Most know Mario Party as a game that is not entirely based in skill. Despite it being filled with minigames that do rely on skill to win, all the other parts of the game conspire to take away any gains that any such skill may have imparted and then some. This often cruel randomness is a key part of what makes it the perfect Jeff Gerstman torture device.
For the longest time, I had not played much of the Mario Party series. As the eldest of four siblings, this might come as a surprise - in theory this is the perfect setup to be a great game for family fun. Unfortunately Mario Party and the games thereafter came out just a bit too late. In 1998, while I was still happily gaming away in my 18th year, my younger 16 year old brother had already by this time decided he was far too "mature" for anything so childish as videogames. My 13 year old sister had never been into them at all to begin with. I did sometimes play with my youngest sibling, my 11 year old brother, but our gaming times didn't often overlap with him in primary school and me in university. And so, my first experience with the series is probably considered the worst way to play it: as a single player game only.
As I grew older due to my unfortunate relationship with linear time, very few opportunities to play the newer Mario Parties came up. The longer game length made it very unlikely to be played at the university videogame club. This is primarily because a complete game of Mario Party takes far too long, and is also not Soul Calibur 2, Super Smash brothers Melee or Halo 2 deathmatch. Or indeed Naruto Gekitou Ninja Tasien 3.
While I have in past referred to these blogs as reviews of the specific games, it's not exactly a term I think is necessarily a reasonable descriptor. I am by no means going to argue that a person need to complete a game before they can review it. However, a game like Mario Party is structured in a way that makes the 1 hour time limit make it impossible to experience enough of the game to fairly judge it. My playthrough encompassed a complete run on the first board with CPU opponents, with the remaining time spent trying out some minigames and other extra modes. So while I certainly have a good feel for the fundamentals of this game, how those are applied in subsequent boards could drastically alter my opinion. Feel free to keep that in mind as you read on.
Mario Party Island Tour is a game that, due to the portable nature of the system, is incentivised to try to make a better single player experience than its console brethren. Sure, if Nintendo had a halfway decent online infrastructure at the time, then there could have been online play, but..... that would require Nintendo to have a halfway decent online infrastructure at the time. A feat they are barely capable of now.
Mario Party Island Tour is surprisingly good looking for a 3DS game. The early 2010s is when I feel the Mario aesthetic really started to come together to be relatively consistent across the various Mario series. The look is certainly less "plastic" than the New Super Mario games, and somewhat closer to what Mario Galaxy was going for, albeit on less powerful hardware. Colours pop, character models are simple but rounded, and animations are simple yet pleasing.
Choosing the first board, Perilous Palace Path, I was faced with the easiest choice I have had to make in months. Who to play as.
What stands out immediately regarding this board is how different it is to a traditional Mario party board. The track that characters take on the usual Mario Party boards form a complete circuit. As you roll dice, your character laps around the course, picking up stars as they go. In this game, rather than a circuit, the board is a single path, with the winner being the player who gets to the end first. This dramatic change in determining who wins removes one of the most random parts of how Mario party games are played, where the winner is whoever has the most stars at the end of the final turn. Stars in these games are not just awarded from skill, but also through a variety of random elements. This is not to say either style is inherently better, it really comes down to personal choice. Given the choice, I would chose this style for a single player game, and the more random for multiplayer. What can I say, I love a bit of chaos with my party games.
This playthrough was relatively brisk, but was not without frustrations. The other three characters were of course played by CPU players, yet I was forced to watch each of them go through all the motions of taking their turns. The fact there isn't a fast-forward or even skip button is baffling.
The minigames in Island Tour are surprisingly brisk. While they typically do not last very long, these typically last for at most 3 short rounds. Not one of the minigames I played lasted for longer than a minute. This shifts the focus of the game to the board game part, which with the inability to speed up CPU play, makes for a game where a significant portion of it is completely outside of player control.
Some of the mini games explicitly reference Mario Galaxy
Despite the changes, my time in this first board was not without at least some Mario Party frustration. At one point I was punished for being infront by swapping places with someone much further behind. However, this was not nearly as losing after the completion of the game because another character collected more doodads and was therefore awarded enough stars to win.
In addition to the main game modes, there are additional game modes that do not come up in the regular rotation. Firstly is a relatively well made hexagonal sliding puzzle game names amusingly, Emergency Hexit. I'm not entirely well versed enough in match-colour puzzles to say which it is based on, but I'm sure it is by no means a brand new idea. Match 7 of the same hexes and they disappear, with all hexes above sliding down and potentially setting up those delicious combos.
The other extra minigame I was able to try was one that used the rarely used 3DS gimmick of AR cards. For those unaware, the 3DS came with a pack of AR cards that could be recognised by the external cameras to render a 3D element over live footage that move when the player does. It was a neat idea, but was always a bit finicky if the light was not perfect, and the illusion typically did not hold up well when movement of the system was encouraged.
The small AR games included here is unfortunately of the janky variety. There's a tower that you have a character climb, and as the character twists around the tower, you need to physically move around the card to keep your avatar visible. However, it breaks very badly with movement. The other is a very simple shooting game, where you shoot goombas that walk around in the environment. It's a very simple minigame, and despite there being much less movement required, was still quite janky.
At the end, despite what may seem to be a review composed of mostly negative points, I found this game to be enjoyable. By no means a 10/10 masterpiece to be debated throughout time as the Citizen Kane of video games, but still, fun.
Next time, I complete the tenth game and unlock my prize of a Nice Wine. And I will achieve this via a Nintendo DS game I have absolutely no idea about: Thrillville Off The Rails. I am assuming rollercoasters are inviolved!
*I mean, kinda. The mid 2000s featured an absolute deluge of complete and utter trash anime, so dropping it as an interest wasn't exactly difficult nor particularly original. I wasn't the only person who, about 5 episodes into s-CRY-ed thought "I could be doing literally ANYTHING ELSE right now". These days I find myself contemplating weather to look back into anime, as I understand there's some pretty good stuff out there. The one with the underground golfing looks pretty neat!
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