mommytheape

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I know it’s a bit weird to like Mario Party Advance more than the 3DS Mario Parties, but frankly, it takes advantage of the hardware that it’s on to its fullest potential. Why bother making a standard Mario Party game on a handheld that requires wires to connect via local multiplayer. Yes, there was a wireless adapter, but it was only for the SP and the range was super short. I can’t imagine a full Mario Party game would have worked well. So instead, they focused on the single player and made a game where the goal is to complete a bunch of side quests. Which probably sounds super lame out of context, but the side quests all have really interesting and hilarious stories. You actually want to learn about these characters and the lives that they are living, it’s surprisingly charming. The actual problem, believe it or not, is that the mini games are either bad or just mediocre, so they’re a bit of a slog to play. But clearing them gives you more dice rolls, which in turn gives incentive to get better and complete all the side quests. If you don’t look at this like a Mario Party game, it’s honestly not too bad.

Do I really need to elaborate? It’s pretty clear how awful this game is. I mentally was not able to finish the final boss because of how soul-draining Sticker Star is. Before crapping on it fully, I do like a lot of the music and it does look pretty nice for a 3DS game. But the combat, oh what the heck happened to the combat?! You use stickers to attack but they’re all a one-time use. So when they’re gone, they are gone for good. Because of that, there’s zero incentive to fight enemies because it’s a waste of stickers and time. You just save them for bosses. Which by the way, most bosses require thing stickers to defeat but you have no idea which stickers will work half the time. So you’ll just end up guessing and wasting even more of your time. Pair that up with a linear level structure, no partners, a lack of any interesting characters or story, and no level of system. This is the most playable unfun game I may have ever experienced in my life and likely ever will.

Oh boy, another forgettable Mario Party game. This time, however the boards aren’t as bad as before. It’s akin to how The Top 100 handles it. You move at the same time and collect star balloons, as well as occasionally playing mini games. The mini games, like usual, are decent for what they are. What’s really interesting is that the reason the boards in this era of Mario Party were considered boring isn’t because they run too slowly, it’s got nothing to do with that. It’s because the boards themselves have virtually no substance. Go back to the N64 and GameCube era, and there’s so many things happening that alter how the board looks and feels. That just doesn’t exist in Star Rush or any of the 3DS Mario Parties. At least Toad Scramble has multiple boards to play on, but allowing everyone to move at once isn’t changing the fact that we’re just running on literal squares. Where is the theming?! What about chance time? And happening spaces? I’m just glad Mario Party is slowly returning back to its roots nowadays.

By far, one of the most generic Mario Party games I’ve ever played in my life. All the 3DS Mario Parties are so forgettable and drab that I have a hard time recollecting any sort of memory of playing this. Thankfully, there’s more than 1 board compared to The Top 100, but these boards for some reason all have different rules. What’s the point of that? Why not have a bunch of boards that can all utilize these different play styles. Since you still move around in a linear style, there’s still no strategy on the board, so it makes the whole game very slow and monotonous. On one board, the boss is literally just rolling a dice to punch a Whomp until its health meter is gone. Underwhelming is the best definition for Island Tour.

Like Donkey Kong, there’s quite a few ports of this game on newer hardware, but I’ll just stick with this variant. I’ve played this the most on the Game Boy Advance because I owned Super Mario Advance as a kid and loved popping in Mario Bros. from time to time. The objective is to take out all the enemies by flipping them from underneath. It’s a pretty interesting idea instead of just jumping on top of them, and what’s even better is this game is co-op. As you go through levels, the enemies get tougher to hit, you’ll avoid fireballs, and the stage starts getting slippery with ice. There’s also consequences for not hitting enemies. They can re-emerge and get faster if you take too long which is a game mechanic you still don’t see that much nowadays. The difficulty progression is pretty difficult for the arcades. This game can still be addicting depending on which version you play. The main issue is that there isn’t much else to do, and the controls aren’t always the best, it really depends on the version you’re playing.

It’s pretty much Mario Party 10, but without the Bowser Mode, and that’s a perk, seeing how bad that mode was. Once again, you move around in a car and collect mini stars, but there’s no strategy or tension since you can’t control which direction to go in. But I guess it wouldn’t matter anyway since the boards are super straightforward, and the items have been seriously downgraded. Gone are the days of getting the magic lamp or the mega mushroom or anything remotely interesting. Now you can get the uh, 1,2,3 dice block or the 1 through 10 dice block. Wow, I get to move around the board slightly less or slightly more. FUN! Oh, just so fun! It’s ironic how the boards take less time to play but feel way longer than they used to. The mini games are still a good time, but they pretty much always are in Mario Party. If the boards **** to play on, that’s just going to make the whole thing worse.

What a great idea, take a compilation of 100 classic mini games and throw them all into one game. Except there’s one problem with that concept, they kind of forgot about adding the classic boards, which is kind of exactly what makes the mini games worth playing to begin with. There’s a total of one board to play on, and it’s the most generic board I’ve ever seen in my life. At least we’re not all in cars, but everybody moves at the same time and you get stars by running into the balloons while mini games play randomly. It just doesn’t feel right playing a Mario Party that’s meant to celebrate the games from two decades ago. And on top of that, we didn’t even get to pick the mini games. Nintendo could’ve run some sort of survey, asking what mini games we liked the most. But NO, they picked and only some of them are solid entries.

Just thinking about this game hurts my soul. You take a perfectly good formula, completely change it for no reason in Mario Party 9, and instead of reverting back to the older way, they made Mario Party 10 even worse. Now look, I understand that some people enjoy the car mechanic, which is fine that’s their prerogative. But I can almost guarantee that those people have not played the older games, and don’t know what they’re missing. Everybody sitting in the car creates zero tension in 100 boredom. Mario Party 10 isn’t even bad, in fact I enjoy a good amount of the mini games, it’s just boring and puts me to sleep. Tedium is the worst quality a game can possess. All you do is collect mini stars and slowly move across a linear board. It’s like waiting in line for a roller coaster. You slowly td your way forward, excited to get on the ride only for it to be short-lived and not worth it. But what about the Bowser Mode? Yeah, it’s completely broken. Good luck standing any sort of chance against Bowser. He gets way more dice rolls than everybody else and has the potential to take out players in mini games, further decreasing the odds of winning. But of course there’s Amiibo Mode, which plays like normal Mario Party, right? Well I mean, I guess it kind of does, but you also have to own Amiibo to play this at all, and the boards are all the exact same square. If it wasn’t for the mini games, this would probably be the worst Mario game of all time.