dice, squish existing players), but Mini is where the problem lies. The logical offset to something like Mega would be a clear penalty, so naturally the game needs to introduce incentives to be Mini. The way they decide to do this is through Mini-Gates and Mini-Mini-Games, functions of the board you can only access when you're a little guy. A consequence of THIS is that large portions of the boards end up being inaccessible or seeing infrequent use. This combined with the quite uninspired board design makes a lot of the experience of the boards homogenized and going through motions.
I hate to say it, but if I'm having fun with Mario Party 4, it's in spite of rather than because of anything it's doing. That or I'm playing a mini-game, there are a few pretty strong mini-games this time around. But I find myself less drawn into Mario Party's mini-games than I am the high-level board play, and that's pretty frankly lacking in this game. Not hard to see why Hudson decided to switch things up for the next game...
This was actually my first Mario Party. Way early on, after my family got our GameCube, we borrowed this game for a weekend. Truthfully I no longer remember how we borrowed it; I seem to recall it being lent to my father by a coworker, but it just as easily could've been a Blockbuster rental. Anyway, I did a pretty decent amount of the game's single-player offerings during that weekend, but it didn't hold my interest enough for me to clear all the boards while we borrowed it. For years, I always wondered about it, as I'd see the game logo crop up every time I viewed my memory card saves on my GameCube. There it was, towards the top of the list. My family got a lot of mileage out of Mario Party 6, which we'd buy for ourselves a few months later. Would we have had as much fun with 4?
I mention all this because, now that I've had the time to play through and sit with 4, those years of wondering probably represent the most fun I had with Mario Party 4. Maybe I would've liked it okay if I'd played more of it as a kid, but as an adult? There's little for me to hold onto.
Hudson basically cranked out one Mario Party a year from the first to the eighth release, but they took two gaps, one with each console generation gap. I'm not sure how true this is, but part of me imagines that much of this delay was so the team could take the time to adjust to the new console by rebuilding character models, assets, etc. This would've marked the GameCube debut for a lot of these characters, so a LOT of the Mario series regulars would've needed to be redesigned for the console shift (and I know most of these guys appeared in Melee as Trophies or whathaveyou, but they used their N64 designs there; compare Daisy's skintones from Mario Party 3 to Melee to Mario Party 4, for an easy comparison). And I will say that for its era, a lot of this looked pretty good. There's a big focus on photorealism and modeling precise physics and graphics, with something like the mini-game "Makin' Waves" a visual showcase in a lot of the same ways Super Mario Sunshine was working towards.
Problem being that there's little soul to how these characters and these worlds look. There's such a focus on photorealistic, sterile environments that a lot of the game doesn't "feel" very Mario. Since I mentioned it, compare Super Mario Sunshine to Mario Party 4. Isle Delphino aesthetically makes sense in Mario's world, with the Piantas, the Nokis, and so on feeling like characters that could conceivably co-exist in a world with, say, Koopalings or Bob-Omb Buddies. Mario Party 4 would've been developed in tandem, so I don't think it's fair to expect Isle Dephino and its denizens to show up. Still, the island locations we see in some of the mini-games, and the worlds of the boards themselves, don't really feel like places that exist in or around the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario Parties 1-3 were generally great at inventing boards and settings jammed with Mario-like flavor. I think of Horror Land's playful take on an unfamiliar genre for Mario, with its giant ketchup spill, and party of ghosts wandering the highway and its hidden Mad Piano; or Wario's Battle Canyon leaning into lore established in Mario 64 and presenting a war conflict like a stage play; or Creepy Cavern having Dorrie, Swoopers, and those Whomps playing their own version of Mario Party (Matryoshka Party?). By contrast, the Mario Party 4 boards feel less like places that might come out of Mario's world and more like places from the real world that are full of Mario characters. There's a sense of sterility to it all, particularly in the play area being on elevated pathways rather than integrated into the environment. Everything uses sophisticated renders, but it doesn't "feel" right.
This is without even getting into the actual content of the game! Frankly, I think all the boards this time around are duds, save Bowser's Gnarly Party (but Bowser Boards are usually hard to screw up). Goomba's Greedy Gala is funny for how dickish it is, but after the initial joke there's little to hold onto. I can't tell if Thwomp's two Extra Boards are deliberately poorly-designed or what, but I'm not much a fan, short and inconsequential as they are. Everything else is just there to be a big fat waste of your time, ESPECIALLY Toad's Midway Madness, where the nature of the board guarantees that a player will periodically get screwed over in that initial teacup loop regardless of how they actually play.
This is in no small part a consequence of the game's MiniMega system, the first of the series' many forays into ill-conceived gimmicks. It's a decent high-concept, playing into series identity in a way that codifies the existing Mushroom items. In practice, it's pretty terrible. Mega's benefits are pretty straightforward (double dice, squish existing players), but Mini is where the problem lies. The logical offset to something like Mega would be a clear penalty, so naturally the game needs to introduce incentives to be Mini. The way they decide to do this is through Mini-Gates and Mini-Mini-Games, functions of the board you can only access when you're a little guy. A consequence of THIS is that large portions of the boards end up being inaccessible or seeing infrequent use. This combined with the quite uninspired board design makes a lot of the experience of the boards homogenized and going through motions.
I hate to say it, but if I'm having fun with Mario Party 4, it's in spite of rather than because of anything it's doing. That or I'm playing a mini-game, there are a few pretty strong mini-games this time around. But I find myself less drawn into Mario Party's mini-games than I am the high-level board play, and that's pretty frankly lacking in this game. Not hard to see why Hudson decided to switch things up for the next game...