Once more unto the breach...
Having previously completed Mario Party and Mario Party 2, I thought I knew what to expect from this series. But you know me, I... I love surprises, and believe me when I say Mario Party 3 findsexcruciating exciting new ways to one-up both the series and its own bullshit at every conceivable turn. Mario and the usual Mario Party party are joined by newcomers Princess Daisy and Scumfucker Waluigi, and strike one against this game: neither of these two are unlocked by default. You have to play and complete the newly added story mode if you want to get at Waluigi. Get the fuck out of my home.
The story mode involves the gang battling over possession of the Millennium Star, which will take you through each of Mario Party 3's new boards. I played on Normal, then gave up after Luigi hit three hidden blocks with stars inside of them. Silly me forgetting that Mario Party's normal state is to dick you over with freakish devotion. I restarted the game on easy - which still resulted in me losing a few times because, strike two: there is no definable difficulty state in a game where victory is almost entirely determined by chance. Yeah, sure, I can steamroll the AI in mini games, but nothing about the difficulty level will stop someone from hitting a Chance Time space two turns from the end of the game and stealing all your stars. There is no satisfying loop of losing, getting better, and then overcoming the game. You just lose like, a whole hour of your life on a 15 turn board, that's it. It sucks. Did you know there's a new item where someone can extend the length of the game by five turns? Absolutely fucked, this video game!
Breaking up each board is a new one-on-one battle board, and if you asked me to comb through my severe list of grievances with Mario Party 3 and come up with a single point on which I think game fails the hardest, it's probably these. You and your opponent make laps around a relatively small board accompanied by battle partners, which take the form of common enemies from the broader Super Mario series (including Toad, who is my enemy.) When you or your opponent lap one another, you enter into a battle phase. The player with the most health remaining by the end of the game wins.
There's sort of a skeleton of an idea here that just isn't fleshed out enough to become fun. The small size of the boards provide a scare amount of interactivity and stunt your ability to strategize, and the only thing it ends up accomplishing is dragging out the length of the story mode with more useless bullshit. There's already so much bloat on the main boards that cause turns to last too damn long, having to buffer them with something that is tantamount to filler only compounds how agonizing it is to play this thing. I don't know why on earth you'd ever pick this mode when playing against a real human being either, there's not enough here to sink your teeth into, it's really just boring.
At a certain point I jammed my Gameshark into the console to see if I could just unlock Waluigi and the final board and circumvent story mode, but since this is a late N64 release, it is incompatible with my Gameshark. So I kept plucking away, bit by bit, until I reached the second-to-last board. That was last night. I turned it on today and my save was corrupted. Strike three? I think randomly having your saved wiped is the most Mario Party thing. I guess that means I didn't finish this, strictly speaking, though I did play the board I was on in the regular party mode so I could at least say I've experienced all the unlocked content that the game has to offer. Given the amount of time I have put into this, I also think it's fair to say I have a pretty complete understanding of what makes Mario Party 3 work (nothing) and what it struggles with (everything.)
Mario Party 2 still comes up as the best entry in the Nintendo 64 series, largely because it finds the right balance of having stuff to do on its boards without dragging turns out, and it eases up on the sheer level of star thievery in the first game. It's clear they tried to make Mario Party 3 a very additive sequel, but because the game was designed by demons from hell, everything they added is just terrible. I guess I could see someone liking this if they played with real people and didn't touch the story mode, or if they happen to be inherently more lucky than I am and were not screwed over arbitrarily as much as I was. The only value owning a copy of Mario Party 3 has is to sit on my shelf next to the first two games so I can say that I have a full set, because it sure as hell isn't touching the cartridge slot of my N64 ever again.
Having previously completed Mario Party and Mario Party 2, I thought I knew what to expect from this series. But you know me, I... I love surprises, and believe me when I say Mario Party 3 finds
The story mode involves the gang battling over possession of the Millennium Star, which will take you through each of Mario Party 3's new boards. I played on Normal, then gave up after Luigi hit three hidden blocks with stars inside of them. Silly me forgetting that Mario Party's normal state is to dick you over with freakish devotion. I restarted the game on easy - which still resulted in me losing a few times because, strike two: there is no definable difficulty state in a game where victory is almost entirely determined by chance. Yeah, sure, I can steamroll the AI in mini games, but nothing about the difficulty level will stop someone from hitting a Chance Time space two turns from the end of the game and stealing all your stars. There is no satisfying loop of losing, getting better, and then overcoming the game. You just lose like, a whole hour of your life on a 15 turn board, that's it. It sucks. Did you know there's a new item where someone can extend the length of the game by five turns? Absolutely fucked, this video game!
Breaking up each board is a new one-on-one battle board, and if you asked me to comb through my severe list of grievances with Mario Party 3 and come up with a single point on which I think game fails the hardest, it's probably these. You and your opponent make laps around a relatively small board accompanied by battle partners, which take the form of common enemies from the broader Super Mario series (including Toad, who is my enemy.) When you or your opponent lap one another, you enter into a battle phase. The player with the most health remaining by the end of the game wins.
There's sort of a skeleton of an idea here that just isn't fleshed out enough to become fun. The small size of the boards provide a scare amount of interactivity and stunt your ability to strategize, and the only thing it ends up accomplishing is dragging out the length of the story mode with more useless bullshit. There's already so much bloat on the main boards that cause turns to last too damn long, having to buffer them with something that is tantamount to filler only compounds how agonizing it is to play this thing. I don't know why on earth you'd ever pick this mode when playing against a real human being either, there's not enough here to sink your teeth into, it's really just boring.
At a certain point I jammed my Gameshark into the console to see if I could just unlock Waluigi and the final board and circumvent story mode, but since this is a late N64 release, it is incompatible with my Gameshark. So I kept plucking away, bit by bit, until I reached the second-to-last board. That was last night. I turned it on today and my save was corrupted. Strike three? I think randomly having your saved wiped is the most Mario Party thing. I guess that means I didn't finish this, strictly speaking, though I did play the board I was on in the regular party mode so I could at least say I've experienced all the unlocked content that the game has to offer. Given the amount of time I have put into this, I also think it's fair to say I have a pretty complete understanding of what makes Mario Party 3 work (nothing) and what it struggles with (everything.)
Mario Party 2 still comes up as the best entry in the Nintendo 64 series, largely because it finds the right balance of having stuff to do on its boards without dragging turns out, and it eases up on the sheer level of star thievery in the first game. It's clear they tried to make Mario Party 3 a very additive sequel, but because the game was designed by demons from hell, everything they added is just terrible. I guess I could see someone liking this if they played with real people and didn't touch the story mode, or if they happen to be inherently more lucky than I am and were not screwed over arbitrarily as much as I was. The only value owning a copy of Mario Party 3 has is to sit on my shelf next to the first two games so I can say that I have a full set, because it sure as hell isn't touching the cartridge slot of my N64 ever again.