[Review] Mario Party Superstars — one party you won’t want to miss

It’s been nearly 23 years since Mario Party first debuted on the Nintendo 64 and forever changed local multiplayer for Nintendo fans. This colorful and amusing spinoff series can be fun for all ages, or it can just as quickly turn your living room into a warzone as players battle it out for coins and Stars. After more than two decades, Mario Party is circling back to its roots with Mario Party Superstars for the Nintendo Switch — a remastered compilation of the first three Mario Party titles from the Nintendo 64 that also pays tribute to the whole franchise.

Mario Party has experimented with plenty of different concepts over the last two decades, but Superstars is a return to the basics that the series started with. You won’t find polarizing gameplay mechanics that appeared in previous entries, like the capsules, the microphone, or the car. Not even allies or character-specific dice blocks, which were more well-received and most recently appeared in Super Mario Party, are included here. In Superstars, you simply roll the dice, maybe buy an item or use one along the way, and get right to the minigames.

Just like you remember it

The item system is much like what you’ll remember from Mario Party 2 and 3, which is sure to please anyone who swears by the Nintendo 64 titles. One or two items come from more recent releases (like the nifty Custom Dice Block that lets you choose exactly what number you’ll roll), but most are old favorites. You can buy Skeleton Keys, Double Dice, Mushrooms, and the like at shops run by Toad, and maybe you’ll have a chance to grab a Boo Bell or a Dueling Glove in item minigames.

Between those shops and item minigame spaces, there are lots of opportunities to acquire items, so it’s all the better that you can hold three at a time. Superstars clearly wants you to use items as you play, and any Mario Party veteran can tell you that using them strategically can be the difference between being the Party Star or finishing in dead last.

Of course, there is guaranteed to be absurdity and craziness at some point every time you play. That could mean a CPU shamelessly rubberbands its way into first place. It could also mean your buddy pulls off a miraculous dice roll that sees them land on Chance Time, during which they then send all of your hard-earned Stars to the player in fourth place. No matter how skilled you are at minigames or how elaborately you try to scheme your way to victory, dumb luck will always be a factor to some extent. Would it really be Mario Party without that?

Superstar’s boards are all taken from the N64 Mario Party titles, just with a fresh coat of paint and a few tweaks here and there. You can bring the party to Peach’s Birthday Cake, Yoshi’s Tropical Island, Space Land, Horror Land, or Woody Woods. One thing you will notice if you’ve played the boards before is the addition of Lucky Spaces, which replace some of the generic blue spaces. When you land on a Lucky Space, you’ll be gifted with a random bonus like coins, an item, or other goodies.

Since there are fewer blue and red spaces on the board that only net you three coins or make you lose three coins, turns tend to take a little longer in Mario Party Superstars than in previous games. The characters move very fast, but with how many different events and interactions are available, it’s rare that you’ll simply roll the dice, move your character, and be done with your turn.

These stages all look great after getting a visual upgrade from the Nintendo 64 to Switch hardware; they’re brighter, cleaner, and seem a lot fuller thanks to ample 3D rendering to replace much of the flat, prerendered nature of the originals. The same can be said for the entire game, which reuses the engine from Super Mario Party. Most of the minigames received a glow-up as well, and some of them are genuinely gorgeous. There are times where Mario Party Superstars rivals Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario 3D World in the graphics department.

Whether these boards were the best choices is another matter. None are outright poorly designed, and they all are charming in their own ways, but the argument could be made that Nintendo left some superior options on the cutting room floor. Yoshi’s Tropical Island, Space Land, and Horror Land were fine choices, but did Peach’s Birthday Cake and Woody Woods really deserve to make it into this very exclusive group above all other contenders? The fact that there are only five boards (and no others to be found in extra modes) also feels a tad underwhelming. Here’s hoping that there will eventually be DLC for the game, because places like Pirate Land, Western Land, Chilly Waters, or Waluigi’s Island should be in here as well.

A fantastic catalog of minigames

Even if the boards in Superstars aren’t your cup of tea, you’ll likely find a lot to love in its vast minigame selection. A grand total of 100 minigames were brought back this time, and they hail from all across the series’ history. The majority are taken from the three Nintendo 64 titles, but the rest come from Mario Party 4 through 10, so every mainline entry in the franchise is represented here. As expected with a list this large, there are a few duds, but for the most part, it’s a terrific selection that brings some of the best minigames in the series into a single cartridge. Free-for-all, 2 vs. 2, 1 vs. 3, duels, coin collecting minigames, item minigames — all types are here.

Battle minigames are also included, albeit in a slightly different form. When you land on a Versus Space, you will participate in a random free-for-all where everyone antes up a certain amount of coins as the reward for winning. In other words, any free-for-all minigame can be a Battle minigame, while minigames that were previously Battle exclusive are now just categorized as regular free-for-alls. A round of Bowser’s Big Blast with only 10 coins on the line might not be as intense as it was in the past. However, the trade-off of being able to play games like Bumper Balloon Cars, Storm Chasers, or Paths of Peril at any time is well worth it. Just the same, playing Snowball Summit or The Final Countdown with a prize pot of 80 coins can make things much more dramatic than normal.

When you want to enjoy Mario Party Superstars’ huge catalog of minigames without all of the shenanigans of the party boards, head to Mt. Minigames and have at it. In addition to your ordinary free play options, Mt. Minigames has a few different online modes that get a little more creative. The daily challenges that pit you against other players in themed sets of minigames are perfect for quick, pick-up-and-play experiences. Coin Battle tests just how many coins you can accumulate in a series of free-for-alls, while Survival tests how many minigames you can win in a row. The chaotic nature of Mario Party’s minigames makes winning streaks pretty difficult to put together, so Coin Battle and Survival can become very addictive as you try to top your high score.

There is no dedicated single-player mode in Mario Party Superstars, and with the daily challenges and survival modes on Mt. Minigames being available only online, fans without a Nintendo Switch Online (NSO) subscription might find the quantity of content in Mario Party Superstars a little lacking. Still, no matter how you play, you’ll always be acquiring coins that are added to your bank, which you can then use to purchase all manner of different goodies from Toad’s shop. These include rewards like music tracks, stickers to chime in with messages during parties, encyclopedia entries, and different aesthetics for your player profile.

Party however you want

If you do have an NSO subscription, being able to play online is going to be a blast for longtime Mario Party fans. Before, your competition was likely limited to your closest friends who would stop by to play in your living room. Now, the field has opened up to the entire world. Maybe you were the best of your social circle, but Mario Party Superstars gives you the chance to see how you stack up to Mario Party players around the globe.

Jumping into an online match with friends or with strangers is painless, and there are a number of ways to customize your experience. If you want all minigames available and a wide range of categories for the bonus Stars, that option is there for you. If you want to make it like you’re back playing on the Nintendo 64, you can do so by setting the minigames to only come from the first three Mario Party games. You can also set the bonus Stars to be the familiar Happening Space, Coin, and Minigame awards.

One of the neatest forms of customization is in your player profile, which other people can view after you’ve played against them online. You can list your favorite Mario Party title, board, and four favorite minigames on there, which are then added to a worldwide ranking. It’s especially interesting to peruse the 100 minigames and see which are the most popular. As of this writing, Mario Party 2, Horror Land, and Mushroom Mix-Up lead the pack in each category.

That’s just the beginning of the remarkable stat tracking that Mario Party Superstars compiles. The game tracks your high scores and records them down to the very minigame, even putting together your winning percentage for individual minigames. Between those statistics, a bevy of achievements (some of which are fiendishly difficult) that unlock new player profile titles, and the online rankings, we dare say that Mario Party Superstars has a bit of a competitive sphere.

But if you’re just coming to Mario Party Superstars for a whacky, carefree bit of fun, the game is more than able to deliver. Mario Party Superstars is welcoming to any and all Mario Party fans, whether you’ve been playing these games since 1998 or trying one out for the very first time. It’s not simply a wonderful celebration of the Nintendo 64 Mario Party games — it’s a celebration of an entire series that has been entertaining Nintendo fans for more than two decades.

Score: 8.5/10