Why does anyone bother playing Mario Party? It’s a miserable experience. You amass an unassailable lead, gobbling up stars like a rapacious black hole of cutesy joy only for Nintendo to crank the randomiser and, within the final three turns, flip the game upside down. Suddenly you’ve lost. You’re dead last, in fact. Elation turns to despair. Such is life. Such is Mario Party.
Super Mario Party on Nintendo Switch is a fine return to duplicitous form for a series that has always, at its best, united people in a shared, incredulous despair. How can life be so cruel? How can a game you’ve just spent the best part of two hours playing be decided by the random assignment of bonus stars during a farcical closing ceremony?
If you play to win, Mario Party will find you out. You must never try to win. In Mario Party, you always play to survive. It’s all the glory and horror of Mario Kart’s blue shell but spread over hours of play. And, for some reason, you’ll keep coming back. As a group of four friends there’s nothing quite like it. The seeming randomness of the cruelty. The cursing. The hatred. The laughter. But it’s all shared. And that’s the genius of Mario Party. Play Monopoly and you’ll want to disembowel your Uncle Kenneth. Play Mario Party and you’ll want to disembowel the system. Or Kamek. And that’s the genius of Mario Party. You’re never hating one another – the despair is a bonding experience.
It’s been a long way back for the world’s more brilliantly infuriating board game game. The Mario Party franchise has been a disaster since 2004. The release of Mario Party 6 on the GameCube marked a high-point (fight me) for a series that has always lumbered between iterative updates and woeful reinvention. Now, 14 years and nine versions later, Nintendo has finally got it right again. Super Mario Party is brilliant. And if you enjoy getting irrationally annoyed at a video game while your friends laugh at you then it’s an essential purchase.
And boy does Mario Party infuriate. Here, new event spaces introduce yet more hideously random jeopardy. Of the four boards, two are effectively turned into farce. On Whomp’s Domino Ruins, an event space triggers a boulder that wipes players off the board, sending them toppling back from whence they came. Great fun! Especially when you keep on triggering it turn after turn. On Megafruit Paradise, the islands are connected with a bridge that is regularly destroyed if you happen to land on the wrong space. And boy does that happen a lot. Great fun!
You will, at times, actively hate this game. And then, on your trepidatious return the stars will align and you will have a wonderful time. It goes against all the laws of good game design. Gaming is about strategy and skill, which in turn make things fun. Mario Party has always been about dumb luck. You simply can’t care if you win or lose, because this game has always made winning and losing so random.
And while Super Mario Party is, for the most part, a necessary rehash of a formula Nintendo never should have messed with, it does bring some new ideas. River Survival, a co-op mode where you have to paddle down a river in a raft before the timer runs out, is brilliant. Aim at balloons to play minigames and extend the timer; shout and squeal as you fail to pick the best route through the rapids. It’s a blast.
Partner Party is great too. You and your partner move around a board freely, rather than on a set path. Roll a ten and one of you can go left in search of coins and the other can go right to secure the star. It’s, mercifully, faster than the standard game mode but also a different way to get shafted by the system – this time with an ally to share in your despair.
But, what a new Mario Party really needs to do is ramp up the randomness. At times, an hour of play can pass by with little drama. Almost every tile should trigger a random, jaw-clenching event. Give away half your coins! Buy a star from a rival player! Swap places on the board! Move the star! Make it all more random. Make it all more despairing. After all, the endless rolling of the dice is just an excuse to play another minigame.
Monopoly is trash because it makes you hate other human beings. Mario Party is a joy because you are united with other human beings in anger and despair against something totally out of your control. Mario Party is 2018. Mario Party is life.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
