Mario Party / YMMV

Best Level Ever: Eternal Star. Going around a broken star, battling mini-versions of Bowser for Stars that they stole from you, while Awesome Music plays? Oh yeah!
Cheese Strategy: After the end of a game board, all stars and coins that human players collected go towards your bank for buying items and minigames and reaching an eventual 100-star goal. Normally, AI players don't count, intended as a form of Socialization Bonus… Until you realize there's nothing stopping you from just changing the AI players into humans on the final turn, thus getting all the stars and coins they collected during the game too. Oh, and there's nothing stopping you either from just running an all-AI game and letting it run its course until the final turn either. Needless to say, this allows you to unlock all the game's content much faster than the developers ever intended. Better yet, you only need two controllers to accomplish it, as the controller only needs to be present in the corresponding port when you're switching an AI player to human, and only during that moment. The second game applied an Obvious Rule Patch and made every player's, human and AI, score count towards the bank.
Crosses the Line Twice: The fourth-place player almost always goes through some cruelly excessive humiliation in the map’s ending cutscene while all of the other characters are celebrating. This includes getting chased away by a boulder, chomped at by a piranha plant, eaten by a giant Cheep Cheep, blasted out of a cannon, roasted on a grill, or falling out of the sky (although saved by a Lakitu). The only exceptions are the Bowser’s Magma Mountain and Eternal Star courses, where Bowser is humiliated instead. As if the feeling of losing wasn’t bad enough, the game went the extra mile to really rub it in your face in a hilarious manner. Future installments dropped this, and instead only focused on the first place player’s victory without drawing extra attention to the loser. Though Mario Party Superstars brought it back, this time having everyone from 2nd through 4th place being eliminated in a humiliating manner and later showing a congratulatory snapshot where the player in 4th place is shown being hit by the board’s trap or gimmick.
Fan Nickname: "Bowser's Bogus Items" is the fandom term for the useless items Bowser forces upon the player who reaches him on any of the game's boards, and, for lack of an official term, is dubbed as such on the Mario Wiki.
Franchise Original Sin: The infamous control stick spinning mechanic that was used in certain minigames dates back to Super Mario 64. In all of the Bowser fights, you have to grab Bowser by the tail and rotate the control stick to spin him around fast enough to fling him into a bomb. This mechanic isn't minded as much in Super Mario 64 because the highest speed you can reach doesn't require you to spin the stick very fast, and you're not doing it competitively either, so there's no pressure to find the fastest way to do it. Mario Party took the element and implemented it into a competitive setting, and the faster you could spin it, the better you would do — which led to damage to control sticks at best and dozens of hand injuries at worst from players using their palms and going to town. One of the minigames to utilize this mechanic, "Tug o' War", makes a return in The Top 100 and Superstars, but the former is unlikely to cause any injuries since it uses 3DS' Circle Pad that is much safer to rotate and the latter is slapped with a safety disclaimer to discourage players from using palms for it, as well as the controls being tweaked to be a lot more responsive to further discourage the practice.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Hate rotating the control stick to light up a bulb and get rid of the Boo in "Pedal Power"? With the release of Luigi's Mansion later on, that minigame seems very silly!
- At the end of Minigame Island, Toad appears to challenge you at "Slot-Car Derby". This was back when he was still one of the hosts and not a normally playable character. Bringing things full circle, Top 100 (which was the first game in the series since Advance to not feature Toad as a playable character) ends the third world in its Minigame Island under the exact same circumstances.
Once Original, Now Common: Mario Party 1 was, in many ways, the first of its kind and set the standard for future party games. That being said it is generally agreed to have not aged well due to its copious Early-Installment Weirdness (no items, losing a minigame can mean losing coins and there even being minigames where 1 or more players have no way to get coins.) and lacking the polish future games had in terms of board and minigame design. Ultimately there’s little reason to go back to the first game instead of its sequels outside of novelty; especially since 2 reuses and improves upon many of the minigames from the first while having much more polished gameplay and refined board design.
Overshadowed by Controversy: The game is fondly remembered by those who have played it, but it's more often than not associated with the rampant control-stick spinning minigames. The most efficient way to win at these minigames was to use the palm of your hand rather than your thumb, but this technique applied a dangerous amount of friction to the players' skin, which led to several players contracting blisters while playing. Nintendo was eventually forced to offer free protective gloves to any player who had injured themselves while playing the game. Additionally, even with the gloves, those mini-games would still wear down the N64 controller joysticks extremely quickly, giving the controllers much less longevity and discouraging players from wanting to replay the game too often for that reason. Most later installments would remove these types of minigames (while the ones that did feature them gave disclaimers before the minigame against using this strategy), and the whole controversy is considered the main reason the game never got a digital re-release until 2022.
Paranoia Fuel: Crane Game. You’ll lose 1/3 of your coins if you’re dropped in the pipe, and God help you if a hard difficulty NPC grabs you.
Scrappy Mechanic: The minigames that involve rotating the control stick as the main gimmick are consistently the most hated ones. Not only is the mechanic difficult to execute effectively, it can actually be physically painful due to the hard plastic sticks used by the N64.^note Future games ditched the mechanic for years between its unpopularity and the fact Nintendo almost got sued over it. It's commonly believed to be the reason that this specific Mario Party never appeared on the Virtual Console while it's first sequel did.
That One Level: Luigi's Engine Room has one of the most intrusive board gimmicks in the entire series. Throughout the map is a system of blue and red doors, and if one color is open the other is closed (i.e. if red doors are open you can't go through blue doors). The "open" color will alternate at the start of every turn or due to some board events, but their prevalence makes navigating the board to get to the Star extremely difficult unless the player strategically works around them to reach the prized item. This often results in having a few stars in circulation that players and computers are stealing from each other.

YMMV / Mario Party

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