Let's Talk About Mario Party Superstars

Mario is one of the most prolific characters in all of gaming. Outside of his traditional action platforming games, the various spin-offs have seen the portly plumber do just about everything imaginable. He's done go-karting, baseball, football, golf, tennis, RPG heroics, he even got a PHD and tried his hands at being a doctor.

But you know what they say, all work and no play make Mario game over. So, when Mario isn’t doing anything other than his actual vocation, he’s partying with his friends in the Mario Party series.

The Mario Party series is one of the most unique Mario spin-offs. Hell, it practically created an entire new genre of party games that mixed board games with mini games. Those original Nintendo 64 and GameCube games are some of the best multiplayer experiences you can ever get and all the games on those consoles are worth checking out. Even Mario Party 8 on Wii has its moments.

However, ever since original developer Hudson left the series due to no longer being allowed to exist, let’s just say the series has seen better days. Mario Party 9 and 10 both attempted to add a co-operative element to the series that just didn’t work. The chaotic nature that made the previous games so fun was greatly diminished and the linear nature of the boards made them all feel lacking.

Then there was the series baffling move to 3DS. Star Rush attempted to add a free roaming element to the boards that ended up making all the boards feel the same, and Mario Party the Top 100 was a great collection of minigames but had none of the other feature that make Mario Party, Mario Party. Not to mention the issue both games had of being party games on a handheld device. It's not exactly easy to set a game up at a party when everyone needs their own system and a copy of the game.

Super Mario Party did attempt to bring the series back to its roots, and it made an admirable attempt, but wasn’t quite the return to form the series needed. The game was more focused on adding a bunch of additional modes that had little staying power. Sure, the boards were back, but they were lacking when compared to their predecessors and were only a small part of the overall package.

Every time Nintendo tried something new it fell flat. All we wanted was for them to go back to that original formula, to give us a game that harkened back to the glory days of the N64 and GameCube eras. And it’s my happy duty to report that Mario Party Superstars is exactly what we wanted.

Mario Party Superstars is what the Top 100 should have been. Not a mere collection of minigames, but a celebration of Mario Party’s past. Think of this game as a sort of Mario Party’s greatest hits, a collection of 100 minigames from across the series and 5 boards from the original Nintendo 64 trilogy all redone with shiny new visuals and remixed music.

In fact, if I may get this out of the way, the presentation is great. The graphics are bright and colourful and the characters, while looking a little plasticky at times, have a lot of character and charm put into their animations. As someone who played Mario Party 5 a lot as a kid, the visual upgrade the minigames got became immediately apparent, Pushy Penguins looks amazing in this. This is easily the best-looking game in the series

The remixed music is also very well done. It's fittingly bouncy and upbeat and keeps the spirit of the original tracks. The new remixes are great, though there is an option to go back to the original tracks if you prefer those. Always nice to get that option.

But the best thing about the presentation are all the little details. Like the fact that the music in each minigame comes from the original game right done to the victory jingle, or how the Mario Party 8 minigames keep the ending cutscenes, or the opening of each board being a recap of the story it had in its original game, complete with screenshots from those original games in all their low-polygon glory. There's a lot of callbacks and references to the previous games and it’s obvious that a lot of love went into the presentation.

This becomes immediately apparent when booting up the game as the main menu is a recreation of the one from the original Mario Party. Even as someone with no nostalgia for the Nintendo 64 games, this was cool to see. There's so much more charm put into this one menu than there is in most modern Mario spin off games.

I just wish the user interface wasn’t so bland. It goes for that minimalist style that every game is doing now. I can’t hate it specifically since it’s just following a modern trend, but it does make me pine for the days when interfaces had actual character and style.

Mario Party Superstars has two main modes of play. Party mode which is the classic Mario Party style of gameplay, and Mt Minigame where you can play any of the minigames in either free play or various competition and challenge modes.

And that’s it in terms of modes. If you were expecting a bunch of extra modes and bonus games like in Mario Party games of old, prepare to be disappointed. At first, I was let down by the lack of modes, but the more I thought about it the more I realized this may have been intentional.

After the bloated excess of Super Mario Party, Superstars feels like a deliberately stripped-down affair. Rather than provide a smattering of shallow gameplay modes you will only ever play once, Mario Party Superstars instead puts greater focus on the two main modes of play to make them as polished and re-playable as possible.

Plus, it’s not like the bonus games have been completely excised. There are still a handful of the bonus sports and puzzle games from previous Mario Party games within Mt Minigame. So they are there, they just aren’t given their own unique mode.

Still, the lack of content might be a turn off to some. There isn’t anything to unlock aside from stickers and encyclopedia entries either. While I do like that everything is unlocked from the start so you can just jump straight into things, I do miss uncovering everything at the same time. I guess that’s the price you pay for convenience.

The only thing I find baffling is the lack of a double's mode. This has been a feature in previous Mario Party games, so it feels weird for it not to show up here. I don’t know if anyone actually played it, but it was always nice to have the option. Why remove it?

There is, however, one big addition that helps with the lack of other modes. Both the main party mode and the minigames can now be played online. Technically Super Mario Party did this first, but it didn’t have proper online for the boards until several years after release, and let’s be honest that was just a testing ground for how they would do it in this game. It’s like when SNK added rollback to their older games, we all knew what they were planning.

This is a major leap forward for this series. We’ve been asking for them to add online to this series since the Wii. And while I think games like this are best played with a group of friends in the same room, just having the option to play this online is a fantastic addition to the series. Plus, it’s harder to get people together to play a game like this in person these days, especially for adults. Having this option greatly improves it’s replayability

But what of the actual gameplay itself. Well, it’s Mario Party just as you remember it. There aren’t any new or unnecessary gimmicks added in, it’s the same friendship destroying fun we all know and begrudgingly love. While some might opine the lack of innovation, they’re sort of missing the point.

This isn’t supposed to be a new take on formula, it’s a return to form. They already tried doing something new with the last 3 entries and they all sucked. Maybe we can let this one’s lack of innovation slide a little.

Like any good party game, it’s easy to pick up and play. The rules are simple enough, the goal is to collect the most stars by the end of the game. You get stars by rolling the dice and running across the board to get to it before the other players do, so it’s a bit of a mad dash to collect them.

But merely getting to the stars isn’t enough, you also need to pay for them using coins. You get coins by landing on certain spaces, but the fastest way to get them is by winning minigames. You play a minigame at the end of every turn with the winner gaining 10 coins, though players in second and third place do still get a few. The ones in last place though, they get nothing like the pathetic, worthless losers they are.

The type of minigame you play depends on the spaces each player landed on. If all players landed on the same colour then you play a 4v4 game, if two players landed on a different colour to the others then you play a 2v2 team game, and if one player lands on a different colour you play a 1v3 game. There are also Duel minigames which are 1v1 but those are rare and only show up on occasion.

One other type of minigame are the VS minigames. These will only be played when landing on a certain space and work a little differently. In these, every player antes up some of their coins and then battles for the collected amount. These were always some of my favourites because it felt like they had real stakes, you weren’t just battling for coins, you were battling to win back your own coins.

There aren’t any unique VS minigames though, it’s just the stand 4v4 games. That's a little disappointing since previous Mario Party’s did this but, eh, not a huge loss. Speaking of losses, there’s one last type of minigame you’ll want to avoid, Bowser minigames.

Like VS minigames, you can only get Bowser minigames by landing on a Bowser space. You'll generally want to avoid these because Bowser has a variety of different affects, all of which are negative. He'll steal your coins, your stars, even redistribute everyone's coins so they all have an equal amount. Who knew Bowser was a communist.

The Bowser minigames are entirely unique and can’t be played anywhere else. In these you win nothing but lose 10 coins if you fail. And it’s very easy to fail to, so try to avoid these as best you can. Mind you it’s all luck whether you do play them so, I don’t know, pray to the RNG Gods I guess.

The minigames selected for Superstars are some of the best minigames in the entire series. Bumper Balls, Pushy Penguins, Bowsers Big Blast and Book Squirm (aka the best one) are all here and still excellent. There are a couple of baffling inclusions, why did they bring back tug of war when they got sued for it last time? But the good far outweighs the bad and with their being 100 of them there’s plenty of variety.

One thing I'm glad they kept from Super is the help section where you can practice the minigame before you play it. Makes it easier to figure out the controls and let’s less experienced players get a feel for them.

The minigames are all well balanced. None of the character play differently so everyone is on an even playing field. Except in the 1v3 minigames. The balance for those is horribly one sided, and not in the way you would expect. How one sided it is depends on the game being played, in some the lone player is Quasimodo, and in others they’re the Incredible Hulk.

They’re either too against the lone players favour or they’re an unstoppable force of destruction. Occasionally you get one that’s fair on both sides, but those are the exception. More often than not they’re horrendously unbalanced, and that’s part of the fun.

Look, this is a party game, you don’t play them to be competitive. You play them to dick around with your friends and have a few laughs, and tears of pure frustration and rage. They don’t need to be balanced; they just need to be fun.

There is a strong element of luck in Mario Party with the random dice rolls, but like any good board game there is an element of strategy to twist the odds in your favor. You can pick up a variety of items that can help you from being able to roll 2 dices or adding 5 to any dice roll you make. You can also find items that can screw over other players, and it is here where Mario Party gets its reputation.

You do not win by playing fair in Mario Party, you win by being the biggest dick. Stealing other players coins, items or stars, giving them a cursed block to lower their dice rolls, switching place with them when they’re right near the star. Whether intentionally or not, you can and will screw over your friends while they in turn screw over you. You will get mad at them, you may even come to blows, and you will love every moment of it.

I played this game with my niece and nephew, and they were swearing up a storm at each other. They outright started to grapple with each other and started to trade punches. And as I watched them rain blows upon each other, all I could think was “god I love this series”.

They were fine by the way, they were laughing their heads off a few moments later. That's what’s so great about this series, you can go from pouty and pissed off one minute to jovial in the next. It's a roller coaster ride of emotions and you just got to ride it.

But what I think makes Mario Party such a great party game is the fact that it evens the playing field for all players irrespective of their skill level. The mixture of luck and skill-based elements make it a game that’s easy to play for anybody.

My niece isn’t very good at action games and struggles with the minigames, but she can still do well thanks to the board game element. It’s a game that anyone can play and that’s an important thing to have for a party game. There's a reason so many other games copied this formula, it’s perfect for the genre.

Now a lot of the fun you have will depend on which board you’re playing on. Superstars has 5 boards from the 3 N64 games: Yoshi’s Tropical Island and Peach’s Birthday Cake from the original Mario Party, Space Land and Horror Land from Mario Party 2, and Woody Woods from Mario Party 3.

I do wish there were a few more boards. I know 5 is the general amount of boards you get, but they could have included 1 or 2 more. At least give us another Mario Party 3 board, feels like that one gets the shaft here.

The boards themselves do vary in quality. The boards from 2 and 3 are great. Space Land and Horror Land are among the best in the series and Woody Woods is damn good as well. The other two boards, I'm a little more mixed on those. Yoshi’s Tropical Island is... fine. It's ok as a beginner friendly board but it is a little too simplistic. And Peach’s Birthday just flat-out sucks. It's one of the most annoying boards in the series and yet also one of the most boring. No idea why they brought this one back.

It also becomes obvious that Mario Party 1 handled it’s boards a little differently when laying them side by side with its sequel’s boards. I will give Superstars for faithfully recreating each board to play each board like they did in the original, but this only makes the Mario Party 1 boards stick out like a sore thumb. I'd rather have more boards from 2 and 3, but I guess we have to give the original some representation.

Superstars does a good job of recreating the gameplay of the older Mario Party titles while adding some quality-of-life improvements. The most noticeable being the pacing. Compared to older Mario Party games, matches in Superstars fly by. It's especially recognizable when playing with a CPU opponent as the game will speed up their turn and skip minigames played only by them, you can even skip their turns in the main mini games which is nice.

I'm also glad we can play with standard controllers again. I hated being forced to use the Joy Con in Super Mario Party, being able to play with a more comfortable controller makes all the difference. This does mean that motion controlled mini games are not included, but I don’t mind that. They were some of the weakest ones anyway.

Mario Party Superstars is a fantastic party game that brings the series back to its roots while also serving as a fitting tribute to the series as a whole. The only issue it has is the lack of content. It could have had a few more modes and boards, but what’s here is still excellent and well worth checking out.

It's also entirely possible the game could get some more content down the road. While nothing has been announced yet, with other Mario spin-offs receiving post launch content it’s entirely possible this one could too. I hope it does, I would love to see boards from the GameCube era make it in.

Even if it doesn’t, what we have here is a solid little party game. It's easily the best game in the series since the GameCube and is well worth picking up for longtime fans and newcomers alike. So, if you’re having a couple of friends over and you’re looking for something to play, Mario Part Superstars is one you want to check out. Just make sure there aren’t any sharp objects around when you play it.