With 23 years of history under its belt, the Mario Party series has certainly had its fair share of highs and lows, with its highs representing some of the most fun I’ve had playing local multiplayer games with friends, and its lows being… well, the near opposite of that. Thankfully, Mario Party Superstars is a celebration of only the best moments this long-running franchise has had. It gathers 100 of the most enjoyable minigames, five excellent boards from the first three Mario Party games, and an amalgamation of some of the best rules, mechanics, and quality-of-life improvements into a single Switch game. It’s still unsurprisingly dull without friends, and not all of the minigames are worthy of the “superstar” label, but on the whole this is quite simply the best Mario Party has been in a very long time.
2018’s Super Mario Party represented a “back to basics” shift for the series, and Mario Party Superstars has taken that idea several steps further by focusing in on the N64 and early GameCube days. There are no motion-controlled minigames, no item capsules, no character-specific custom dice blocks, no buddies to recruit, and of course, no party car. Just four players, each taking turns rolling dice, moving along a virtual game board, playing minigames to earn coins, and using those coins to buy stars. And maybe it's because it has been a long while since we’ve had a Mario Party game without some sort of extra gimmick, but this simplicity is incredibly refreshing, and I certainly didn’t miss having something there to mix up the formula.
It helps that the five boards are some of the best-designed in Mario Party’s history. Yoshi’s Tropical Island is an excellent starter board with an easy-to-understand layout and a fun twist involving the star marker swapping between its two islands – it’s sure to lead to heartbreak and elation in equal measure among your friends. Space Land, meanwhile, is a go-to when I want to play without any game-changing board mechanics and just get that pure virtual board game experience; Peach’s Birthday Cake offers a completely different style of play by keeping the star in one position and sprinkling spots where you can plant coin or star-stealing piranha plants; Woody Woods forces you to think several moves ahead thanks to its constantly changing arrows that send you down different paths; and finally, Horror Land is a personal favorite of mine because of its fun day/night mechanic and a King Boo that can let you steal a star from every other player... if you get a skeleton key, 150 coins, and are able to reach him while it’s night. It’s an insane hail Mary win condition to shoot for, but if you are able to manage it, it’s sure to be a story you and your friends won’t soon forget.
Developer NdCube has done a fantastic job of bringing both the looks and sounds of these boards up to modern standards as well. Character models are pretty much identical to how they looked in Super Mario Party three years ago, but the remade boards are immaculately detailed, with Peach’s Birthday Cake being a clear standout thanks to the hyper-realistic and delicious-looking snacks decorating the linear path around the cake. It also can’t be understated that not only have all of the boards and nearly all of the 100 minigames undergone dramatic visual transformations, but they’ve also gained new instrumental arrangements for every song that accompanies them. You can even unlock the songs from the store and listen to both the classic and modern versions of each one in the Data House, which is great because while the N64 songs still hold up, their modernized versions are even better.
But while the boards are all impressive, the one bummer is that there are still only five of them. That is a step up over the dismal four that Super Mario Party offered, but still not on par with just about every single other numbered Mario Party game in the past, which have almost always included six. Even just adding one more board from Mario Party 3 would have gone a long way toward making the package feel more robust, and it would have evened out the balance of boards from the three N64 games at the same time.
Minigame Madness
At the heart of any good Mario Party game is its minigames, and fortunately almost none of the 100 that were cherry picked from every numbered entry in the series disappoint. You’ve got your all-time classics like Bumper Balls, Shy Guy Says, Hot Rope Jump, Revers-A-Bomb, and Booksquirm, just to name a few favorites. What makes these games so great is their sheer simplicity, plus a small added twist. Bumper Balls, for instance, is literally just a game about bumping your rivals off a small circular platform while riding a bouncy ball. But the twist is that in order to knock an opponent off, you have to put yourself in a dangerous position by building up momentum and bumping them close to the edge, which puts you in prime position to get bumped off yourself.
And then you also have some picks that might not immediately come to mind, yet wind up being great selections because of the variety they bring to the table. Honeycomb Havoc, a game in which you just take turns picking one or two fruits at a time and try not to be the one who’s forced to grab a honeycomb, may not be the most exciting game in the world based on what’s happening on-screen, but the metagame that’s happening between you and your friends as you’re all able to see their loss or victory several moves ahead makes it one of my favorites out of the whole pack.
Very few, if any, are complete duds. That said, there are a couple of minigames that are so close to each other that including both of them feels like a waste of space. Leaf Leap and What Goes Up both have you racing upwards by hopping up platforms as fast as you can; Pokey Pummel and Mecha Marathon both have you pressing a button (or buttons) really fast; and Roll Call and Goomba Spotting both have you counting the number of things that appear on screen. All are fun games, and none are completely identical, but when you consider that classic minigames such as Platform Peril, Locked Out, and Running of the Bulb didn’t make the final cut, it’s hard not to feel a bit disappointed at these handful of double-ups.
My only other gripe with the minigame selection is that many of the 1v3 minigames are so skewed to favor either the single player or the group of three that it really doesn’t make it much fun for either. In Piranha’s Pursuit, for instance, it doesn’t even feel like you’re part of the minigame when you’re on the team of three, Archer-ival feels actively terrible when you’re not the archer, and Tidal Toss feels nearly impossible to win as a solo player if even one of the team of three is any good. Oh, and there’s the iconic, N64 controller-destroying Tug o’ War, which actually requires an in-game warning to advise you not to use your palm to rotate the control stick in order to avoid damaging either your Joy-Con or your hand.
That said, there are a couple of genuinely great 1v3 minigames, like Tackle Takedown, which is a football minigame that has the team of three attempting to tackle the single player who is able to use three bursts of speed to try and juke them out of their boots. But the majority are underwhelming and I always groaned when I saw one was coming up.
Bringin’ It All Back
Mario Party Superstars doesn’t do much that’s completely new for the series, which is completely fine with me considering it brings back so many things that I love and missed from recent Mario Party games. Like for example, stars that cost 20 coins instead of 10, which was a big issue I had with Super Mario Party. It was just far too easy for everyone to afford stars in that game, which really hindered the actual board game strategy and placed too much importance on recruiting buddies to bolster your dice rolls. In addition, Duel Minigames are back and help make the final five turns way more exciting by giving you and your adversaries the opportunity to challenge each other to high-stakes, 1-on-1 minigames with wagered coins up for grabs. And of course, Chance Time is back as well, which introduces all sorts of chaos into the mix..