Super Mario Party: Making friendships by ruining them one friend at a time.

Many believe that the best of friends are forged when people go through the hardest situations. While no game can come close to that kind of experience on its own, the closest would have to be Mario Party. What might look like a harmless party game, can quickly turn into one of the most cutthroat competitive games you can play in a group. Why? Minigames, and Power stars. That being said though, get a good group of people together, and these games can be some of the best games to play together. While there was a quality shift, especially during the Wii and into the Wii U, Super Mario Party boasts as being a return to form for the series. How well does it pull it off though?

It should be noted that this version of Mario Party doesn't just have the regular boards and Minigames. Alongside the regular boards, there is Partner Party, a mode where two people work together to obtain the most amount of stars in a board style similar to those found in, I want to say, Mario Party Star Rush. In this mode, you can go anywhere you want on the board, in any direction, but the boards are set up in a way so that it's kinda like a Mathematics puzzle as you try and land on the space that you want to with the dice roll you're given. My only complaint about regular Mario Party and Partner Party (that apply to them specifically) is that the boards can at times feel very short, especially in Partner Party, where the amount of spaces you can move depends on both players dice rolls, any items used, and the dice rolls of up to three partners per player. There have been a number of times when I've tried to get the star, and due to the layout of the board and the number of spaces, I was unable to get it cause I rolled too high of a number, though that does come with the charm of the mode, so it's up to interpretation.

Along with this are the usual "come here to play random mini-games", "come here to play mini-games in a set order", and two new modes, one where four players have to work together to make it down a river, and a mode focused on rhythm-based minigames. These are a lot more fun then one would think, just because of the absurdity of them at times. Most of my experience with Super Mario Party comes from the fact that I brought it with me to the Tech Games Fest Beyond this year (shoutouts to everyone there who played it), and because we made it our goal to try and unlock the four characters, we all had a laugh at some of the things we did while playing these modes, from the loose definitions of teamwork, someone who was playing Yoshi during a Boomerang Minigame that was swinging the Joycon so hard it made it almost impossible to see the targets, to even Waluigi's fancy dances in a simplified version of Just Dance.

One problem though with Super Mario Party though is that, like with any game built as Multiplayer focused, Singleplayer is dull, almost lifeless because the life of the game is who you play with, it's not satisfying to play with the computer. That being said, this Mario Party does support online... for just the minigames. I don't see the point of this, because while yes Mario Party is best played with friends on the same TV, Online play is the next best thing, especially if I want to play with people on the other side of the globe, not to mention it would be a nice way to sell the Nintendo Switch Online Service to those who aren't sold on the online NES games. It comes off as a missed opportunity. Another point against it, though not for any major fault of its own, is that compared to some of the other big games on the Switch, Super Mario Party feels small in terms of content. What makes it the most obvious is what's coming out next month, Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. While it scratches a different itch from Smash, due to the amount of content in Smash, it's hard to recommend Super Mario Party when looking at it from a financial perspective. That being said, I do hope that Super Mario Party gets post-launch support like Splatoon and Arms did, some new boards, new character. Or, for all I know, that's all being saved for a Mario Party 12... oh yeah, forgot to mention that Super Mario Party's technically Mario Party 11, yet the 17th Mario Party game. It's a safe bet another is coming, if not for the Switch then for another console.

While Super Mario Party is fun, it's not something you're going to be sinking a lot of time into unless you have people to play with. It's the main reason why I probably won't be playing it much going forward, though it will get some use at events just due to the nature of the game. Unless you've got friends to play it with, wait for a price drop, or just outright skip it. Come next week, to get into the Pokemon mood, Pokemon Stadium for the Nintendo 64.

Oh and if anyone's curious as to why I didn't bother bringing up the presentation or the new dual console minigames, the presentation's ok, nothing overly interesting though, it looks and sounds like a Mario game. As for the dual system games, I've got no experience with those as I only have one console and I'm the only one I know who has the game (that doesn't require a passport to get to).