Mario Party 10

By: Robert Murphy

When people usually hear about a party they think, a good time, few beers and good friends, not screaming in rage or frantic attempts to murder one another on a charming Mario style game board. Well, this is what you often get with Mario Party games (and most Ninetendo games in my experience) as you and your friends fight one another over stars, minigames and the attempt to be the first across the finish line and named the victor. It’s a charming little setup that has been going on for years now as groups of four players start on a variety of different game boards and move across the spaces to gain the most stars and victory over your friends. Mario Party 9 saw a change up in the long standing dynamic that continues on here in Mario Party 10. Four players cram into a vehicle together and individually roll a 3D dice to progress across a linear map, dodging obstacles and taking on different challenges depending on the game board you choose. New features though have come with the addition of the Wii U gamepad and other new Nintendo products so let’s see what lies in store for another “fun” party.

Despite my insane competitiveness, I’ve always found that Mario Party games were the best to lose at because of the amount of luck that can come into play with a game such as this. A randomly generating dice decides your fate and the fate of your friends each turn and there are any number of obstacles that can make or break you along the game board. Players can end up being bitten by a Piranha Plant or shot by a Bullet Bill and lose a fair amount of their stars or even worse you can now end up unleashing Bowser from behind his prison bars and he could steal half of your stars. You just never know what is going to happen when you roll those dice, all you can really do is pray that you will still come out on top. I haven’t kept up too much with the recent additions of the game but with the purchase of my Wii U, I thought it would be a fun game to have for my family and friends. A part of me does miss the old school styling of the game where players were all separate on the game board and raced each other across the looping map to get to the one solitary star placed at a random point. The new mechanic of everyone moving as one does lead to quicker games to be played but this new style of playing does debunks the long standing strong point for Mario Party and that is the minigames.

Minigames are the key part of every Mario Party game and where all the fun practically comes from considering most of the game involves you staring at a screen waiting for each player to take their turn. Minigames now though are far less frequent and do not occur after each player has taken their turn, rather they now appear to randomly generate on any one of the square spaces. There’s no labeling to indicate whether or not the square you land on will lead to a minigame so you never know when one will come along to break up the monotony. It isn’t like they never occur but it is sad that one of the strongest parts of the game doesn’t occur as much as it should.

When you do get a minigame, it is still an insane amount of fun and takes on the new look and feel of the recent Mario games that players have come to know. The bright and brilliant colors all look wonderful and you and other players will happily be jumping around trying to complete the various objectives such as being the last player bouncing on a trampoline while knocking everyone else off or kicking the most Cheep Cheep’s as they head towards a peer. There are also game modes for the motion controls on your old Wii controllers that will prove to be a challenge. Being the first player to move your player on top of a giant ball across various buttons was the hardest for me but others like choosing the Shy Guy with the most donuts on his plate even things out in terms of difficulty.

This all just happens to be part of one mode for Mario Party 10 and I came to find out that there are three different modes for this new game. The next mode I played was Bowser Party which brings the Wii U gamepad to some actual use and introduces a fifth player into the action. Bowser was always soar about being left out of things and so now another player can take on his role of crashing the party and stealing other players hard earned stars. In this mode Bowser follows the other four players that travel along like usual in their car and trying to get across the game board. Bowser in turn rolls a few dice to try and catch up to the other players and if he manages that then a 1v4 minigame takes place (hooray! minigames!). The games are fairly balanced to start off with as players will try to do things like dodge fireballs or avoid being thrown into a fiery pit as they run along a giant wheel. If the players manage to continue staying far ahead of Bowser or continue to beat him then the difficulty for the players gets turned up a notch and Bowser ends up more in favor of victory.

The mode is delightfully fun for the Bowser player as you lord over your friends trying to take them out (gosh, no wonder my friends think I’m mean). Regardless, players will no doubt have some evil fun at the expense of the entire party. Perhaps the best map to take advantage of being Bowser would be the underwater level due to the fact that certain points of the game board diverge to two separate paths, one usually worse than the other. Bowser can manipulate the signs at the diverging points with the gamepad due to the fact that they’re written in squid ink. It’s not a huge mind game to play but it is still a devilishly fun feature.

Our final game mode is the amiibo party and was initially something of a delight for me as it returns to the original Mario Party style of each player taking their own turn and moving separately. There is, of course, a gigantic catch and that is the frustrating mechanics behind this particular game mode. Players must constantly be close to the Wii U gamepad in order to plug each of their amiibo’s in when it is their respective turn to do something. Organizing this little function is like a game of hot potatoe or worse an exercise in everyone crowding around on the floor of your home to try and work this mode out. You also have to add on to this the fact that the maps to this game mode are fairly flat and linear, yes, there are different maps for the different amiibo’s but they do not vary much from each other in anyway. Overall, it feels like an exercise in futility to have even included this game mode in the first place (same goes for the amiibo’s in general) and I was supremely upset that this mode wasn’t as enjoyable as it should have been.

In the end, Mario Party 10 does prove to bring some new features to the table and make use of the new gamepad functionality. It certainly helps you become an evil mastermind while you take control of residential party pooper, Bowser. However, I do wish that if you’re going to bring back the classic Mario Party format, you definitely shouldn’t ruin it by adding the amiibos and making players crowd around the gamepad. It really detracts from the enjoyment. While there definitely are some shining moments for this game, there just isn’t enough to make you race to the store to pick it up.

Good:

- Five player Bowser game mode

- Wonderful maps and a few new minigame types to play along with the classics

Bad:

- Amiibo mode is a disappointment

- Where are all the minigames? And why am I not playing them more?

Scully Rating: 6.0 out of 10