My past Mario Parties can be divided into two distinct but miserable circumstances: Mario Parties played years prior with friends that I forced myself to replay alone, and Mario Parties experienced purely in isolation. This ongoing experiment into Mario Party's effects on my mental health needed more variables, so for Mario Party 5 I decided to rope in two additional test subjects who I must assert were not tricked or coerced into participating.  Appreciations (Toad) and TransWitchSammy (Boo) have even agreed to help me play through each subsequent Mario Party, a decision that was perhaps brought on by some sort of Mario Party mania or chemical changes to the brain caused by playing Curvy Curbs thirty-eight times...

This left one vacant spot which could've been filled with another human player, but we all agreed that leaving a single CPU opponent in play (Bowser Jr.) would result in more pandemonium and dickery. This was true for the first board, where Bowser Jr. ran a clinic and forced us to form a united front against him. Very quickly, Mario Party 5 became a man vs machine story, wherein we intrepid three mortals of flesh and bone formed a pact to undermine and defeat Bowser Jr. at the expense of our own individual victories. Not that we needed to, as Mario Party 5's CPU is wildly inconsistent, and whether we set Bowser Jr. to "normal" or "hard," he constantly flip-flopped between being a cunning strategist and cheater to ripping the ass of his pants and farting every turn.

It's also a bit hard to form a concentrated attack on any one player when so many of Mario Party 5's minigames are based purely on chance. Sure, no Mario Party prior has been a true "game of skill," but an overwhelming amount of MP5's games involve spinning a wheel and hoping you win. Take Random Ride, a 4 v 4 game where you place bets on which vehicle you think will win a race, with the most fortuitously named ride having the best odds. Whether you choose "100% Assured Destruction" or the "Dogshit Dumbasscopter" is wholly dependent on where you fall in the turn order. Other minigames like Bus Buffers have instructions that straight up say "yo, the controls suck," so that's fun!

Like all Mario Parties prior, MP5 loooves to re-roll minigames instead of showing you new ones. In our weeks long playthrough, I don't think we ever rolled Handy Hoppers, Fish Upon a Star, or Manic Mallets once. We did, however, get Quilt for Speed no less than four times during our last 25-turn game. Though this is the worst collection of minigames yet, Mario Party 5 does at least have Hotel Goomba, and there is something extremely funny to me about running through a hotel and decking Goombas in the face in what can only be described as an act of unprovoked savagery. Shout-outs to the minigames Coney Island and Heat Stroke for having names that make me giggle.

Bowser Jr. was our collective enemy throughout, but after the first night it was Toad Time all the time thanks to Appreciation's incredible luck and astounding ability to mash buttons with a ferocity I've never encountered before. Though they won the vast majority of our games, Sammy and Bowser Jr. did eek out their own victories whereas I struggled to the very last. I'll admit with some embarrassment that I got Mad For Real a handful of times due to the game's dickishness and Dolphin's shoddy netplay screwing me over mere spaces in front of stars, which usually resulted in me getting up to pour myself a drink and returning to bemoan my luck with an increasingly common refrain: "I just want to win a Mario Party."

At least boards are much more forgiving and easier to navigate than past games, featuring far fewer hazardous spaces while being overall less reliant on luck to move about. The inherent lack of gimmick spaces is meant to accommodate Mario Party 5's capsule system, which allows players to permanently alter individual spaces on the board, progressively making the game more chaotic. The layer of strategy capsules introduce is razor thin as you can rarely activate a capsule's effect on a space's occupant immediately, and you risk landing on a space you teed up to harm a specific player. New DK spaces allow players to compete for bananas that can be cashed in for varying amounts of coins, and Boo's star and coin stealing spaces are now represented by Chain Chomp due to his inclusion in the main roster.

Now if you want to become a true Mario Party professional, convince everyone to play on the Future Dream board, then spend a significant amount of the game doing loops around the upper-right section where the Chain Chomp lives and just keep stealing stars from everybody while occasionally grabbing one when it spawns in your territory. Do this enough and you'll humble Bower Jr. turning him into a pathetic fail son. His old man still shows up during the last five turns, permitting the player in last place to spin the wheel and alter the board because "it ain't Mario Party if it's easy." Of course it's Bowser Jr., who has been forced into a star deficit and ruined. "My own son," Bowser thinks, looking at him not in disapproval but disgust. Well guess who's the Dream Star now. Happy Waluigi Wednesday, bitch.

Mario Party 5's greatest asset is how it deepened my friendship with two of my best pals on Backloggd (you're all my pals, but we're just not on the "suffer through Mario Party for six weeks" phase of our relationship yet, sorry.) Were it not for Mario Party Thursdays I wouldn't have had the chance to make fruitless attempts converse with Appreciation's cat, nor would I have been on the edge of my seat as Sammy grappled with Gigabyte's flimsy hardware while trying to upgrade her PC, and neither of them would've had the pleasure of hearing my speech slur, two glasses of rum deep to dull the pain. A friendship forged in the fires of Mario Party's bullshit is surely one that will remain unbreakable. Thank you, Hudson.

2 out of 5.