Bad Stars | Ranking All The Mario Party Games
NOTE: This is a collaboration article with my sibling Zeke. We’re excited about this one. Enjoy! Also, I know I haven’t posted in a while, and I will explain everything on Thursday. I promise.
Due to various sensory processing and motor skills issues (how much store credit can I get for autism, I wonder? I never signed up for this shit.), I’ve never been very good at video games. Though I play some games here and there, I don’t call myself a “gamer”, but I do appreciate them as an art form. I don’t actually consider myself a “fan” of anything, like movies or games or anime or whatever, it’s all just stimulus for me and I take whatever I can get.
My mom kept my sibling and I supplied with a steady stream of video games (for Nintendo consoles exclusively), some of which we played together. Games like Skylanders Giants (Spyro’s Adventure was good too, but Giants just improved in every aspect) and New Super Mario Bros. Wii were among our favorites.
But contrary to expectations, nothing brought us together quite like the Mario Party series.
Yes, the game series known for ending friendships and starting fights was our favorite thing to do together.
Mario Party is largely considered a game of chance; it is, for the most part, but that’s fine. Great, even. The fact that anybody can win keeps it exciting. Plus, there are some strategic elements (mostly pertaining to board movement) if you know how to approach them. There are whole YouTube channels like Friends Without Benefits that got their big break by playing Mario Party games. To show my appreciation for a series I hold near and dear to my heart, I decided to sit down with my sibling and reflect on which game in the series was truly the best.
For this list, Zeke and I, after lots of back-and-forth discussion in the form of text and phone conversations (we go to different colleges), ranked all the main Mario Party titles from best to worst. This includes 1–10, DS, and Super. Mario Party Advance and the 3DS titles like Star Rush and Island Tour are not included; we’re just talking about the “main” ones with an actual 4-player Battle Royale mode. For the record, we have played all the games at least once. We also played them again before making this list, to keep them fresh in our memories. Finally, it took us a while to do this since, despite having played these games side by side, our opinions often differed drastically on some of the games and their components. It DID make for some interesting discussions, though.
(It goes without saying that you should have some experience with Mario Party before reading this editorial.)
With that out of the way, let’s begin!
BEST: Mario Party 3
Me: 20 years straight and still the champion!
Zeke: I think it has the best boards.
Me: I’d say… uh, somewhat. Maybe? 6 is good with that, too.
Zeke: If I had to pick what makes 3 the best, I’d say the pacing. It sounds whiny to say that a game moves “too slow”, but when you’re playing a game with other people, that’s the first thing you notice. I also think 3 was ahead of its time in a lot of ways.
Me: ‘Course, we can’t forget the minigames.
Zeke: Everybody loves “Chip Shot Challenge”, “Rockin Raceway”, and ”Eatsa Pizza“; there’s only a few I don’t like. At worst, with bad games like “MPIQ”, they still aren’t enough to drag down the whole experience.
Me: But seriously, WHY haven’t they brought back Duel Mode? It’s the most fun I’ve ever had with Mario Party!
Zeke: Toad.
Me: Oh yeah.
Zeke: He’s not BROKEN broken, but his cost should scale.
Me: If they bring [Duel Mode] back, they need to, I think, balance the game around Toad. He only looks like the worst partner until you actually have him.
Zeke: If you’re on a board like Pipesqueak without backwards movement, he’s broken.
Me: But I gotta say, Duel Mode encapsulated what I loved about 3, the visceral fun with just the right amount of jank. Also, Game Guy always had your back. You got so lucky sometimes it actually makes me sick.
Mario Party 6
Me: I think ‘jack of all trades, master of none” applies here.
Zeke: It’s the master of boards.
Me: I think 8 is better, come to think of it, but to 6’s credit, it was the first game with different board objectives, and it made the case for that feature very well. But, I don’t know, something about the boards, and the whole game, just felt… safe.
Zeke: I think that 6 had better boards than 8 because of how well they worked in formats besides Battle Royale. Don’t you think that Clockwork Castle and Castaway Bay have legitimate 2 v 2 strategies?
Me: No, of course I do. If you, reading this, haven’t played 2 v 2 on Castaway Bay, I highly recommend it.
Zeke: But you need 4 people.
Me: Speaking of needing people, I was surprised by the Solo Mode. It was a great way to both farm enough currency to get extra stuff like unlockable characters and to practice minigames. But, funny enough, Solo Mode is what made me realize that most of the minigames in 6 were good, but not great.
Zeke: Well, there is stuff like “Snow Whirled” and “Lift Leapers”. “Rocky Road” and “Jump The Gun” are good too.
Me: True, “Jump The Gun” is one of my favorite 2 v 2’s in the whole series. I think the battle minigames were kind of weak, though.
Zeke: Yeah, “Strawberry Shortfuse” is fun, but I don’t think it deserves to be a battle.
Me: All things considered, would you call this the fairest Mario Party game?
Zeke: Yeah, this or 3.
Me: I don’t know, I like this game better in terms of fairness because there are no hidden blocks and you can choose what to duel for before you play the minigame. 5 also did that, but 6 did it better (only needing 40 coins to match a Star instead of 50, which makes sense because it’s double a Star’s typical retail value). But then again, 6 is just 5 but better.
Mario Party 8
Me: Ah, memories.
Zeke: Most time we’ve collectively spent on a game together, by far.
Me: I’m a huge fan of this game, but I’m not an ignorant one. This game is missing severe amounts of polish, mostly because of the whole “being ported from the GameCube at the last minute” thing. What’s your favorite aspect of how this game was obviously a rush job?
Zeke: The frame rate drops, and just that the whole game is badly rendered.
Me: The controls are also painful, they needed to spend more time developing the motion controls, and also they didn’t need to use them for every little thing. “Flip The Chimp” is the obvious example of how badly this game can control at times.
Zeke: “Wing And A Scare” is also pretty bad. The difficulty was probably unintentional there.
Me: Controls aside, I did like the minigames quite a bit, especially the 2 v 2's. But the boards were my favorite part. I still think they’re better than 6’s boards.
Zeke: We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one. That said, I think Koopa’s Tycoon Town was a big improvement on Windmillville from 7.
Me: My favorite [board] was, weirdly enough, ‘King Boo’s Haunted Hideaway”. The fact that it’s so unfair to everybody at once is what I like about it.
Me: But what I want the most is an HD remaster of this game. “Joycon Drift” aside, I think that an HD remaster with improved controls and presentation would make it easily the best game in the series.
Zeke: I think so.
Mario Party 9
Zeke: Best minigame roster on a console Mario Party. Games like “Don’t Look”, “Logger Heads”, “Skipping Class”, “Peak Precision”, and “Tuber Tug” are absolute bangers. There’s only a couple bad ones like “Toad And Go Seek”.
Me: Whether you like this game or not, the graphical leap from 8 to 9 is impressive. It’s also the only Mario Party Game, next to Mario Party 1, that I would say has music that really stands out. Also, the motion controls are much tighter, making minigames like “Chain Event” possible when they would have been unplayable in 8. Come to think of it, there aren’t as many motion controls used in 9 overall.
Zeke: The minigames really sanded down the motion control use, like in “Don’t Look” and “Pier Pressure” and “Logger Heads” the controls are just one simple movement. The boss minigames where everybody works as a group while also competing were also really cool.
Me: The boards are largely more or less the same, but there are differences that make some better than others. Like, “Bob-Omb Factory” had an… interesting second half because of how overpowered the 0–1 Dice Blocks get.
Zeke: I didn’t like “Magma Mine”. That board feels like it plays itself.
Me: People say that about every board in 9 EXCEPT Magma Mine, so that’s interesting.
*five minutes of conversation too fast-paced, yet stilted, to write down*
Zeke: Actually I take it back, there is more agency in 9 than people let on. If you think it’s all just “moving down a path”, that’s just incorrect.
Me: I liked the Dice Blocks as items, like now everything is basically a Red Candy.
Zeke: There’s no way that everybody who complains about Mario Party 9 has played Mario Party 9.
Mario Party 4
Me: It’s solid, I guess, but a bit dull at times.
Zeke: That’s fair. I like how uncomplicated the items are, though.
Me: Yeah, they wanted to take it easy on themselves with the whole “new console“ thing and I respect that.
Zeke: I liked the minigames.
Me: I HATED the minigames!
Zeke: You didn’t like “Bob-Omb Breakers”, or “Mario Medley”, or “Booksquirm”, or “Dungeon Duos”?
Me: I do, but it’s kind of telling that you had to go to those ones right away. Everybody KNOWS that those ones are good, but for every minigame like “Booksquirm” there’s a dozen unremarkable filler ones like “Manta Rings”.
Zeke: I thought you of all people would at least like “Long Claw Of The Law”. Y’know, because you always beat me.
Me: I.. don’t even know to describe our experience with that minigame. There’s no way it wasn’t just letting me win all of those times.
Zeke: “Domination” is a good minigame, you’re just bad at it.
Me: I’ll tell you what I AM bad with, the controls of these minigames, they’re so stiff and often just broken. Like, “Butterfly Blitz” just flat-out doesn’t work. The net’s hitboxes are all wrong. “Chain Chomp Fever” also has really bad hitboxes.
Zeke: I noticed that too.
Me: I thought the boards were pretty dull.
Zeke: Shy Guy’s Jungle Jam was fun. I hate Koopa’s Seaside Soirée and so would everybody else if the music wasn’t so good.
Me: Goomba’s Greedy Gala was my favorite because of how much it embraced the whole “Mario Party” thing, but Bowser’s Gnarly Party was one of the worst boards in the series. They didn’t think about the bridge mechanic at all, the board is too big, and you would need to play a 50-turn game to experience the whole board.
Zeke: Has anybody ever played 50 turns on Bowser’s Gnarly Party?
Me: Probably not.
Super Mario Party
Me: Let’s just get this out of the way- it’s a slow game. But I don’t actually mind. It’s deceptively slow. It’s like how 5 minutes laying in bed feels shorter than 5 minutes sitting in class.
Zeke: It had pretty good minigames.
Me: I think so too. Like, this game SOLD itself on the minigames. The normal Battle Royale is cool and all, but the extra modes of this game that revolve around the minigame collection are where it’s at. The rhythm games were my favorite.
Zeke: This game had an amazingly clean interface. Everything, from the ability to practice minigames on the explanation screen to the fact that the board shows you how many spaces away everything is, it’s all just so nice.
Me: I also loved all the characters we got to play as.
Zeke: Finally, a game where we got to play as Boo AND Shy Guy!
Me: I loved the big roster, but I felt like they felt that they had to do something with it, and that’s where the character-specific Dice Blocks come in. Like, character-specific items aren’t new to Mario Party games (they existed in 7), but this is a whole new level. This game has an actual tier list!
Zeke: Luckily, I always liked Boo and he just happened to be good.
Me: Great, now if people ask what character I play in Super Mario Party and I say “Shy Guy”, they’ll make assumptions. Little do they know I was a religious Shy Guy main in Mario Party 9. He’s been my favorite Mario enemy for a long time. The fact that he’s overpowered in Super Mario Party was just a pleasant surprise.
Zeke: The boards weren’t that great.
Me: I liked them fine, but I wish there were more. They could have been slightly bigger, even with the whole 1–6 standard dice.
Me: People say this game was “bad” or had “wasted potential”, but I disagree. It was a good time, and I’d like to play it again sometime.
Zeke: Sure, whenever you’re up for it.
Mario Party 1
Zeke: I think this is the exact line between “good” and “bad”.
Me: Okay, well, “Mario Party DS is bad” is going to be somewhat controversial, but I trust that you can explain yourself when the time comes. Anyways, Mario Party 1. I thought I was going to HATE it. I expected to be thrown off by how much of a “beta test” it was, but surprisingly, the simplicity was my favorite part.
Zeke: You do have to make some concessions, this being the first game and all. It’s almost not fair to compare it to 6. Then again, it makes the games worse than this one THAT much worse. Like, you had one job.
Me: The boards were pretty barren, but I liked how every character had their own board. I just wish there was more to do on them. But again, the pacing was the best part. No items, almost no board events, the game passed by much quicker than some of its successors. It kept the ball rolling.
Zeke: Obviously, we have to talk about the minigames. People can agree on games like “Face Lift” and “Shy Guy Says”, and there are some decent ones like “Crazy Cutter”.
Me: But then again, half of the games are very similar to each other, I don’t like how some minigames take coins when you lose and some don’t, and the less said about the stick rotation games, the better.
Zeke: I think this game was a great first try.
Me: Its seeming randomness can just be chalked up to inexperience, but what is there was at least interesting enough to warrant a bunch of sequels.
Mario Party DS
Me: Insert unfunny anti-piracy memes here.
Zeke: Bad memes.
Me: Anyway, Mario Party DS. If 6 was the “jack of all trades and master of none”, that would make DS the “master of one”; I’m talking about the minigame collection.
Zeke: I liked this game growing up, but it just has so many problems. Like, I only ever want to play on one of the boards.
Me: I thought Wiggler’s Garden, Toadette’s Music Room, and Bowser’s Pinball Party were good, but the bad boards were REALLY bad. It’s weird because the concepts that failed here were already done well in previous games. Kamek’s Library is just Neon Heights but worse, and DK’s Stone Statue is Faire Square with everything good removed.
Zeke: Overall, the game was certainly scaled down. It worked for the presentation and the minigames, but not for playing through the boards. They were just too small to make their concepts work. Like, a “Faire Square”-style board like DK’s Stone Statue needs blue and red spaces to work, or else the green spaces are just too bunched together.
Me: But how about those minigames, huh?
Zeke: Best minigame collection in the series, hands down. It pains me to admit it, but looking through the list of minigames in DS, there’s not even one that I don’t like.
Me: “Globe Gunners” and “Camera Shy” are classics. What I like is how well-rounded the mechanic use of the minigames is. Like, they routinely make solid use of all the DS’s features, and the games control very well. I even like how balanced the 1 v 3’s are; they actually hold up when played with four real people.
Zeke: DS is nostalgic for me, yeah, but now there’s just very little I actually like about it.
Mario Party 7
Me: I don’t even know where to begin.
Zeke: Glacial pacing. I cannot BELIEVE how slow this game is. I also don’t like the items, and it’s not just because of the character-specific ones.
Me: I like how our main characters in the old Mario Party games are Peach and Daisy, and in 7 they just happen to have character orbs that get you free coins.
Zeke: The character orbs were either broken or bad, there was no in-between.
Me: That sums up the whole game pretty well, I think. The whole thing is so random and inconsistent and janky, even for Mario Party. There are a lot of parallels that you can draw between 7 and 8, but they’re both unpolished messes in completely different ways. Like, in 8 the minigames had poor and unresponsive controls, but in 7 the minigames feel like they were each designed by three different people who had no communication with each other.
Zeke: This is the first Mario Party game where I hate all of the boards. Except for Grand Canal, but it’s the “plain” one, so that’s kind of cheating.
Me: They had great concepts, but were executed badly, or were just executed much better in 8. Like, Goomba’s Booty Boardwalk is just Pagoda Peak but better in every way.
Me: I also hate how this game stops you to do something every five seconds. You have green spaces, board events, Bowser spaces, DK spaces, Koopa Kid spaces, AND the “Bowser Time” every five turns.
Zeke: “Neon Heights” is definitely the biggest offender of this.
Me: The Bowser Time events in Neon Heights are the best example of why the mandatory Bowser Time was a bad idea. Like, remember when you lost a game because Bowser replaced the Star chest with a Ztar chest?
Zeke: Not funny, didn’t laugh.
Me: Did you notice that the titles of the single-player Bowser minigames are weird? Like, “Tunnel of Lava!” was clearly made first, and the other minigame titles actually say what the games are about. I just chalk it up to an oversight.
Zeke: This game was an oversight.
Mario Party 2
Me: Surprisingly, I didn’t like it as much as 1.
Zeke: Part of it was the item system. Only having one item slowed things down a lot. Like, either have three items or none. In 9 you could only have two Dice Blocks, but you used those more frequently than you use items in other Mario Party games.
Me: This game tried to bite off more than it could chew, but introduced concepts like battle minigames and duel minigames in a really… rudimentary way.
Zeke: But it’s a rudimentary game, so…
Me: The boards and the themes, that was cute and all, but the boards themselves are just not good. Like, in Pirate Land you will inevitably just get hit with a cannonball when you’re on the bridge and sent back to start.
Zeke: You love to see it.
Me: Half the minigames were recycled, and the ones they added have their own problems.
Zeke: “Look Away” is a good one, but the others just weren’t. “Honeycomb Havoc” only has strategy up to a certain point.
Zeke: The whole game was just like the first one, but one step forward and one or two steps back.
Me: People only like this game because of the costumes.
Mario Party 10
Me: This game is just 9 but with none of its good qualities.
Zeke: People only like this game because of Bowser Mode.
Me: Bowser Mode isn’t even very good. There’s a lot of balancing issues, especially with some of the minigames and the rerolling mechanic.
Zeke: The rerolling thing is so broken that it’s funny.
Me: Other than that, not much to say. The music, minigames, and boards are all just worse than they were in 9. There’s also less content, too. At least Mario Party 9 had you playing minigames on a regular basis, even if they weren’t at the end of every turn cycle, but in Mario Party 10 it’s not uncommon for people to only play, like, three minigames in a single session.
Zeke: The game itself felt so… soulless.
Me: I was like, “this feels more like a debug menu than a game”. There was no flair, no personality, nothing to set it apart from the other games. I feel that every other game, like how 1 was loosely based on Super Mario 64 locations, how 7 had its “World Tour” theme, how DS based the whole aesthetic of the game on the characters being shrunken down, and even how 9 grabbed setpieces and motifs from Newer Super Mario Bros Wii., had its own identity presentation-wise. 10 doesn’t have that. Well, it does have pieces of Super Mario 3D World, but Super just rendered it obsolete in that regard.
Zeke: I miss MC Ballyhoo.
Me: Me too.
WORST: Mario Party 5
Zeke: The most surprising bad thing about this game is the pacing. Like, there’s not even an excess of board events like in 7 and Super. It’s just… naturally slow.
Me: I remember the first time we played this, and I thought “man, we’re on Turn 4, but it feels like Turn 8” then you checked the pause menu and it turns out we were on Turn 3.
Zeke: Yeah, seems about right.
Me: It’s hard to think of even one thing this game isn’t the worst at. I don’t just mean that every aspect of this game is lacking, I mean that each aspect of a Mario Party game is done worse here than in in any other game on the series.
Zeke: I hate the item system.
Me: I think everybody does. Would it have killed them to just put in an item shop? The weirdest aspect of the item system is that not only did they have it all figured out in 6, but it seemed like such a no-brainer too. I‘m also amused by the concept of the Miracle Capsules, which you will probably only ever get three of (because otherwise they do nothing) if you played fifty turns, and if you held me at gunpoint and told me to play 50 turns of Mario Party 5 I would probably ask you to just shoot me.
Zeke: The fact that you can use some items like the Spiny Capsule on yourself feels like an oversight, not that I expected anything different.
Me: The only thing worse than the items are the minigames. The worst minigames of Mario Party DS are better than the best minigames of Mario Party 5. Also, when you do the math, about 16% of the minigames in 5 are based on button-mashing.
Zeke: Besides “Pushy Penguins” and “Hotel Goomba”, I can’t think of any standouts. And there are SO many bad ones. “Quilt For Speed”, “Curvy Curbs”, “Vicious Vending”, “Dodge Bomb”, I’d go on but we don’t have all day.
Me: The duel minigames in 5 are the single worst category of minigames in any Mario Party game. They’re all in the bottom percentile of ALL minigames for me, except for “Shy Guy Showdown” because it’s short and “Piece Out” because it’s actually really good. But if I had to get rid of them to get rid of “Button Mashers” and “Blown Away” for the sake of equivalent exchange, I would do so in a heartbeat.
Zeke: 5 just ends up being even less than the sum of its parts.
Me: Literally why would you not just play 6 instead?
Conclusion: Has Mario Party been in a decline?
Me: Because I have the inability to leave other people’s opinions out of my editorials, I just had to throw this in.
Apparently, some people think that the Mario party series is going downhill as a whole, starting with the Wii era.
Zeke: I think that will be determined by how Superstars pans out. Overall, though, I disagree.
Me: By its nature, the Mario Party franchise has varied wildly in quality over its ENTIRE lifespan. There have always been ideas scrapped because they didn’t work, ideas scrapped for no real reason, and despite the misconception that every Mario Party is largely the same, every game in the series is at least somebody’s favorite.
Zeke: I think the series would be worse off if every game was like 6. As long as it keeps changing, there’s room for growth.
Me: I can’t even be mad at the 3DS games. They’re offshoots that nobody really considers as main titles. As for Super, it was largely a return to formula and then some. I don’t think that the franchise is bad now, I just think we have to give it a chance to get back into the swing of things. After all, Super was advertised on being a return to form, and hopefully more base content will be added to Mario Party games in the future because of everybody’s chief complaints about Super.
Zeke: You could take out 9 and 10 and the series would make more sense in terms of progression, and being a series.
Me: I didn’t think all the experiments like the car were all bad. 9 showed that if the game works WITH a mechanic instead of just having it, then it can still be good. Even if you hated stuff like the car, the old games are still available. They never go away. I struggle to think about the series as a continual line heading in a single direction, and I consider them games that stand by themselves. As a rule, anybody who thinks the series is going downhill didn’t like Mario Party 9. Which is fine, but I thought it had merit. Oh, well. Can’t wait to see how Superstars turns out, though!
Thank you so much for reading. Zeke and I had a blast writing this together, and we hope you had fun reading it. See you next time!
