Mario Party Superstars

This one was, and remains, one
of my favorite DS games of all.

I would say I have a love-hate relationship with the Mario Party series... but to get there, I’d need to have played more than three games in the series. I absolutely love Mario Party DS, I am not a huge fan of Mario Party 2 despite it being a fan favorite... and the third was Mario Party Advance, on an emulator, but talking about that one is like talking about the Sonic franchise by bringing up Sonic Chronicles (a turn-based RPG, yes, really).

This sub-franchise went through an awkward period in the 2010s. In its ninth and tenth entries, characters travelled together on the board in the same vehicle. Whatever happened to competing for Stars? It feels like something’s missing if you can’t be cruel to the others on the board as well as in the minigames. This led to an uphill climb, which I’m not entirely sure the Mario Party series has finished – newer entries work to win back the crowd, whether it’s the minigame-only “The Top 100” for the Nintendo 3DS or the back-to-basics “Super Mario Party” for the Switch.

Also back to basics is today’s entry, Mario Party Superstars, which features five boards selected from the first three games in the franchise, as well as 100 minigames. Developed by NDcube and released on October 29th, 2021, Superstars is a celebration of the subseries’ long history, perhaps the best yet. Let’s see how that goes.

You are the superstar!

Ten characters come to the Village Square, formerly known as Mushroom Village in the first Mario Party, to duke it out on boards and in minigames. The classic six present since the series’ inception (Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Peach, Wario and Donkey Kong), two regulars who joined early on (Daisy and Waluigi) and two later additions (Birdo and Rosalina).

Only 10 come to the party? That's rookie numbers!

I envy the Yoshi sleeping in the melon slice.

There are five boards: Yoshi’s Tropical Island and Peach’s Birthday Cake from MP1, Space Land and Horror Land from MP2, and Woody Woods from MP3. Would it have been too much to have a second board from MP3? Several items from the franchise’s history have been added, and some boards were updated. As an example, items weren’t in MP1, so its boards are revised to include them, as well as an item shop. In a few cases, a board’s path was modified, with one example being Peach’s Birthday Cake.

Picking from the main 10 home console entries as well, there’s a selection of 100 minigames to play. Technically 105, if counting the five item minigames from MP2 and 3. Do we get a roughly equal distribution of minigames? Nope! In fact, the selection is even wonkier than in “The Top 100”. Just look at this table from the Mario Wiki!

For Mario and Co., it's a minigame. For me in
Quebec, that's an average winter day.

When a single entry’s minigames account for more than a fourth of the entire roster... it’s a tad uneven! As a fan of the DS entry, I’m disappointed they didn’t also pick a few minigames from the entries on handheld consoles, but hey, can’t have it all. Notable difference, all the minigames are unlocked from the start – no ????????s when the game is rolling at the end of a turn. On one hand, I get it, it’s a hundred minigames and it would take forever to find them all. On the other, it takes away that little bit of fun in discovering through play which minigames made the cut.

There’s no Story Mode featuring the five boards in some sort of overarching plot line. There isn't even a cutscene showing the friendly competition taking root among the playable characters, all available from the start.

Party Cards are plenty easy to find online.

What’s progression here, then? Well, after you finish a game, your coins are transferred to a bank, and the Stars you collected are converted into coins. You can then use those coins in Toad’s House to purchase stickers to use during gameplay, backgrounds for your Mario Party Card, songs for the Sound Test, and entries for the Encyclopedia in the Data House. Said Data House also has a section with 60 achievements to try and complete.

You also gain experience at the end of a game, which “levels up” your Party Card, unlocking new things to buy. The end credits are unlocked at Level 50; it doesn’t take super long to get there. And past that point, all you unlock is more encyclopedia pages, up to Level 99. And that’s all for progression.

Roll the bones!

Would be a shame if someone activated that laser...

Now that the technical details are out, I might as well start talking about my own experience. To get a feel of the game, I played an entire 30-turn match on each board. There is an attempt by NDCube to mix and match the better mechanics of the the franchise, putting older boards up to date and adding the newer item options and quality-of-life improvements we’ve seen since.

This does not always translate into perfect board design, at least based on my (admittedly not that thorough) testing. Even though it’s allegedly the easiest of the five boards, I despised Yoshi’s Tropical Island; it’s made of two islands, which you move around, and can go from one to the other by paying the Thwomp on the bridge. The Stars can only be in two spaces, one on each island; it occupies one of these spaces while Bowser is on the other. When a player lands on an Event Space, the Star and Bowser are swapped. I swear this board had too many Event Spaces, because the Star moved around far too often.

Not getting a lot of customers, this one.

This was not from my game... or Luigi might have won.
King Boo can from the other three players at once. At a hefty
cost, he can even steal 1 Star from each of them.
Yikes, talk about a massive game-changer.

The Tropical Island originates from Mario Party 1, which didn’t use items; so the board was updated with a lonely little item shop on the first island. Specifically, in the area you won’t go to if you cross a bridge. This made getting items there an absolute pain, while other boards give loads of items away. This is the case for Horror Land, which instead has too many Luck Spaces, so it's raining items and coins on players. Luigi, the Hard difficulty CPU, ended my test match with over 400 coins... But only one Star, because he could never get to Toadette in time, so he ended up dead last. It’s the board I had the easiest time on, because of the Luck spaces, several Toad shops, and the fact I bought enough Stars to keep a comfortable advance.

On one hand, shortcut. On the other, Bowser.

But Horror Land was hard to navigate due to its day and night gimmick, which blocked some paths at night, with the cycle switching through Event spaces and once every two turns. Instead, my favorite board might have been Peach’s Birthday Cake. Kinda sparse on shops and items, but a very simple layout; you move around the giant cake, then step on the second layer to reach the Star Space, which never moves. The only fork in the path is a luck game, which has a 1-in-4 chance of sending you on a smaller cake where Bowser awaits – but if you can afford it, it's also a shortcut back to the Star.

Easy, Normal, Hard

To think, without Bonus Stars, I would have lost most of
my matches.

Every match I played had three CPUs with different difficulty settings – one Easy, one Normal, one Hard. (I wasn’t going to set a CPU’s difficulty to Master, the hardest of all, while I was still learning!) The idea was to get a feel of the AI for three difficulties all at once. As I got better at the minigames, I had an easier time, but I still struggled from time to time against the Normal and Hard opponents. And when it comes to winning the 30-turn matches, I managed relatively well, but I’m not a big fan of just how often I won by a hair’s breadth solely because of the Bonus Stars given away at the end. That’s how close it was, four times out of five.

There have been reports that the difficulty of CPUs overall was boosted for this game. NDcube’s previous Mario Party retrospective entry, minigame collection The Top 100, apparently had stupid easy AI to play against, so a little bit of overcorrecting may have been done here to compensate.

Let the idling Galoombas be. It took 23 years for them
to have their own name.

Not helping are the board designs, which are made so they can significantly change the game state at any moment. Even one unlucky turn can tip the scales from a comfortable victory to third or fourth place. Space Land has a laser that fires once enough players have passed by the center space, and which robs any players in its path of all their coins. Other times, some boards change their own layout constantly; Woody Woods and Horror Land are the worst offenders.

She's a CPU? She'll land on a red space or something.

CPUs on boards all felt unnaturally lucky, landing too often on spaces that benefited them, and avoiding major drawbacks. The tradeoff is just how damn stupid they could be when they made decisions; taking the wrong path repeatedly or not picking the options that had the best odds of rewarding them down the line. It was most notable through the Custom Dice Block, an item which lets you move exactly the number of spaces you want (from 1 to 10). CPUs frequently purchased those, and would choose to land on spaces that didn't give great advantages, even when they had better plays to make.

I’m still not sure how AI is programmed when it comes to decision-making, I wonder if the unnatural luck and stupid decisions were an attempt at balancing out the difficulty. Coming to that conclusion felt like seeing how the sausage is made and I’m not sure I like it.

Minigames for everyone

So much to choose from, I can't even pick!

The selection of 100 minigames is available on Mt. Minigames, accessible from the boat in Village Square. You have the option to play  freely. Even as I played through five 30-turn matches, I still hadn’t tried them all, so I made sure to check out the ones I had missed.

(As an aside, Superstars brought back some Mario Party 1 minigames that used control stick rotation. Y’know. The ones that made gaming history because they badly hurt players’ palms in the N64 era. But hey, should be okay! There’s a warning to not do that, surely nobody will do it, right? Just like when people told each other to not lick the Switch cartridges!)

There aren't many... but they're there.

However, there are extra modes to check out here. For one, a section devoted to sports, letting you play 2-vs.-2 volleyball or soccer to your heart’s content, and puzzles, with three that I recall playing (and enjoying) in Mario Party DS. Two modes, Survival and Daily Challenge, require an Internet connection and a subscription to Nintendo Switch Online.

Still gotta love the classic Mario enemies and characters
getting bit parts in various minigames.

Ooh, this one has big Mario Party DS vibes!

In Coin Battle, the goal is to finish with the most coins across 5, 10 or 15 rounds. You get coins for victory, but you can get all kinds of minigames – even those where you keep all the coins you catch. On some rounds, all players give coins to Lakitu, and the winner keeps most. There’s another mode where you team up with another character for a 2-vs.-2 showdown. First team to win 10 minigames wins. The last mode, Trio Challenge, is a series of 1-vs.-3 minigames. You’re put in the team of three and must help the team beat the solo player in a sequence of five games.

That’s about it!

Final thoughts

Also part of the "mandatory Mario Party experience" package:
Your luck turning for the worse all in a single turn.

It’s a Mario Party game. The franchise is as famous a friendship destroyer as Monopoly, and while there’s a lot to check out as a solo player, there will always be more of an interest in board matches with friends (I did play this game with others, and it’s more fun that way!). We have plenty of content here, 100 minigames to check out and five boards (though maybe one more would have been nice), a couple of modes, many quality-of-life updates to old classics, and a few modern ideas like achievements, some of which are tricky to get.

It’s a retrospective more than it is a new adventure, and it shows. There is no “Story Mode”, nor is there anything significant to unlock (no new characters or modes; just encyclopedia pages, Party Card varnish, and music packs). This leaves a solo player with no real “progress” worth going for unless you’re the completionist type, and thus very little interest in going back on your own. It lacks the replayability I remember from games like the DS entry. And sure, there’s online modes on Mt. Minigames, but since it requires a subscription...

The other modes are pretty fun too.

The game overall looks very nice, plays very well,
and has excellent music.

Even as a retrospective, Mario Party Superstars is uneven; a nostalgic point could be made for all five boards coming from the first three games. But this one wanted to pay tribute to the entire franchise (...well... games 1 to 10, because who cares about the handheld titles?), yet the selection of minigames is as unequal as could be, with more than half the minigames coming from the first three, and only 15 total from MP7 to 10. Still, putting together classic boards and modern features made for an interesting experience, and I did enjoy my time, even if I had my gripes with the CPU AI and some questionable choices in board layout/updates.

I was left with the feeling that I wouldn’t pull this one from the shelf again, unless it’s to play with friends. Which, to be fair, is what this subfranchise exists for. So... goal accomplished? I’m ambivalent, I think it’s good but I would appreciate it more if there were better incentives to return to it outside of multiplayer.

Next up: Another Switch game review, maybe?