Super Mario Party Review

Among the series’ best entries, but still sorely in need of just a bit more.

Platforms: Switch
Developer: NDcube
Release Date: October 5, 2018
Reviewed by: Derek Van Dyke (@DerekOfTheDykes)

Once a key pillar of the multiplayer gaming experience on Nintendo systems, it has been a long time since Mario Party has had a real win. Now, after almost 13 years of handheld spinoffs and overly-experimental numbered titles on home consoles, Super Mario Party returns to the classic board game formula of the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube titles that marked the series’ heyday. The result is a game that feels like many of the best elements from across the franchise loaded into a single package that feels, for better and for worse, unapologetically old-school Mario Party.

The game looks, sounds, and performs like a modern Mario spinoff. Nintendo doesn’t even let the world’s most famous plumber take a day off without polishing the presentation down to the strict standards demanded of him. The presentation is slick, vibrant, expressive, and timeless. The game runs like a dream without showing even a hint of framerate hiccups during my time with it. Absolutely none of this will wow or astonish you. The Mario Spinoff Aesthetic does not exist to astonish, it exists to be taken for granted.

Pictured: A degree of unnoticed polish that would make any cash-strapped developer cry.

The first time you select one of the myriad characters and step into Super Mario Party’s main central area, the Party Plaza, you’ll be confronted with a selection of different gameplay modes staged along a semi-circular path that loops back on itself. There is nothing to do in the Party Plaza. The name, in fact, seems sarcastic. The game mercifully lets you instantly select any of the gameplay modes from the “Party Pad” menu, but you still have to navigate to each of the prop screens representing these modes at least once before the Party Pad will save you from meaningless foot travel.

In terms of gameplay, the core Mario Party mode is everything a starving fan would hope for. Four players roll dice and move their character independently across a hazardous board, battle it out in minigames after every one of a set number of turns, collect items, build up coins, and use those coins to buy the stars needed to actually win the game. Each player has both a standard dice and one unique to their character, which adds an additional layer of strategy to character choice unless you’re like me and always pick Wario. The four game boards included are tightly designed and more compact than usual, which is compensated for with smaller dice rolls than older games. Players can pick up unselected characters as allies, who will give them an additional space or two on each roll and an additional unique character dice to select from. When all the turns are over and you think you know who won, the game goes all Dumbledore and awards a couple of additional stars based on completely random achievements, which runs the very likely possibility of changing the winner in the last minute.

Although really I’d like to think the good headmaster was just a big fan.

Super Mario Party is ultimately not a game of skill, it’s one of chance. It is possible to weigh every risk, make every correct choice, and win every minigame, and still lose horribly. This is why Mario Party has a memetic reputation for ending friendships. Despite this, Super Mario Party is actually at its best when it gets unpredictable and upends the board from under four human players. Poor rolls, devastating stage events, and backstabbing by your former loved ones will fuel countless hilarious stories of near wins and losses. This is what makes Super Mario Party such an enduring party game: who took what place is less important than the tale of how everyone got there.

One of the most important aspects of any Mario Party game is the selection of minigames, and in that regards Super Mario Party really is super. There’s a ton of variety in minigame types, with the simplest often being fairly quick affairs and the most engaging usually giving you a bit more time with them. Even for younger players, objectives are easy to understand, and the controls for each are equal parts accessible and responsive (always a fear with motion controls). Because many of the minigames are built around one-handed motion controls, this does limit every player to using a single Joy-Con controller throughout the game. In practice, I found this to be no great annoyance.

Although it’s possible I’m just too busy trying to figure out how Goomba is holding that bat.

There are other gameplay modes aside from the traditional Mario Party mode, though most of them are just a nice distraction from the main game. River Survival pits four players on a timed rafting trip where they play a series of totally co-operative minigames in order to earn the additional time needed to make it to one of the handful of branching ends. Sound Stage brings a bit of WarioWare flair with a series of quick four-player rhythm minigames. Challenge Road is a long list of slight tweaks on existing minigames for a single player to gradually make progress in. There’s a small selection of larger standalone minigames that change somewhat based in the configuration you play them (including, usually, the option to use two different Switch units together in novel ways). All of these are fine but didn’t strike me as having lasting appeal. Challenge Road in particular feels more like busy work than anything.

The one secondary gameplay mode that stands out from the rest is Partner Party, a 2v2 version of the classic Mario Party format with some clever rule changes. Each player on a team rolls their own dice before the two are added together, and each player is then given that many spaces to freely move around tweaked grid-based versions of the four boards used in the standard Mario Party mode. There’s a lot of potential for teamwork and strategy here, as players tend to split up to divide goals between them. In my time with the mode, that usually broke down to one player chasing the star space while the other competed for the available items, coins, and allies. The general dynamic and flow of Partner Party is different enough from the standard Mario Party to be worth playing regularly, and it has a similar breadth of possibility and content, which made it a highlight of the game’s offerings.

Partner Party is easily the most worthy of the non-standard game modes.

Unfortunately, for as good as the Mario Party and Partner Party modes are, the game’s online offerings are every bit as lackluster. Despite the back of the box proudly proclaiming you can “take the party online”, the only thing you can actually do online is play an extremely limited rotating selection of minigames. It’s rather baffling that Nintendo’s first online-capable release after the launch of their paid online service is a game that corrals the entire online experience into something so limited it doesn’t even qualify as an afterthought. I found myself feeling like this tease was more frustrating than having no online mode at all. For many players, Super Mario Party’s single limited online mode will likely never be touched, only serving as a reminder of the online multiplayer board game that fans didn’t get. Sure, the best games in the franchise were all offline only, as they predated the modern prevalence of online gaming. However, it isn’t the Gamecube era anymore, and these are basic features many gamers expect.

Another frustration is the small number of boards available in the Mario Party and Partner Party modes. While each board is well-designed and unique, having only four boards feels extremely limited compared to the larger variety in many earlier installments. Nintendo has made a point of expanding many of its games with small free content updates over time, and new board layouts would be a perfect way to breathe a little extra life into this game. Still, nothing has been announced, so for now we have to assume that this is what we’ve got. The four boards that do come with the game are great though (especially the unlockable fourth board), so this is ultimately a case of “not enough of a good thing”.

Problem #3: I have a friend who is very upset she can’t play as Toadette anymore.

Super Mario Party may not be free of shortcomings, and it will likely fail to entertain solo players for long. On the other hand, if you can get a group of people together, it provides the kind of natural social gaming experience few other games can. By moving back to the formula that made the series so popular in the first place, Nintendo and developer NDcube have not only finally put Mario Party back on the right track but also created one of its best overall entries. Here’s hoping the next stretch of that track includes a proper online mode.

Super Mario Party was played using a physical retail copy purchased by the reviewer.