as someone who's well familiar with the current state of Mario Party, mostly from other people on the internet, I gotta say....this ain't bad

now I'm not a Mario Party guy, I was always the Mario Kart one instead so don't expect me to go "THIS ISN'T LIKE THE N64 AND GAMECUBE ONES GRAAAAAH" because my personal experiences with the Hudson Soft Mario Parties doesn't go beyond 8, DS, and recently a tiny bit of 7. I will say that when it comes to the post-Hudson Soft games, this is the one that's definitely the closest to the originals (typed by someone who's barely touched the originals). I think what helps is how the Mushroom Village hub from the original is brought back as well as the Koopa Troopa who's the same exact Koopa that's the guide of the boards in the first Mario Party, I think that's really cool. I mean yeah he's no Geno or whatever but seeing him so excited to guide again as well as explaining the board events that took place in the N64 days really makes me root for the guy, welcome back bro. oh yeah Toad's hosting again too but he's everywhere

there's only five boards from this game (two from MP1, two from MP2, and one from MP3) and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed. granted they're excellent board choices, even if Space Land was a bit of a mess from my experience, but it couldn't have hurt to include a couple of more boards from the later ones. five is just way too low, the original Mario Party has more boards than this game! at least they're not slacking on the minigame department, which has at least 100 of them, all of them coming from the previous console Mario Parties. of course this is no doubt impressive, I don't even think I've gone through every one by the time I finished all five boards. personally some minigames feel near impossible to win if you're facing CPUs on Hard and Master, but that isn't too much of a critique instead more or less a skill issue on my part, as well as the usual Mario Party BS. lastly I want to mention the Lucky Spaces, which I know were definitely not on the original boards. I don't dislike them really I mean whenever you step on one you always get something good I can't hate that, but I do think there's a little too many of them. in comparison to all those Lucky Space spots, there's only been one time someone landed on a Chance Time Space during all five board playthroughs, they should really replace all those Lucky Spaces with Chance Time that'll truly bring out the chaotic Mario Party experience

so yeah I'm done for the time being. playing through all five boards is my personal completion seeing as there's likely no proper ending for this game. there's achievements and collectibles to get, but they're mostly not too special such as stickers and pages about the characters that you can easily find on the Super Mario Wiki, yeah sorry not incentivized with unlocking all of that. you can unlock the option to use the original board music, but I only wish they went all the way by having the option with the minigames too (I know there's 100 of them but it still would have been neat). but yeah I've probably sounded a bit nit-picky during this review but I really did enjoy my time with the game and I'm looking forward to returning whenever I start playing online with my friends. if you're a Mario Party fan, I heavily recommend checking it out, especially if you got other people to play it with either locally or online. this is really a step in the right direction for Mario Party, and I hope that continue to improve onward. so yeah not much else to say, I like that Mario's pose and the dice block is the exact same as MP1, thanks for reading.

you can't select Mario Party DS as your favorite Mario Party, ignore everything I said Mario sucks