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Mario Party 9 Review for Nintendo Wii (Wii)

Mario Party 9 Review for Nintendo Wii (Wii)

Rolling Dice At Each Other

When you get to the ninth iteration of any video game franchise, it’s bound to be a little boring unless the developers change things up. Nintendo knows this, and they’ve designed Mario Party 9 to be unlike anything you have seen in the Mario Party series before. Coins and stars are gone, boards have a defined beginning and end, and minigames are far less common, instead letting the board game itself take center stage. Nintendo has essentially made an entirely new game and just put the Mario Party title on it. While this is a refreshing change of pace from the “get coins/buy stars” formula of the past, it brings with it a whole new set of problems that may frustrate Mario Party purists.

As I said before, coins and stars are gone. Instead, you are battling to see who can earn the most “mini-stars” before the end of the game. Mini-stars can be picked up by finding them on the board or winning them in minigames. Similarly, there are spaces on the board that make you lose mini-stars, and minigames where you will have to wager your mini-stars against your opponents.

Mario Party 9 Screenshot

You would think this means that the person who is best at minigames simply wins, but that’s not true here. Unlike previous Mario Party titles, Mario Party 9 doesn’t force you to play a minigame every four turns. Instead, minigames are only triggered when you land on a minigame space. There are varieties of different minigame types such as Free-For-All, 1vAll, Battle, and even Bower Jr. minigames, and, unlike past Mario Party titles, the games aren’t chosen randomly. Instead, the player who triggers the game gets to pick, allowing some degree of advantage.

Most of your time will be spent traversing the board itself. Instead of moving around the board individually, all the players hop into a vehicle of some sort and move around the board together. You take turns being captain of this vehicle, and while the captain is able to roll the dice and collect mini-stars, he or she also suffers all the positive or negative consequences of spaces landed on. Of course, there are also event spaces that effect passengers in the vehicle as well. Your ultimate goal is to gather as many mini-stars as you can while indirectly screwing over everyone else.

Mario Party 9 Screenshot

This turn-by-turn play continues until you reach the end of the board. Yes, boards are now created with a beginning and an end, though you may take many different paths to get there. In the middle and the end of each board is a “boss” which you fight by playing a boss minigame. All players work together to defeat the boss, but the player who performs the best gets the most mini-stars. After the final boss of the map is defeated, everyone’s mini-star total is tallied up and the player with the most stars wins.

There are about eighty minigames in Mario Party 9, and they are all fairly decent. Like previous Mario Party titles, they are simple and easy to learn, though the boss minigames generally have multiple parts to them. Most of these minigames don’t allow you to interact with the other players though, instead asking you to perform better than your opponents without giving you any direct way to screw them over. Unfortunately, this makes some of the games quite boring. You’ll probably soon find yourself longing for the games that actually let you interact with other players.

Mario Party 9 Screenshot

For example, there are plenty of variations of “shoot at the target” style minigames. Most of the time this takes place in four-player splitscreen, so everyone has an equal chance to succeed. Everyone gets the exact same targets every time, and after you all play the game once or twice you will end up getting tie after tie because you can’t affect your opponents in any way. Having everyone shoot at the same target with the quickest shot scoring points would have been much more interesting.

Since you don’t play minigames every four turns, you’ll see a lot less of them over the course of a game. While it was common to play around twenty of these over the course of a short Mario Party 8 game, it’s normal to see less than ten in a game of Mario Party 9. As a result, it will take longer to play every minigame available, which does give the game some much-needed replay value.

All of these gameplay changes address problems of past Mario Party titles. For example, since minigames are played less often, turns move much more quickly. Since there are no more coins to spend, you won’t find people taking forever in shops or randomly bursting ahead because they bought several triple-die blocks. Since you move along the board together, you never really feel like you are missing your chance to land on a good space. Since you are always heading toward the end, you won’t catch yourself traveling in loops without knowing where to go. Since you are just trying to gather mini-stars, you no longer face the frustration of getting only a few spaces away from the star before having some random board event move it. The game just feels like it progresses in a smoother fashion, which keeps people interested in seeing the game through to the end. Also, there are no more 2v2 minigames, so you can play a game with any number of players without having to deal with A.I. opponents. That’s a nice touch.

Though the game runs smoother, it’s now even more random than it was before. In previous Mario Party titles, doing well in minigames gave you resources that you would then inevitably spend to gain the advantage. In Mario Party 9, most of that is taken out. Instead, all you really have control over is rolling the die when you are captain. Sure, you can use high-block or low-block items to skew your die-roll, but obtaining these items is also essentially random, as you have to land on a die block space to get one.

Mario Party 9 Screenshot

Yes, you get to prove your skill by winning minigames, but these are only triggered randomly when you land on one of their spaces. The captain gets to choose the minigame, but from a random selection. Not only that, but the game gives you far fewer choices than you had on the roulette wheel in previous Mario Party titles. You can pick mini-stars up or lose them by moving past certain spaces on the board, but, once again, you have very little control over this since the die-roll is always random.

Essentially, a single player could play everyone’s turn outside of the minigames and nothing would change. It’s nice that Nintendo has shifted the focus of Mario Party to the actual board game itself, but since there is so little strategy is involved, it feels like you are just rolling dice at each other for about an hour and then arbitrarily deciding who wins. Actually, that’s basically all you are doing.

Is Mario Party 9 fun? Sure. In fact, its new gameplay formula is probably one of the most refreshing changes to hit the Mario Party franchise to date. Still, it hasn’t addressed the main failing of Mario Party titles: the replay value. In the past, the long length and random nature Mario Party games made gamers forget them shortly after their release in favor of more strategic and skill-based party games like Rock Band. Now Mario Party moves quicker, but has even less of a strategic element. This makes the game less frustrating, but no more appealing than any other Mario Party title. After playing through each of the boards twice with a group of friends, I was ready to put this title on my shelf until the next Mario Party release.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 3.6 Graphics
The graphics are a marked improvement over previous Mario Party titles, but the Wii is definitely showing its age at this point. 3.2 Control
The minigame controls work well enough, but there is still an overreliance on the Wii’s motion controls. 3.2 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
The soundtrack is as whimsical as you would think a Mario Party soundtrack would be, though it gets tedious after a while. 3.5 Play Value
It’s a fun game, but you’ll get bored with it pretty quickly. 3.4 Overall Rating – Fair
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.

Review Rating Legend
0.1 – 1.9 = Avoid 2.5 – 2.9 = Average 3.5 – 3.9 = Good 4.5 – 4.9 = Must Buy
2.0 – 2.4 = Poor 3.0 – 3.4 = Fair 4.0 – 4.4 = Great 5.0 = The Best

Game Features:

  • Players ride across stages together in special vehicles. Players take turns as Captain of the vehicle by hitting Dice Blocks to move the party forward, hoping to land on lucky spaces.
  • From Toad Road to Boo’s Horror Castle, players will encounter a wide variety of familiar Mario franchise elements in new environments that can be enjoyed solo or with friends.
  • In Mario Party 9, each themed stage has a clear destination point but with multiple paths along the way, so no two games will play the same. Every time they play, players can earn Party Points that are used to unlock special items and features.
  • Each stage culminates in a Boss Battle. Collectively, players must combine their strength to defeat classic foes such as Bowser and King Boo while still playing competitively to boost their own individual scores.
  • Includes 80 outrageous new minigames that find players making pizzas, escaping haunted mansions, and racing snowmobiles.

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