YMMV / Mario Party

For individual games in the series:

• Mario Party
• Mario Party 2
• Mario Party 3
• Mario Party 4
• Mario Party 5
• Mario Party 6
• Mario Party Advance
• Mario Party 7
• Mario Party 8
• Mario Party DS
• Mario Party 9
• Mario Party: Island Tour
• Mario Party 10
• Mario Party: Star Rush
• Mario Party: The Top 100
• Super Mario Party
• Mario Party Superstars

---

• Accidental Innuendo: One of Yoshi's 2D artworks from Star Rush, which was reused in Superstars as his "Whaaat?!" sticker earned a lot of snickering for its resemblance to an O-face, especially when Yoshi gets inked by a Blooper in the former's Coinathlon mode.
• Better as a Let's Play: A game where you can easily be screwed over by pure luck in which a standard match goes on for an extended period of time. These elements are understandably not to every player's liking, but the combination of chaotic and unpredictable gameplay mixed with a lengthy game has been noted to make for an entertaining watch.
• Broken Base:
  • Ever since Mario Party 9, people have debated on whether the extensive changes were a bad idea or the series really could've used innovation. More specifically, are the cars unnecessary baggage that sucks away players' independence, or do they unite all players to experience the fun together as a group? Either way, cars are a very divisive subject among the fanbase.
  • Luck-based minigames. While generally disliked in single-player modes, the reaction when playing with friends is a bit more split. Naturally, skillful players tend to hate them, but more casual or less skilled players prefer Luck minigames and hate strategy-based minigames since they raise tension and provide the opportunity for weaker players to have a chance to shine.
• Critical Backlash: Despite all the criticism, many feel that Mario Party 9 and 10 were good games in their own right, especially with all the innovation.
• Critical Dissonance: Though generally well received by reviewers, they've criticized the series for being too luck-based and lacking in innovation. Fans, however, like the series for the same reasons.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The "pity coin" for that one extra coin that gets randomly thrown to someone after some Battle minigames (when the total purse is a number that is not a multiple of 10).
  • "Bowser Revolution" is often referred to as "Bowser Communism" due to Bowser redistributing the coins equally amongst all the players.
  • Despite the fact that Chance Time has been given different names from the fourth game onward ^note Reversal of Fortune in 4, Chance Roulette in 5, and Round of Miracles in 6, most people continue to refer to it as Chance Time. It's not hard to see why though; it established itself as one of the most infamous parts of the first three games, and by that time calling it "Chance Time" had been completely drilled into everyone's minds. Averted when it returned in Superstars.
• First Installment Wins: Regardless of the arguments about the quality of the many sequels the game has, the original three on the Nintendo 64 are widely regarded as the best in the series. Though somewhat averted since most fans prefer the second title over the first. Mostly since 2 has updated versions of 1's more popular minigames, better maps, and none of the infamous spinning minigames that plagued 1. Additionally, 3's late release in western regions has caused it to be underplayed.
• Game-Breaker:
  • In 5, 6, 7, and 8, someone on the dev team had the brilliant idea of making battle games count towards the minigame bonus star... which means if you ever get the very rare but still possible 50-coin battle game, the person who wins it clinches that bonus star and possibly the whole game, unless the game is long enough for other players to catch up.
  • The Sluggish/Slow 'Shroom Orb in 6 and 7 was overpowered due to downright neutering a fundamental random tenet of the game. It allowed you to roll from 1 to 10, except that the dice rolled slowly enough for players to pick any roll (and thus land on any nearby space) they liked. Want to spite another player? Land on a Round of Miracles (a reskinned Chance Time) and try your luck, or perhaps land on a Duel Space and try to beat your target for coins or a star. Want lots of money fast? Turn on Mic Minigames in 7 and land on a Mic Minigame space, then bet and win as much money as you can. Want a chance at the Happening or Red Star? Just deliberately land on such spaces with the Orb. A star is up to 10 spaces away from where you are that it is possible but unlikely to roll high enough to reach it in one turn? Just use the orb to guarantee moving enough spaces to nab the star. Had a disappointingly low roll lately? Just use this orb to get a reprieving 10. Such an item allowing players to land on any nearby space they wish, in a game series where dice blocks are supposed to randomize each player's movement, proved to be so powerful that Mario Party 8 nerfed a similar candy, the Slowgo Candy, to only allow players to move 5 spaces ahead. Super Mario Party and Mario Party Superstars brought this item back in the form of the Custom Dice Block, and it's as powerful as its 6 and 7 counterpart, especially in the latter game, since many of the maps in that game have game-changing event spaces. Timing the dice roll isn't even needed anymore, as you can just scroll to the number you want.
  • The Genie Lamp, Flutter Capsule/Orb, and the Star/Golden Pipe, depending on the game. Each of these items can bring its user onto the location of the Star or very close to it, which is very convenient for its user but quite unfair to every other player. They are at least the most expensive items in their respective games, which combined with their use meaning you have to pay the toll for a star makes it hard to overuse them unless you have a lot of coins.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Super Smash Bros. for Wii U had Smash Tour, which is a "board game type" mode. Fans joked that Smash Tour is a Smash version of Mario Party. The mode Toad Scramble in Star Rush plays much like Smash Tour, where players move around the board at the same time to collect items and recruit allies.
• Hype Backlash: The N64 entries have gotten this over the years from fans starting from 4 onward. While many do agree that they're still good games, they've been receiving criticism for having mechanics that have not aged well that the GameCube era games fixed. Most infamously, the control stick spinning minigames from the first game are considered to be a major sour point regarding the N64 games given the legal fiasco Nintendo got themselves into because of it, and to a lesser extent, 3 underselling in western regions due to its late release.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • There's a section of the fanbase that is only interested in the minigames. Because of this, two games were eventually released containing 100 minigames from throughout the series' history.
  • The playable character roster is apparently an extremely important factor in deciding which installment certain fans might pick up. To cite a specific example, Donkey Kong finally being playable again in the 10th installment after being reduced to an extra in the 5th installment was certainly well-received.
  • Most people picked up 10 for the chance to play as Bowser in Bowser Party mode and cause chaos. Plenty of players were happy to play as him in the normal game mode in Super as well.
• Love to Hate: Bowser's Jerkass side is on full display throughout the series. While players will dread the inevitable moment where they land on his space, you can't help but enjoy just how much of a petty troll he is. This is especially true in the original trilogy, which arguably depicts Bowser at his silliest, leading to some genuinely hilarious moments.
• Memetic Badass: Luigi. He is perceived as having the power to win minigames by doing absolutely nothing.
• Memetic Loser: Wario, though less for his supposed poor luck and more for his line, "SO EIN MIST!" In Japanese we hear "OH MY GOD!"
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Bowser Communism ^Explanation Bowser Revolution, which has the effect of evenly splitting every player’s coins, practically caused the communism jokes to write themselves.
  • "Gimme Equality!" ^Explanation The Mario Party DS equivalent of Bowser Revolution. The phrase would quickly be adopted by various groups that faced some of oppression.
  • The aforementioned "SO EIN MIST!" You can thank The Runaway Guys (Chuggaaconroy in particular) and their mishearing of it as "D'OH I MISSED!" for that one.
  • "Luigi wins by doing absolutely nothing" ^Explanation A series of videos in which the player, using Luigi, sets the controller down and yet beats several minigames anyway, be it through Artificial Stupidity (usually via setting three CPU players to the lowest possible difficulty) or the grace of the Random Number God. Also available for Mario Party 5, Mario Party 9, and Super Smash Bros. And here's the entire series. It even inspired its own trope. A later strain of this was developed, called "Peach loses by doing absolutely everything", wherein Peach, well, loses by doing absolutely everything.
  • "We play for mad cash!". ^Explanation This originated from pokecapn's Let's Play of the series whenever anyone in his group would gamble with all of their coins. This in turn was frequently referenced by The Runaway Guys in their playthrough.
  • "Takin' your star bro!". ^Explanation This came from artwork◊ for Mario Party 10 that depicts Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Bowser playing with an amiibo board. Mario is moving his piece and looking smug, Luigi is fretting over what is unfolding, Peach looks shocked, and Bowser is contemplating the situation intensively.
  • Thanks to the intensely competitive nature of the games — a competitiveness not helped by random events that can cause major lead changes — the series has developed a memetic reputation for destroying friendships. Even Nintendo joked about it twice - In an ad for 10, claiming that the friendship wrecker returns, and in "A Completely Normal Mario Party Superstars Trailer" for Superstars.
  • Mario Party DS Anti Piracy/"Piracy is no Party!" ^Explanation A series of fanmade mockups of an error screen that would appear when the game is pirated was shown here, and here, among others. No such thing actually exists, but it looks and sounds like it could be real enough, making it pretty unnerving and downright creepy. Eventually, more people started making their own fake anti-piracy screens for other games and the creator even made several follow-ups to the original due to its popularity. It even got to the point that The Cutting Room Floor, a wiki that documents unused content and such in games, had to lock their page on Mario Party DS due to people trying to add information about the screen to the page, thinking it was real.
    • Luigi the criminal/Luigi pirates video games^Explanation In all of the Mario Party DS Anti Piracy videos (except the first), the player is always controlling Luigi, which results in the characters accusing him of being a criminal. As such, people have made jokes about Luigi being a horrible monster who deserves the cruel and unusual punishments he receives, be it getting mauled by Monty Mole or Swallowed Whole by Shy Guy.
  • The control stick-spinning minigames of the first Mario Party became the stuff of legends among fans over time for their infamy at injuring players who used their palms for maximum efficiency. The jokes returned in full force when the "Tug 'O War" and "Cast Aways" minigames returned in Superstars with the exact same control scheme and only a cursory warning against the tactic, on a console with control sticks notorious for gaining input drift when overused. Taken to its full extreme with the first Mario Party coming to Nintendo Switch Online, control stick-spinning minigames and all.
  • Rosalina's "Whaaat?!" sticker^Explanation Out of all the Superstars stickers, this sticker in particular is popular due to her completely unfazed reaction compared to most of the characters' concerned or shocked expressions.
  • Fake Superstars stickers^Explanation A new feature in Superstars, replacing taunts, is a set of stickers for emoting during games. All of the in-game stickers are clean, but given Mario Party's reputation, players quickly began editing them to much more colorful, sometimes vulgar reactions juxtaposed with the stock 2D artwork, and even hacking them into the game.
• Memetic Troll: Peach. Many fans claim that an AI-controlled Peach, even with the AI set at "Easy", always manages to cheat her way to victory, whether that'd be in minigames or getting stars and/or coins. This is also a bit of an Ascended Meme in Mario Party 4, as the manual refers to Peach as "surprisingly mischievous".
• Narm Charm: Bowser's model in the N64 games is incredibly goofy-looking. Hudson Soft made this complement his personality; throughout the original trilogy, Bowser acts like a Large Ham Troll and is incredibly silly, doing things like giving the characters a "cake" which is just a spiked shell with frosting and a candle on it, or showing off a coin-creating machine that produces a single coin and then charging 20 coins for the demonstration. His infamous animations like the "Bowser Dance" and Mario Party 3's "Sexy Bowser" in particular are things that would never work on later Mario Party Bowsers, where his model and mannerisms tend to skew slightly more towards serious than silly and are more in line with his traditional depiction.
• Nintendo Hard: In 2, Minigame Coaster on Hard. It forces you to perform and win every minigame in a predetermined order on Hard mode. You have a very limited amount of lives, much like the earlier platformer games, lose one every time you failed a minigame, and you only earn 1UPs from invoking Law of 100 with the coins you win from cleared minigames. If you lose all your lives in any world, you must start all over from your last savepoint (which is at the start of each world), and the last couple of worlds both have six stages in them. The final few stages have mostly button-mashing minigames, and the computer is usually very good at these types of games. The absolute final stage only has one repeat of a Mini-game played higher up in the coaster, but the "Toad" in front of it asks you a trick question about whether or not you want to start the entire coaster over. The actual minigame is a second round of "Shell-Shocked", but it counts as a one-vs-three match because you're up against three Koopa Kid tanks who will try to gang up on you.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: Many fans felt the series took a sharp decline in quality after NDCube took over from Hudson Soft. In particular fans disliked their emphasis on experimenting with the established formula (especially notable with the shift to everyone being in one car in 9 and 10) and their board design being lackluster. While Superstars did achieve reception on par with Hudson Soft’s games, it still received criticism for only having 5 boards and some feel calling it their best Mario Party is technically cheating due to it being a Mega Mix Game that takes most of it’s minigames and all of its boards from Hudson Soft’s games. However, it's very important to note that the latter installments of the series changing due to it switching developers is only partially true. Many Hudson Soft Mario Party developers moved to NDCube before the newer installments were even developed, including the series directors and planners of the series since Mario Party, Kenji Kikuchi and Shuichiro Nishiya, who were also involved in all NDCube installments making this just as much a deliberate decision from the original developers.
• Paranoia Fuel: Many, many of the minigames will tense you and the other players up, especially when the stakes are high and losing would be critical to your lead.
  • Even if you're the most skilled player who is in the lead, the chance of landing on the Chance Time/equivalent or Bowser Spaces will haunt you throughout the game, waiting to turn the tables in someone else's favor. The sheer stress that Chance Time and its equivalents induced in players may have been a large reason why they were removed from the series between 7 and Superstars.
  • Bowser's Big/Bigger Blast from Mario Party 2 and 4, and Cut from the Team from Mario Party 8. The tension alone makes the heart race in fear. Who will die first? Will it be you, or your friends? You're at the mercy of Lady Luck as you slowly step forward and meet destiny... Superstars adds an extra layer of tension by randomly spacing out when you're given the results of your choice, making every second feel like an eternity.
  • Shy Guy Says from the first and second games feels like some kind of sadistic punishment the titular Shy Guy roped the players into as opposed to a game. Both games follow the same structure; the Shy Guy will raise one or two flags which correspond to the A and B buttons, if you don't correctly repeat his signals, you're eliminated. In 1, the players are floating on barrels tethered behind a moving pirate ship and the Shy Guy is the captain. If a player loses, the Shy Guy cuts their rope with a cutlass, leaving them to float away into the open sea as they scream. In 2, the players are high in the sky suspended from balloons. If a player loses, the Shy Guy pops their balloon with an arrow and they fall into the abyss. What amps up the paranoia, however, is that when the Shy Guy raises two flags, he's trying to fake you out. And sometimes when he's raising only one flag, he's trying to fake you out!
    • An Ascended Meme from the pirate version of Shy Guy Says: Swim For Shore!
• Replacement Scrappy: Not many people like DK's removal as a playable character in 5 and Toad supposedly taking his place. Fans were alleviated however, when Donkey Kong returned for 10, Star Rush, Super, and Superstars, only missing The Top 100 since his reintroduction.
• Scrappy Mechanic: While some of these mechanics have fans for their chaotic randomness, that same element has earned them ire.
  • Chance Time is often considered the biggest example of this in the series, and for good reason. Seeing your hard work getting flushed down because of pure luck is very, very frustrating to players. Got a lot of Coins or Stars? Chance Time (or an equivalent) could take it all away!
  • It was at its worst in Mario Party 3, since there, and only there, one of the slot options would cause an unlucky donor to hand over all their coins to a given recipient. An even nastier slot option from the same game would also force the donor to give every single star they had to another player, giving the lucky recipient a massive star lead. Mario Party 4 (where it is known as Reversal of Fortune) severely reduced its power, Mario Party 5 (where it is known as Chance Roulette) and Mario Party 6 (where it is known as Round of Miracles) reduced it even further, and Mario Party 7 outright removed it. It would take until Superstars for Chance Time to make a return to the series, where it was once again reduced in power compared to its incarnation in 3 (albeit more in line with how it was in 1 and 2).
  • Bonus Stars are another very divisive aspect of the series. Every installment gives players additional stars after a game ends (though you have the option of turning bonus stars off in most games from Mario Party 2 onwards). In the first few installments, one bonus star was for getting the most coins in minigames, while another was having the highest coin total at any point. A skilled player would easily win both of these stars, since winning a lot of minigames was the easiest way to make a lot of coins. Mario Party 7 introduced more bonus stars to pick up the slack while also randomizing which Bonus Stars are given out. Chuggaaconroy has shown a way to scrappy it despite the tweaks, by having the in-game lead by two Stars and leading in four of the six possible Bonus Star categories, which guarantees a win by the leader because they're getting at least one Bonus Star no matter what the combination is (unless the player in second gets both of their Bonus Stars, tied with the leader in the one category of the leader's that appears, and has more Coins than the leader).
  • Any minigames based mostly/entirely around luck — especially if they're Battle Minigames, are usually seen as extremely unfair and biased towards the CPU. You could potentially lose lots of coins just for being unlucky enough to pick the wrong thing.
  • The Bowser Revolution, which averages out the coins/mini-stars of the players. This can be particularly vexing if it occurs late in the game, as it has the potential to nullify all progress made to date and make the last minigame the only one that matters. The issue was exacerbated when NDCube initially took over the series since, unlike when Stars determined the winner, Mini-Stars are the only deciding factor in the victory and Bowser spaces are more plentiful towards the end of the board, making a Bowser Revolution more likely to come up in the dying turns of the game. Later installments by them would greatly reduce the Bowser Revolution's potency.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Some players would impose "race to 4th" on themselves, which means purposely losing minigames and so on in order to finish last. Some custom rules would also be applied, such as requiring players to accept stars if they have enough coins.
• Sequelitis: After about a dozen or so Mission Pack Sequels, the series has gone up and down in quality game by game:
  • The first three installments tend to be regarded as the best (at least, in 3's case, among the relatively few who have actually played it), with 2 being the most loved. Though this has softened over time.
  • The Nintendo GameCube installments, 4-7, are where the series started to pick up a Franchise Zombie status among most people. There doesn't seem to be any real consensus on the installments, with each of the games having just as many detractors as they do defenders. Of the four however, 6 seems to be the most universally beloved.
  • Due to its focus on single player-focused gameplay, Advance is seen as alright on its own merits as a single player mission-based experience, just nowhere near as good as the multiplayer player-focused main games.
  • Mario Party 8, one of only two installments on the Wii, probably has one of the most divisive amounts of opinion on it among the Hudson era of Mario Party, ranging from it being the pinnacle of the series to it being the nadir of the series. On one hand, the game had a huge amount of minigames and characters, with a lot of effort in the presentation of the games, but on the other, the reliance on motion control gaming (8 coming out during the more experimental era of motion control for the Wii) and the more realistic environments compared to 6 and 7 came with mixed reception.
  • Mario Party DS, possibly due to being a handheld installment, seems to have escaped much of this fate, with many citing it as 'not amazing', but better than some of the previous ones.
  • 9 completely switches up its normal mechanics, seemingly in an attempt to break off the many It's the Same, Now It Sucks! criticisms of the series. Critic reviews manage to agree with the changes. Some fans, however, responded with the opposite reaction.
  • Island Tour, another handheld installment, also has slightly different mechanics from its predecessors. It's mostly given a "meh" reaction.
  • Mario Party 10, for the Wii U, introduces a new 'Bowser Party' mode (where the Gamepad user takes on an antagonistic 'Bowser' role to create obstacles for the other 4 players during minigames) as well as keeping many of the changes introduced in Mario Party 9. Reactions are quite mixed, ranging from those who enjoyed this style of gameplay to those who despised it and see it as one of the worst entries in the series.
  • Star Rush has been received better than its three predecessors for allowing players to move around the board freely as in the earlier titles and returning to the original Star-collecting style of gameplay, although it's still not seen as anything special.
  • The Top 100, being a compilation of different minigames from throughout the series, seems to avoid this for the most part, with the main complaints being its unusual lack of content compared to other games in the series.
  • Super Mario Party is considered a step in the right direction compared to NDCube’s previous titles due to returning the old formula for the boards though it’s still considered to be one of the weaker installments due to its boards being few in number, small, and being grid-based.
  • Then came Superstars which, as a whole, is generally considered to have completely averted this, being hailed as comparable to the N64 titles in quality and a bigger return to the series' traditional formula, though some did grumble at the game only having 5 boards even though all of them are reused from previous games. Overall, the move to the Nintendo Switch proved to be very beneficial for the series.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: 9 and 10, developed by NDCube, weren't recieved as well as Hudson Soft's entries due to controversial changes like the car Scrappy Mechanic. Super Mario Party goes back to the normal board gameplay, though the game is still seen as just okay compared to the Hudson-developed games. Superstars takes it a step further and is seen as one of the best entries developed by NDCube, if not the entire series, for completely returning to the traditional gameplay without any of the problems that plagued 9 and 10.
• That One Level: Every installment of the Mario Party series has a few minigames and boards that seem solely designed to test players' patience. There are so many examples, there's a page listing them all.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Starting from Mario Party 5 and onwards, Donkey Kong no longer being a playable character has made fans upset. Thankfully for them, he finally returned as a playable character in Mario Party 10 and Star Rush, only to revert back to an NPC in The Top 100 — and then coming back as an unlockable playable character in Super, along with Diddy, as well as Superstars.
  • 3 removed the board-appropriate costumes featured in 2. Though they served no major purpose beyond being aesthetically pleasing, fans found the costumes charming and some are still upset they've yet to be reintroduced since their debut.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • After appearing in 8, Miis aren't playable in any installments from 9 onwards, despite those games being on systems that support them. This wouldn't be much of a problem, except that ND Cube, the developers of the Mario Party games from 9 onwards, also made Wii Party. Then again, that might be why they aren't playable here...
  • Though Donkey Kong Spaces kept DK involved in the series as Bowser's Good Counterpart, most fans agree that they liked him better when he was playable. Eventually, Nintendo got the message and Donkey Kong has rejoined the roster from 10 onwards (barring Top 100), with DK Spaces having been absent since 9.
• Tough Act to Follow: The first three Mario Party games on the Nintendo 64 are considered the finest games of the series due to the quality of the minigames, the wide variety of game modes, and in the case of Mario Party 3, the addition of a pretty interesting story mode. The GameCube games and Mario Party 8 had a difficult time following them up, though they were eventually Vindicated by History, thanks in part to the controversy surrounding the modern games.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Prior to returning in Super, cooperative four-player minigames have been phased out after the very first game, which itself only had two (Running of the Bulb and Key-Pa-Way). Minigames where you steal coins from players (Grab Bag, Cash Bash, the 1v3 and 2v2 minigames as a whole), as well as just making a player lose coins outright (Bowser's Cash Bash), have also been removed, with the returning minigames that appeared in the second that were based off this changing so no coins change hands outside of the battle minigames, which themselves don't have you directly steal them.
• Vindicated by History: The GameCube Parties (4-7) initially caught a ton of fire for being very repetitive sequels that did little to spice or change up the formula. They have come to be more loved, however, when the series returned with 9, which drastically changed the formula from its frantic free-for-all style, which many fans did not like. With each new Mario Party released that drifts away from the classic formula, the more and more the GameCube Parties became vindicated, with some considering them now to be right up there with, or even superior to, the Nintendo 64 titles. The same thing can also be said for 8, the series' first Wii outing that was criticized even more than the GameCube titles at the time of its release, but eventually joined 4-7 in being vindicated. In fact, in a poll for Superstars where players could put their favorite entry in their player card, 8 got fourth place, behind only the N64 entries. Some fans were also upset that 8 has the lowest amount of minigame representation in Superstars, with only "Winner or Dinner" and "Paint Misbehavin'" being included. Granted, this could be due to a lot of the minigames in 8 making use of the Wii's motion controls, but there are still a fair amount that could've worked in Superstars.
• Woolseyism: It may be religious Bowdlerization, but "SO EIN MIST!" feels a lot more Wario and is a lot funnier than the slightly OOC "OH MY GOD!" Granted, this is partly due to the sheer amount of people (one particular one who comes to mind is Chuggaaconroy) who mishear the replacement line as "D'OH I MISSED!".

---