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.
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.