Mario Party Su­per Star Re­view

MISHAWAKA – The lat­est in­stall­ment of the Mario Party se­ries is here: Mario Party Su­per­stars. As a proud owner of Su­per Mario Party, I ex­pected Mario Party Su­per­stars to be more of the same, with some new maps, items, and mu­sic. Un­for­tu­nately, that is not quite the case. Mario Party Su­per­stars is not a port of Su­per Mario Party, but its own game. To me, that is fine, but there is not enough con­tent of sub­stance to war­rant mak­ing this its own game. A ma­jor­ity of the minigames in this en­try are re­cy­cled from pre­vi­ous Mario Party games. Nin­tendo seems to have over­played their hand into nos­tal­gia, and, as some­one who did not play too many of the older ti­tles, it has not worked out for me. I have only played Mario Party 7, 8, 9 and Su­per Party. This game was built for fans who have played most or all of the games. I am say­ing this now to make sure my opin­ion, and all po­ten­tial bi­ases in it, are plain.

I do not think that it is a con­tro­ver­sial state­ment that Mario Party has al­ways had a “re­fined” se­lec­tion of maps on which to play. Its strength lies in the di­ver­sity and ad­dic­tive na­ture of its minigames, so com­plain­ing about boards is akin to com­plain­ing about the color of your dessert plate: fo­cus on en­joy­ing your food. How­ever, the more re­cent games, es­pe­cially, have suf­fered from hav­ing an al­most crim­i­nally low num­ber of boards. In Su­per Mario Party, there were four party boards, which were densely packed, but con­sid­er­ing the short­est game lasted an hour, you would in­evitably see every­thing there was to see sooner or later. If you played a dif­fer­ent board for every game, you would ex­haust all the board con­tent in some four hours. Aside from aes­thetic, there were few rea­sons to se­lect one over the other. To il­lus­trate my point, I of­ten chose which map I played based on what song I liked the best.

I do want to re­it­er­ate, how­ever, the boards are not the main in­ter­est of Mario Party; the prime draw is the se­lec­tion of minigames. There is not much to say on this front, save for the fact that there are a lot of minigames, and a se­lec­tion of greats from each of the pre­vi­ous games. Many peo­ple who do have nos­tal­gia for those ear­lier en­tries state that the de­vel­op­ers have done a great job rep­re­sent­ing each game with its best minigames, which is as ring­ing an en­dorse­ment from those kinds of gamers as is pos­si­ble. 

There are minigames that are de­signed for three play­ers against one, two against two, and the tra­di­tional free “four” all. Some minigames fea­ture dif­fer­ent ob­jec­tives; there are those that are sim­ply com­pet­i­tive where your stand­ing will de­ter­mine your coin earn­ings, oth­ers that have play­ers at­tempt­ing to win prizes di­rectly (one fea­tures a player us­ing a high striker to win items that help them on the board) and oth­ers are sim­ple cash-grab games, like the Ticket Tor­nado from Chuck E. Cheese, ex­cept with solid gold coins that (some­how) equal those tick­ets in real-world value.

Board play in Su­per­stars is more of a re­turn to form. In Su­per Mario Party, the base price of stars was ten, half of the tra­di­tional fee. Prov­ing that times are tough every­where, not just in the real world, Su­per­stars set the price back up to 20 gold coins. There are many more op­por­tu­ni­ties to earn money and, con­se­quently, many more op­por­tu­ni­ties to lose it. Each player gets a ten-coin bonus for mak­ing it around the board, lucky spaces are more plen­ti­ful, “Chance Time spaces” move money around fre­quently, and later turns can dou­ble coin val­ues, com­ing and go­ing. In other news, Bowser spaces and Bad Luck spaces dish out the usual un­der­whelm­ing pun­ish­ments, event spaces in­con­ve­nience every­body, and “Vs.” spaces are for peo­ple who can­not wait un­til the end of the round to lose to luck in a minigame. On one board, there is even a piggy bank that ex­acts a fee from passersby, hoard­ing coins un­til such a time as Koopa Troopa sees fit to liq­uidize his as­sets.

As a side­note, Koopa Troopa and Yoshi are my fa­vorite Mario char­ac­ters, but while one of them takes his right­ful place on the ros­ter, be­ing cute, green and big-nosed, the other gets de­moted from player to tu­to­r­ial NPC. Here’s a hint: his name rhymes with Troopa Koopa. Ev­i­dently, Nin­tendo does not see much “star power” in the faith­ful foot sol­dier of Bowser’s army, de­spite be­ing adorable, bright and mak­ing a sim­i­lar se­ries of un­in­tel­li­gi­ble-yet-cute noises to the afore­men­tioned green di­nosaur. Don­key Kong, a char­ac­ter with his own se­ries, made it back in, but Koopa Troopa, whose only playable ap­pear­ances are in the spin­off ti­tles, tells me how a board game works and then has to call it a day? That is low, Nin­tendo.

The char­ac­ter dice blocks from Su­per Mario Party have been dropped in fa­vor of up­ping the stan­dard die from six sides to ten sides. Add a host of ob­jec­tively un­fair items that help you and hin­der your op­po­nents, branch­ing and in­ter­con­nected paths and in­dis­putably ridicu­lous warp pipes, and player mo­bil­ity has sky­rock­eted. 

The end­ing cer­e­mony for each game has re­mained more or less un­changed from Su­per Mario Party: two ran­dom bonus stars are pre­sented and then the vic­tor is an­nounced. The best ad­di­tion is a se­quence fol­low­ing the end-game sta­tis­tics, like stars, coins, spaces trav­eled, etc., which pre­sents the play­ers with a post­card-es­que pic­ture of the char­ac­ters pos­ing on the board, with the high­est-rank­ing clos­est to the cam­era. It is a very neat ad­di­tion to com­mem­o­rate what was an hour-long ad­ven­ture (or longer).

Re­al­is­ti­cally, this is a mod­ern Mario Party game, mean­ing it stream­lines a lot of for­merly te­dious processes, com­ing across a bit spar­tan in the process, but it is ul­ti­mately a fun party game. The minigames are the per­fect bal­ance be­tween chaotic and ac­ces­si­ble; the pac­ing, though a bit jumpy, ap­pro­pri­ately ramps up to­wards the end; the mu­sic is good, as per usual; and I can def­i­nitely see my­self hav­ing fun with peo­ple at a get-to­gether, shindig, hoe­down, soiree, fi­esta or any other syn­onym for a word that, through­out this piece, has lost all mean­ing thanks to Mario Party Su­per­stars.