Nintendo’s flagship party game has returned with Mario Party 10, giving us plenty of ways to sabotage these strange people that we call “friends” and “family.” In the lead up to its release, the title was sold on the idea that it was finally time for longtime Mushroom Kingdom antagonist, Bowser, to crash the party in his own, dedicated mode. In addition to the standard mode and the new Amiibo Party, which let you use those hard earned figurines as game pieces in exclusive boards, and it was hard not to get caught up in the pre-launch hype. Now that we’ve had a good amount of time to digest everything that MP 10 has to offer, we break down what works, (and what doesn’t,) in Mario’s latest bash.
Mario Party
This mode is the traditional format that started in Mario Party 9, for better or worse. In this co-op and competitive hybrid, each player takes turns rolling the dice, which moves their shared car across one of the game’s five boards. By landing on certain spaces, winning mini games, and using up a wealth of luck, each player receives mini stars as they fight towards the end. Whoever has the most stars by the time the end of the board is reached wins, although this isn’t as easy as it sounds. New to this installment, rolling certain numbers will release padlocks on the Game Pad that’s containing a jailed Bowser. Whoever rolls the last number needed to unlock him takes a big hit to their star count, making even simple turns take an anxiety inducing detour.
For as fun and random as this mode can be, this was easily my least favorite. The fact that the much panned MP 9 format made a return is mind boggling, especially since working together isn’t nearly as fun as going against each other. In addition, while I understand that games like these aren’t supposed to be particularly competitive, and reward luck just as much as it rewards skill, there are too many times where you feel like you have no control over the outcome of games. Outside of special die that help you narrow down the numbers you can roll, it kills all excitement when you’re penalized, (or even rewarded,) for doing absolutely nothing.
Amiibo Party
Does Amiibo Party make waking up at embarassing hours to line up outside of toy stores for those Toad or Rosalina figures? Kind of, if you’re a fan of the classic format that drove games 1-8. Here, you use your Super Mario Bros amiibo as your game pieces as you travel around a square board, collecting coins and stars along the way. As in the days of old, the winner is the person who owns the most stars after a certain amount of rounds are completed. To make things more interesting, after a round is finished once each player rolls the die once, a mini-game triggers to break up the action. Separated in free for all, 3 on 1 and 2 on 2 games, most of the games are highly enjoyable, making it all the more rewarding to win those coins.
Strategy comes into play much more in Amiibo Party compared to the main mode. For one, while the layout of the board is the same regardless, each quarter is divided into a different theme, based on each playable character. What this means, is that once changed through game play or selected at the start of a match, each section can have different hazards and bonuses which change mid game! This makes the backstabbing nature of old school Mario Party more prominent, since certain themes make it easier to steal stars or sabotage your buddies when you’re behind. It’s devilish fun!
It’s just a little ridiculous that you have to use your amiibo for EVERY. SINGLE. THING! I can’t imagine anything would disrupt the flow of game play by having to tap your amiibo to roll the dice. Tap it to activate power ups. Tap it to make choices. Even it being this tedious wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t far too easy to perform the wrong actions. Tap at the wrong time, and you can waste a precious turn with an accidental move. Not to mention that the mode gets old quick since the map layout gets tiresome, but it’s still an upgrade over the co-op mode above.
Bowser Party
The star of the show. In this mode, five players get in on the mix, with a special set of Bowser themed mini-games to terrorize the heroes with. Much like the standard mode, the four, non-evil players share a car, which travels along one of three maps, (two of the original five are excluded, sadly.) Only, this time, the team based mechanics feel justified, since they have to work together to avoid Bowser, who plays opposite of them with the Game Pad. Their goal is to make it to the end of the map before all their health is drained by the evil kidnapper of princesses.
To balance out the heroes’ four dice rolls each turn, Bowser gets four die of his own, (assuming he doesn’t gather bonuses that give him even more.) If he manages to catch up to his opponents, the group plays a four on one game that revolves around Bowser damaging the other team to drain their hearts, (which replace the mini stars.) If a member is KO’d, they leave the car and cost their team a roll. If they avoid damage, then they live to fight another day, while the King of the Koopas attempts to halt their progress on the next turn.
I want to start off by saying this mode is great fun. Aside from a few terrible mini games, most of the ones offered are a blast, while forcing you to approach them differently from the typical cutthroat nature of Mario Party games. With that said, traveling the board is unbalanced for Bowser, where achieving KO’s is unbalanced in favor of the team! You see, when Bowser doesn’t catch his opponents, he gets a second roll, increasing the chances that the four players opposing him will have to face off one way or another. Yet, when KO’s do happen, it’s absurdly easy to revive. Between the numerous spaces, the half way point that awards more health, and luck based sections that can undo all of the Game Pad user’s hard work in a single turn! Even more so, it feels like skill is rarely rewarded against luck. In fact, even when I would sweep all the mini-games, the only time I would win is when the team made it to the end, but guessed the wrong star!
Which brings me to the actual finish. Once the co-op crew gets to the end, (which needs a specific set of rolls since the three spaces in front of it are all hazards,) the team has to guess between one of three enemies that holds the star they need to win. Guess right, and victory is theirs! Guess wrong, and they get knocked back a space behind the hazards and forfeit the rest of their turn, even if some teammates haven’t rolled. This gives Bowser plenty of time to maul them as they scramble to guess the right answer. So really, it all comes down to how lucky they are at the end, where everything before it feels like fluff. Fun fluff, but fluff nonetheless.
In the end, I had a good time with Mario Party 10. I just wish that after all this time, Nintendo would come up with a better balance between skill and luck. While both are necessary for a fun board game, too often does it feel like your actions have little to do with you winning and losing. Add to the fact that the biggest mode in the game continues to adopt such an unpopular mechanic, and you get a party that manages to be good through its new ideas, but never gets to the point of being great. With its few unlockables, barebones presentation, (it doesn’t have a proper title screen,) and handful of boards, these nitpicks round out a party that could’ve been legendary, but ended up just okay.
Derek’s Thoughts:
Mario Party is a series that has always been close to my heart. The first games in the series were arguably the first party games that I ever played, and my fondest middle school memory is the entire year that a batch of my closest friends and I played Mario Party 7 every lunch-hour, every single day of the week (it was pretty amazing having a friend live that close to the school).
After MP7, I fell away from the series for a time. Then I picked up Mario Party: Island Tour at launch and quickly returned it (I don’t think I need to get into why), but when Mario Party 10 was announced last E3 with its new (and awesome-looking) Bowser mode and Amiibo support, I was already sold.
Truth be told, I’ve been having a blast with the game. That being said, I’ve only delved into its titular mode once, and I don’t know if I ever will again. As Josh notes above, it’s fairly mundane to have everyone working together, and the heavily luck-based gameplay of the mode doesn’t elicit further playthroughs, especially when the game’s other modes are far, far more interesting.
Amiibo Party is cute as heck, and it’s where I’ve been spending the majority of my Mario Party 10 playtime. It feels the most like classic Mario Party. The ‘boards’ however, are unfortunately tiny and uninteresting, and while each quadrant has a different feel, the stage as a whole amounts to nothing but a square, forgoing the interesting, themed game boards and multiple paths of the series’ previous entries.
As Josh mentioned above, Bowser Party is again, a blast. Playing from Bowser’s perspective puts an entirely new spin on the game, and the Bowser Party mini games are easily the most fun of the entire bunch. This is definitely the ‘your friends will hate you mode’ as the cat and mouse game between Bowser and the other players will lead to a multitude of swearing, yelling, and more. People complain about this mode being unbalance, but after 20 rounds of Bowser Party, we’re sitting at 11 for Bowser and 9 for everyone else. I haven’t, at any point, felt as though this one was unfair, so I do imagine that it could have a lot to do with who you’re playing with.
I think the most interesting (and toughest to swallow) part of Mario Party 10 is just how different it can be from the series’ classic iterations. I played mostly with friends who haven’t played the franchise in years (and don’t overly follow gaming) and they were all pretty upset to see what Mario Party had become. Yes, they had a ton of fun with mini games and tapping their assigned Amiibo every two seconds, but the fun of the board variety, of getting to purchase a star just before your opponent and completely screwing them over, or of changing the location of a star’s location while a friend is just spaces away, are all gone. These are the moments we tend to remember the most about our countless Mario Party match-ups, and unfortunately, these are the moments that have disappeared completely.
Mario Party 10 is a lot of fun, but if you’ve been away from the series (like I have), you do need to change your expectations of just what Mario Party is. Your friends will complain and probably say that it stinks, but they’ll still have a gas, and in any case, it’ll give you all a nice break from Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros.