Mario Party games ranked
The best way to ruin friendships, but what's my favorite way to ruin friendships? Now being rewritten as my revisits happen!
4 Games
In pretty much the only game I like of the first 5, Mario Party 3 is truly a great game. Its minigame selection is solid, maybe a little worse than 2's, but it hits the home run in what really matters to me. The boards in this game are easily the best of the pre-orb games. They aren't incredible admittedly, Deep Blooper Sea isn't great and every board in this game has at least one thing I really don't like about it except maybe Spiny Desert. But the beauty of Mario Party 3 comes in the item system, which is easily the best traditional system in the series. The plays you can make in this game are genuinely bananas, from saving up plunder chests for the moment someone gets a rare item and making the ultimate gamble, using keys to get to a critical boo usage, keeping a cellular shopper to be ready to grab something important at any moment, and my lord and savior the reverse mushroom. Nearly every time I pop Mario Party 3 in I'm gonna see some crazy moment that I'm never gonna forget, and that's the sign of a good freaking game right there.
1
This is in my head as one of the biggest boomer games along with Mega Man 3, because god I can not find someone under 24 who actually thinks this game is as great as people said it was when I was growing up for the life of me. Ignoring Mario Party 1 because I'm still not convinced that game is real, 2 feels like actual first game syndrome. The minigames are solid but the rest of the game is just kind of lacking. The boards are a mixed bag, all of them are way too big but the only actively abhorrent one is Mystery Land, incredible that they somehow made a worse version of Wario's Battle Canyon. I find Horror Land and Bowser Land pretty interesting, but really this game is just held back by the lack of a solid item system. Only being able to hold one item is a horrible limitation, and gives way more value to items like mushrooms than something situational like a skeleton key. And of course there's also the plunder chest which is guaranteed to steal the item you want since there's only one item to carry. It does pick a random player but really people won't even have items that often since each board only has one shop each, which is maybe even worse than the one item limit. Most of the time the boys and I were just playing this game like Mario Party 1, rolling the dice and seeing what happens. But hey the minigames were fun this time and the boards don't make me wanna rip my hair out so the game's just kinda meh I guess.
2
I have some good memories with 4 and I'll admit that its minigame selection is honestly one of the stronger sets, but unfortunately the main game feels like its practically designed against you. Most of the interesting items in 3 have been thrown out to be replaced with the mini and mega mushrooms, making for a gimmick that makes the game a chore to play. Now you can't snipe stars or shops to make big plays or speed up the pace of the game since mega mushrooms can't interact with board events and they're your only way of increasing your movement, but nothing compares to the mini mushroom. Using keys to unlock doors in 2 and 3 already tended to make those stars hard to get with how big the boards can be and how otherwise low value keys are, but now the chance of accessing stars with them and making the game continue are down to a dice roll that's against your favor. Not only is this frustrating, it just makes these stars harder to get. I had two games when playing where no one got a star for the first half of the game. However this is only made worse by the boards, which are maybe the 2nd worst set in the series behind Mario Party 1. I thought Shy Guy was decent and I guess Boo isn't thaaat bad, but the other 4 boards have a gimmick which has the only purpose of causing people to get stuck in one corner of the map the entire time. In every single game we played on those boards, at least one person had a prolonged period where they got stuck in a corner of the board. I don't care if it's "not that common" it's horrible board design that that can happen in the first place, and even if the first three games didn't exclusively have incredible ideas, they were at least more creative than "luck-based junction" or "path that changes directions out of your control" as the frequent gimmicks.
3
This game is atrocious. I genuinely have no other words to describe it. The only joy to get from it is the decent music, a handful of minigames, and laughing at how awful this game is. There is borderline no player input on the boards, it's just rolling a die and seeing what happens, no items at all. Even if there were items though, most of these boards are just unsalavable. Crap like Wario's Battle Canyon, Bowser's Magma Mountain, Eternal Star, and Peach's Birthday Cake would be horrible no matter what game they were in, and thankfully we have Superstars to prove that for Peach. The minigames are also horrible, even if there are a few classics like mushroom mix-up, a ton of these are just so bland and basic, or just downright terrible. It's sad when the infamous control stick rotating games are some of the more mechanically solid minigames. Top this off with awful pacing from aspects like the one player games or skipped turns and this makes the Mario Party with the shortest rounds due to the lack of player agency feel like it has some of the longest.
4