Mario Party on Portables | Taking The Party On The Go

[Music] there's something special about a good old game of Mario Party you know getting together with a few friends to mash some buttons plan out your upcoming turns on the board of your choice building and crushing alliances basically at the toss of a dice it is such a good formula that has worked so well for generations for the most part and then the mario party games started getting bad etc etc this is a story I'm pretty sure most you are caught up with opinions on the console mario party games are already well established like how the day/night mechanic and Mario Party six makes that the best one that's just an objective fact whether or not you agree with it is not my problem however there is a side to this story that doesn't get discussed anywhere near as often Oh God Mario Party on portables conceptually this makes perfect sense Nintendo's handheld consoles sell like crazy so there is definitely a market for taking the party on the go these are also not numbered entries so this allows the developers to try something new what could possibly go wrong oh alright to be fair those scores are based on when the games launched maybe looking back at these in retrospect we'll find something special here five parties in three different houses I know people are gonna bring up Super Mario Party since it's on the switch and one of the main console selling points is the portability but for some reason that game doesn't support handheld mode years later that still doesn't make any sense so that one is disqualified and no we're not gonna talk about Mario Party II here it was a cute little eReader novelty sure but I'm gonna need a lot more time to build up the willpower to actually play it so back to square one back to 2005 starting off we have Mario Party advanced and this game is primarily single-player all we're off to a great start hi there hello before we really dive into things I gotta talk about just how this game starts up we are making a passport apparently you got your name here of birth no date just a month that's interesting you make an avatar wow that's that's kind of cool actually Mario Party advance did mieze before meas were a thing okay uh yeah yeah that's me alright you then get to input your favorite hobby I'm a big apostrophe guy myself and finally a random comment I couldn't really fit the whole thing so like comment subscribe that'll get the job done you then get asked what your biggest dream is and what your silliest secret is I'm sorry we're getting really personal here I'm not really all that comfortable saying all these personal details okay I sure hope no one finds out and the real kicker is none of the stuff matters as far as I know there is no other point in the game where it calls back to the answers you provided so what's the point the main mode of the game is shroom City the only thing even remotely reminiscent of the series staple board games and you're in a car as well Wow we should have saw the dark times coming long ago you roll the dice you move across the board to specifically marked locations that's it whenever you get to a new spot a little cutscene will play out starting off a brand new quest usually leading to the most basic of minigames you could possibly imagine or even a fetch quest you know the most fun thing you could ever do at a party I love the snowman one he challenges you to baseball swing for the fences I doubt you can do it he's dead now there really isn't that much more here than that you got a bunch of these locations all across the map and by completing enough of the challenges you can travel over to Bowser's place and play a special minigame against him you do that enough times that's the game you only have a few dice rolls per round as well you play minigames to try to gain more if you run out of dice and hit zero well that's it you either move on to do something else or you go back in for more failing the minigames is often common as well they're pretty vague with their instructions so expect to consistently start off at the beginning and plan your route from there but that's fine that's basically essential some of the quests you can only do with specific characters the eye ball has a princess only policy apparently and a cute little dinosaur you know that could impossibly do I suppose if you're looking for a time waster this will certainly do that this isn't a party this is more or less the video game equivalent of doing chores and not in the fun animal crossing way I will say this much I do think the game sprites are pretty nice you know I've always been a fan of the game style even if we lost some playable characters along the way rest in peace waluigi and as for the minigames well their minigames alright but like I said before Mario Party advance is primarily single-player so these games are all about either getting to the end or getting a bunch of points and in general the whole lack of competition just makes this entire thing feel pretty pointless there are a couple multiplayer games you can play with a link cable so that's appreciated but they're off to the side in a separate mode they feel like even more of a total afterthought oh but we do have a bunch of toys that we can gain access to that's fun how can I possibly forget about the extra bit where you can guess what direction the stick is gonna fall in ha boy this party is too much for me oh hey there's a sheep counting one as well which is great because this game is putting me to sleep I mean I guess I just didn't know what to expect I mean obviously a gameboy advance wasn't gonna come close to providing an experience that the console mario party games can but you know you didn't have to make a Game Boy Advance game right but now we have the Nintendo DS this is a console that could better handle a Mario extravaganza paralyzed the D s was already kinda sort of an n64 you can put in your pocket and it sold ridiculously well so there was no shortage of people to play with now the time may be right to give this type of game a shot and I mean look at the boxart they're running across blue spaces things are already looking up my god yeah this this is Mario Party on the DS Oh awesome finally in a more typical Mario Party fashion we have multiple boards to play on all of which having a different theme for different characters you roll the dice you're save up points to get stars this is honest-to-goodness Mario Party and yeah it's pretty good we even have a story mode that ties everything together Bowser gets his hands on a special scepter that shrinks everybody down to a very tiny size and the only way to reverse it is to collect sky crystals by defeating the bosses of the board's simple premise this is a mario party game after all but the thing that's really cool is the game fully embraces the smaller scope for example the first board is a flower garden where all the plants tower over you in size one of the later ones is a pinball table where getting knocked around is one of the primary gimmicks and the minigames they may not all hit the tiny aesthetic but most of them do running away from a vacuum cleaner feeding a shy guy candy a game of chicken where you see who stops the furthest down a chalkboard without face-planting it's really cool stuff do you remember the minigames shock drop and roll from Mario Party 2 pretty fun one well you give it a new coat of paint you call it rotisserie rampage and it is fresh once again this game also uses the touch screen so it plays differently as well as a matter of fact there are multiple games that use the touch screen making good use of one of the DS's best features likewise a few of the games also use the microphone making good use of one of the DS's least interesting features you know kudos to the developers for giving it multiple shots but microphones in Mario Party don't mix I'm sorry just not my thing overall they are more or less on par with your standard run-of-the-mill minigames but the style really gives this game its own identity it's kind of like the pop-up book aesthetic from Mario Party 3 the chances of getting together a group of people to knock out a board game or two may not be as high as it was back when the game was new and even still it doesn't compete with some of the best you can find on consoles but regardless it is a damn good effort outside of the story we also have a handful of multiplayer modes a decent amount of collectables to go for and also a pretty nifty puzzle mode pulling in multiple puzzle games from the previous mario parties I remember playing puzzle parties so much back in Mario Party 3 and I loved that it's found its place here too this entire mode is actually pretty cool and it's a really nice way to celebrate a part of the series history boy do I ever love foreshadowing so this is pretty impressive we went from absolutely pointless with the Mario Party advance to not one of the best but definitely one of the more interesting games in the series with Mario Party DS I mean at its core it just feels like Mario Party which you know may not sound like that big of a deal for a game titled Mario Party but boid while of foreshadowing if you want to check the game out it's also available digitally on the Wii U which eliminated any chance of playing a multiplayer so you know not everything about the game is good advanced NDS where the only portable contributions developed by the initial series developers Hudson soft advance may not be good but at least its original and I'll give them credit they worked with what they got I guess but I'll be damned if you're a fan of this series I would definitely recommend DS oh oh and now is where things go completely off the rails you know how the development team shifted from Mario Party 9 from Hudson soft 2 nd cube and a lot of people hated it well guess who developed the 3ds games these three games go back to that initial idea of hey they're not main numbered entries we can do something new here and on almost all accounts they do a terrible job evoking the vibe that a good old-fashioned mario party game should have sure maybe having a party on the go is destined to fail and the DS game is simply a fluke but considering 9 and 10 were developed around these games and we're all aware of how well they were received I just don't think they really cared you may have assumed that with the previous game being good and had jumped a new hardware things are gonna get even better but no oh no the story on 3ds begins with island tour and while it does start up with a minor glimmer of hope it doesn't take long for that to get totally dashed I'm gonna be straight up with all you the board's here they just suck all of them for one they're all linear and while the car concept gave us linear boards as well at least that was done in an effort to make turns go by faster but also we're back to the each person takes a turn approach so now it feels even longer for a turn to finish since everyone's going down the same straight line separately while the person in first place is more guaranteed to win than ever before terrible gimmicks - having to constantly duck and cover from a potential Banzai bill blast and an otherwise ridiculously short course may be one of the worst boards in series history that being said though the minigames there quite alright I'll give the game credit island tour is home to a solid bunch of mini games some of which using some of the features of the 3d apps like the gyroscopes in the touchscreen and thankfully there are some extra minigame exclusive modes and those are definitely more fun than any of the boards one of the minigames I really liked is one where you draw on the touchscreen so you can keep track of 12 enemy cards that is one of the most clever minigames in the entire series there's even a few augmented reality games - yeah that stack of cards the 3ds initially came with you remember those in practice it's a little more novel than it is fun but I got a slight kick out of it graphically the game looks okay so at least the jump in hardware showed something positive here but overall island tour is a bit of a train wreck the following attempt was Mario Party Star rush thankfully this one fares a bit better rather than attempting to put a spin on what worked in the past this time we kind of just got a ton of ideas thrown at a board and whether or not they were gonna stick is totally up in the air the main feature here is toad scramble where a group of four toads move around the board collecting coins and getting stars as you would expect but everybody moves independently at the same time and you're free to move in any direction as you wish playing as generic toads is pretty lame but what objective you have is to recruit other Mario characters to join your party and doing so gives you some of their benefits for the rest of the game they allow you to use special dice blocks and they can also handle specific obstacles across the boards and another kind of neat example minigames don't really pop up super often but if you get to reach a boss fight rather than all four characters jumping in at the same time the remaining characters have to rush over to the spot while you score some points early on say what you will about the newer mario party games that is a really smart idea you see this is what I wanted when we're talking about an original take on Mario Party for a portable console it's not necessarily a ton of fun it's difficult to come back against someone who's in the lead the visuals are overall pretty bland and unoriginal and in the later stages you'll be repeating the same boss battles that you just did not too long beforehand but it's still an original concept that's not terrible so it's a noteworthy attempt in my opinion probably why we saw a return in Super Mario part which was pretty fun there too we got no stick falling toy this time around but I think I can manage aside from that there are a couple of extra modes and they kind of fall flat once again they threw together a bunch of ideas and hope for the best there's a random rhythm game in here it has no bearing on the rest of the game the songs you can choose our okay and the actual game part isn't that fun so why and then there's the minigames and they're pretty unremarkable as well star rush features a shockingly small number of them but we also have the coin Athan mode this kind of makes up for it characters race around a board based on the coins that you pick up in time based games while also picking up some items along the way to benefit yourself and screw over your opponents it's fast it's frantic and it's fun holy cow we have a fun one here everybody listen star rush isn't gonna win any awards or anything like that but it's not that terrible so that's nice I guess it is definitely better than Island tour though so things are beginning to look up I shouldn't have said that out loud Mario Party is a massive successful franchise and it should be celebrated how did they screw up such a basic idea the final game we have today is Mario Party the top 100 bringing together the top 100 minigames from the 10 console games and throwing them onto the 3ds and it really doesn't do much more than that I have multiple questions first off why is this on the 3ds I am all for remaking classics but shouldn't this be on the switch instead wouldn't that have made more sense I would argue it's tougher mashing buttons or spinning the circle pad on a 3ds than on a controller so some of the games that we have here just don't feel right also the top 100 according to who nobody asked me which games were good certainly would not have put crank to rank on there definitely none of the chance games those only kind of work when you're playing the board game there's no dungeon duo's that seemed like a shoe-in as far as I'm concerned that is one of the best 2v2 games in the series ultimately what we have here it's not a terrible collection I just think the name the top 100 is very misleading it's not the top 100 it's just 100 thankfully books were miss here that's nice hell that's a top 10 right there none of the minigames from Mario Party 6 utilized the day-night system that's really lame that's what made those games special in the first place some entries also only have very little representation here it's kind of weird not simply picking 10 minigames from each of the 10 console games to make things even oh and we do have a board game based on star rush and there's only one very tiny board come on why admittedly I did enjoy minigame Island that made a comeback here it's the main single-player mode where you just plow through a bunch of the minigames in order that's it it is a fun ride because I already enjoyed these minigames in the better console versions but if you can find the game for cheap top 100 may be worth it alone just for this mode it is the most substantial and varied mode of any of the 3ds mario parties it's a sad state of affairs but that's where we are if we had returning boards and more returning modes we would have a potential masterpiece here believe it or not there's a lot more to Mario Party than just for the minigames I played through it had a decent time put the console down didn't really feel much of anything afterwards and yeah that's Mario Party the top 100 oh but hey at least we have 3d support whoa dang it's like I really want to be playing something else instead I really don't want to be that much of a downer here but it's safe to say that the legacy of portable mario party games is absolutely wild Mario Party DS is the clear highlight here since you know it's an actual mario party game the other four certainly experiment with relatively interesting ideas but aside from some bright moments and star rush and top 100 and of course advances falling stick truly a gem of the GBA library it all just feels like a waste of time once nd cube took over the series it felt like simply a matter of releasing games as much as they possibly could but not releasing quality ones Mario Party may not be for everybody I understand that but there is still an identity to uphold because it has a massive fan base either stick to what works and polish it up really nicely or really sometime to your original idea before putting out a finished product don't just make some software we roll a dice on a board and call it a day definitely check out Mario Party DS think about star rush laugh at the rest that is my best recommendation if we never get a dedicated handheld console from Nintendo again then we can confidently say that the portable mario party games is one hell of a five-game long rollercoaster of a sub series maybe if the next mario party game on switch has handhelds play then we'll have something to look forward to it can't possibly get any worse than these just please bring back the falling stick toy that's all I ask it's all I'm asking I'm a simple man I see a stick I want it to fall I like to thank you all think the same way [Music]

Channel: AntDude

Views: 846,061

Keywords: AntDude, Review, Video Review, Game Review, Mario Party, Mario Party portable, Portable Mario Party, Mario Party Advance, Mario Party DS, Mario Party Island Tour, Mario Party Star Tour, Mario Party Top 100, Mario Party 3DS, Mario Party Advance review, Mario Party DS review, Mario Party 3DS review, Mario Party Island Tour review, Mario Party Star Rush review, Mario Party Top 100 review, Mario Party The Top 100, Worst Mario Party Games, Mario Party review

Id: AsN1JT2mw0A

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020