The Party Returns from Years Past! (Mario Party Superstars in review)

     Mario Party was an integral series to the Nintendo 64. It was one of the biggest selling points for the console that finally allowed for four players to play at once, along with Super Smash Bros, Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye 007. This series has always held a special place in the hearts of Nintendo fans and people who play games of any kind, giving a perfect example of what a board game could be like in a virtual format. Nintendo's iconic plumber was not the only one to have a game of this type, of course, with Sonic and Pac-Man having games like this as well. There are also the bizarre properties that mimicked this style of game, such as Shrek Super Party and of course, Disney's Party, which not only had the Disney characters you know and love but also introduced... Billy the Ghost. Can I forget about Billy the Ghost? No, absolutely not. I thought I had forgotten about him until this minute, but he's back in my head... and I'm just going to move along now. Mario Party games were all the rage at conception of this idea, but over the years since the Nintendo 64, each subsequent entry got farther and farther away from what people wanted out of this series, until we reached Mario Party 10 for the Wii U, where four people traveled together in a car and had to run from another player playing as Bowser. My friends who have played this game have said that the new modes were absolutely no fun, and it's little surprise that Nintendo decided to shelf the Mario Party franchise for a few years. Fortunately the little board game that could returned to the scene on the Switch back in 2018 with Super Mario Party. This game was a lot of fun, boasting a lot of mini-games that involved HD Rumble, and thus you had to play them with a Joy-Con. This game was a pretty transparent attempt at showing off what the Switch could do, and was a fun enough game all around, adding several new modes that were a lot of fun, but only featured four boards for the iconic "Party mode" which is what the series is best known for, of course. Add in the fact that the game made you win on the three boards before unlocking the fourth board as well as having almost no online play until earlier this year, and it made for a pretty rocky start for this reboot of the franchise. Mario Party is back in a more traditional form finally with Mario Party Superstars, hoping to recapture some of the magic of its original few titles. Will it succeed in that goal? Let's roll the dice and go through this game together today.

So it's a remake, right?

    The premise of this game is simple. The main content of the game, the boards, come from the first three games in the Mario Party timeline, which were for the Nintendo 64. There are five boards here, with two coming from the original, two coming from Mario Party 2, and one coming from Mario Party 3. Not a huge list of boards here at launch, but it is at least one more than what Super Mario Party had, and there is a lot of talk about DLC adding more boards down the road. These boards are definitely appealing to the nostalgia factor, which Nintendo is pretty much always good at, though I didn't own a Nintendo 64 at the time of the release of these games, so I'm not nostalgic for any of these boards. That being said, the boards are gorgeous and the team at NDcube have paid their respects to these lovely boards, while also giving them a kind of history, relating them back to their original appearances at the start of every match. The costumes sadly don't return for the Mario Party 2 boards, which used to have the characters dressed up as astronauts in Space Land, and as wizards in Horror Land, but they're still a lot of fun and play exactly the same as they used to. Space Land is pretty straight forward but with a coin-draining laser that fires at different times in the game, and trust me, you don't want to get hit by that. Horror Land is a lot of fun, featuring the floating eye that can chase you to the other side of the map, making for much easier traversal. Unfortunately there are also Thwomps blocking your path, a day/night cycle which can make certain helpful events not happen when you think they will because they only happen at the opposite time, and also King Boo can send Boos to all three opponents to steal coins or a star at the same time. It's insane how quickly you can ricochet back and forth from first to last place on this board. Peach's Birthday cake is strange since the star doesn't move at all, making it feel almost like a "Monopoly" stage, with Koopa Troopa giving you ten coins every time you pass a certain space, (basically acting as a "Go" space) and if you land on certain spaces if another player has planted a piranha plant there, you lose either coins or a star, depending on the size of the plant (think of houses and hotels in Monopoly). Woody Woods is the sole returning board from Mario Party 3, and I hope you like Monty Mole and running around in circles, because those are two things that this board is abundant in! When I played this board a few days ago with a friend, we played a 20 turn game, and it wasn't until maybe turn 10 that I was able to get a star, just from how many times I had almost gotten to one, and then was turned away by a Monty Mole changing the arrow sign around. It requires a lot more strategy than many of the boards in this collection. Yoshi's Tropical Island rounds out the group here, and it brings the same flair of the original game that Peach's board brings, meaning that the star doesn't move by default to other spaces, though you can switch it with Bowser's space by using Cheep Cheep's Trick. This will never be as good as Bubba's trick, as it was called in the original game, but it does the same thing. A giant cheep cheep comes up and eats Toadette, then spits her out where Bowser just was, leaving Bowser to surf in and take her place. This adds a lot of tension, especially as you get closer to the star, but that's not the only quirk of this board. There are Thwomps monitoring the bridges between the two islands, and depending on where the star is on the board dictates which side of the board you want to be. The way you move the Thwomps out of the way to let you move to the other side is by paying them coins, but you have the option of paying more than what is required, and the next person to cross the bridge will also have to pay that many. This means that if one of your friends wants to trap you on the other side of the board from where the star is, then they can do that, though it would require a lot of money to do so. This game as a whole does a great job of paying tribute to the classic boards, and it honestly makes me want to go back and play the original games just to see what small changes the team may have made in adapting these boards to a modern console.

(The graphics and branding have come a long way since the classic titles!)

    Boards aren't the only things that return here, however. Mini-games from all across the series show up here, all together there are 105 of them. These include some of my personal favorite games, which include mostly games from 4,5, and 6, which all came out for the Gamecube and are the ones that I'm definitely the most familiar with. On top of adding the mini-games, they've also re-orchestrated the music based on which game the mini-game was originally from. I could barely contain my excitement when I heard some of the music from Mario Party 4, even though it was slightly tweaked from the original, I was still extremely happy with it as I was hurrying down the hallway in "Dungeon Duos," trying to escape on my hot air balloon before the opponents could. Not every game here is a winner, there are definitely some odd choices as "Fish Upon a Star," my favorite mini-game from Mario Party 5, was left out to make room for "Tug-O-War," a game which literally caused people to cut their hands because they were rotating the joystick with their palms to go faster, and Nintendo had to settle complaints by shipping gloves to effected owners of the game. It seems like Nintendo would want to keep that mini-game out of the ensemble this time, but oh well! All of the games play well here, and I, for one, am happy to see a return to the normal mini-games after the motion control games from Super Mario Party. They were fine, but I'm happy to see some classics return, that's for sure.

Let's take this party online!

    For maybe the first time ever, this game has online that actually works pretty well! Despite Nintendo having a pretty terrible track record of online play (which certainly didn't get any better with the Expansion Pack, but that's a story for another day), I've played several board games online with a friend, and it works much better than I thought it would. At launch, Super Mario Party allowed you to play one mode online where you could play like 20 mini-games or so, but three years after its initial release, this game finally got an update to give the whole thing online multiplayer, and it seems that the update was more about getting the service ready for Superstars. It's pretty exciting to see, and I hope it bodes well for the future of Nintendo's online offerings. There's not a whole lot to talk about here, it is a little annoying that as soon as you boot the game up, you're brought to a menu of "Offline Play, Local Play, and Online Play," as there's a building on the main menu already dedicated to the Online play option, but if you choose offline play and then go to that building, it says something akin to, "Try this feature in online play mode!" I just don't understand why it's there if it doesn't do anything for that mode, but it's not a big deal. The main menu as a whole still works fine, it just has that as a weird quirk.

    Speaking of the main menu, this is another lovely burst of nostalgia for fans of the classic Mario Party game. The original game was centered around Mushroom Village, and wouldn't you know it, this lovely locale is back once again. The different buildings aren't all run by Toads this time around, with Kamek running the Data House and Shy Guy running the Option House, but it would definitely be weird to see the weirder designed toads from Mario Party 1 appearing in their new HD glory. The opening cutscene from this game is just delightful, that's the only way I can put it. There's a zoom in of the pipe from the original Mario Party, which is where the parties all began, then all the items come flying out of it along with Koopa Troopa with a flag, who was also there for the original game. Koopa Troopa soon gathers up all the players for this game and tells them that they're going to go to some places that they haven't been in a long time, which makes everyone cheer, including the people at home who played the N64 games, I would imagine! It's a simple scene, but it's a cute one for sure, and again, helps to sell the feeling of nostalgia emanating from this title. Though there isn't an actual story mode here, the mentions of the deeper story importance from the past titles in the series give an added feeling of gravity to the proceedings. In Space Land, for example, Toad reminisces about how Bowser was defeated by some brave astronauts and saved the area long ago, and though this is a peaceful time, there are rumors that dark things will come to pass once again, and they need a new Super Star to save them. It's a really neat set up, accompanied from some pixelated goodness courtesy of Mario Party 2's Nintendo 64 roots.

    Mario Party Superstars is a lot of fun all around, and I'm looking forward to playing it for many years, even though it may not get as much attention as the previous games did when I was younger. I only have really three gripes with this game so far. Not enough game boards (which more will hopefully be added as DLC later), not enough characters with only 10 available (but hopefully more will be added later down the line as well), and they didn't put Fish Upon a Star in the game, even though they knew that it was my favorite mini-game from Mario Party 5, and I don't know if I can forgive them for that travesty. If you liked the old Mario Party games, I would say definitely give this one a try, especially if it's been a while since you've played one. This is one party that I am definitely glad that I accepted the invitation to.

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends! I hope you've all had a great week and that you're doing well. It's been a long time since I've actually bought a Mario Party game, I think it was Mario Party 6 and I was still in Elementary school at that time, so it's certainly been a while. I'm having a great time with this one so far and hopefully I'll continue having fun as I play with more of my friends! So far, I've mainly played as Rosalina, but if they were to add Monty Mole back from Super Mario Party, I would play as him most of the time probably. Love that little guy. I've been Jonathan, your Self-Proclaimed Super Star, and I'll talk to you again next week!