"Is working together really better...?"

Once again, Nintendo fans get another Mario Party thrown at us for us to consider buying. Now, a lot of us will see Mario on the cover and automatically assume that the game is well made. The rest of us see Mario and complain that it's the same old thing. Where does Mario Party 7 stand? Well, this question is difficult to answer, as it should be with any game.

The Mario Party series has been a popular, long-running series for the Nintendo systems featuring Mario and pals and their quest to beat each other in a Star-collecting board game. Each time a game in the series comes out, the fans buy it, and most of them love it, and the series loses its charm to quite a handful that now detest the game. Personally, I've loved all the Mario Party games, but simply because I love playing the game, and changing it around, even a little bit, is exactly what I need when the old game starts getting stale. So, it goes without saying that Mario Party is ever much different each time a sequel arrives, but that doesn't mean it's going to remain the same.

Mario Party games turn the worlds of the Super Mario universe into a giant board game, and everyone is invited to play. Players take turns rolling dice and moving around the various boards, collecting coins and ultimately buying or somehow finding "Stars." The premise is simple: get the most stars by the end of the game (a set number of turns) and you win. While it sounds mundane, the game is made exciting by various events always happening: players place spaces on the board that can hurt the other players, and various parts of the board interact with the players (possibly giving them chances to gain more coins and stars, take away from other players, or simply lose some of their stuff). Once each player has taken a turn, a "minigame" starts.

Minigames are the heart of Mario Party. There are many, many different types. The basic idea is a mini-competition for coins between players. Using simple skills that anyone can master (memory, timing, reaction, etc.) players compete with each other to put themselves closer to getting a Star.

The Mario Party games each have a different "theme" to them, and this time around, Mario and his friends have been invited on a cruise, so the theme is something like "different places in the world." With a desert, space station, an ancient Japanese mountain, and a few others to choose from, the boards are quite diverse.

However, each Mario Party game also adds a few interesting new features to the game that make it more exciting and keep the game from getting stale. Mario Party 7 didn't really seem to do this. The one player mode is nothing more than playing the Party Mode by yourself with some kind of mundane task (for example, "Please get two stars.") and the only new "feature" added to the game was eight-player mode; although, it's basically four player mode with two players passing the controller back and forth (which makes the game longer and more frustrating to play). Once in a while, an 8-player minigame will pop up (though very rare) which requires each player to hold half of the controller and sometimes do very separate tasks that one player would not be able to do on their own (well not as well as the two together) or something that requires a bit of synchronization between the two players.

The main downside to 8-player mode is, though, that no one really has seven other people that want to cram around in front of one TV while passing controllers around just to play Mario Party.

Team play seems to be really stressed in this version, and even though any Mario Party game is mainly fun with four players, this game almost requires it. Team battles are much more interesting, and the eight-player mode seems to be what the developers were intending you played most of the time.

Gameplay

Gameplay in Mario Party 7 is much the same as the previous games. The speed of characters running around the board is the same as the good speed from Mario Party 6, but now so much happens in one turn that the turns take forever anyway. There seems to be a lot more events during the actual board game, dice-rolling part of the game, which isn't exactly what makes the game fun. While it's interesting to have a small challenge or character spaces, it's not really fun to watch your friends shopping for orbs, talking to boo and koopas, fanning a giant fire, and playing an entire minigame against Bowser by themselves while you wait for your turn. If these things were used more sparingly, it might be entertaining, but once you have to sit through it over and over, you get very fed up.

Overall, though, the game plays fine. There are a lot of fun minigames, though nothing noteworthily different from before. The games are still fair and a competition of skills that anyone can play. There are even a few very exciting games that caused my friends and I to jump and scream with excitement during the game (our favorite being Take Me Ohm, where everyone stands on a giant hexagon and must jump over beams of lightning sent from one side to its parallel -- sometimes more than one at a time).

The one player mode is horribly boring, but you must complete it to unlock the final Party board. Unlocking everything else is pretty easy, though, if you decide to keep playing by yourself. You get a lot of "mileage points" by playing the one player game, and you can spend them on some interesting toys (just for looking at) and new characters and sounds for the game. You can even unlock the staff's score and time records for the minigames! Unfortunately, playing the Party Mode with your friends doesn't seem to cash in many of these points, so if you want to unlock things quickly, you'll be slaving away by yourself.

Graphics/Sound

While I do think that graphics and sound are the least important part of a game (especially one like this), Mario Party 7 was really disappointing here. A lot of the songs get on your nerves more than sing cute tones in the background. A few of the songs are good, but most are not. Also, the fun character voices, including the taunts, were just recycled from Mario Party 6, so there is nothing fun or new about the voices.

The graphics seem to be a downgrade from the previous game, too. The Mario characters now look awkward and lost a lot of charm from the previous game. Daisy looks unhealthily thin, Yoshi looks more like a strange alien than a dinosaur, and the rest of the cast has their fair share of weird graphical quirks.

Replay

Mario Party 7 has a lot of minigames to play and a few fun boards. The innovation of board ideas seems to have gone down, though (still using chomps to steal stars and such) with the exception of the windmill board, which is very fun and interesting. Instead of buying stars, you "invest" in various windmills placed across the board's spaces. Whoever has the highest total number of coins in one windmill will have possession over the stars inside (from one to three). You can deposit coins in a windmill any time you come across it.

The multiplayer games outside of Party Mode don't seem very exciting, and the "game show" idea from Mario Party 6 was removed. Mic games are still there, but now with the four-player free-for-all mic games, they seem to take away from the game by slowing it down (don't worry, the mic is still as responsive as before, so there isn't a problem in playing them).

Overall

Mario Party 7 doesn't really seem to give out the fresh excitement that the new Mario Party games normally give out, and it seems to get old very quickly. While you can always look into it for the new minigames and such, if you already have Mario Party 5 or 6 for the GameCube, you might want to wait until Mario Party 7 gets much cheaper before you consider buying it, because you will probably move back to your old Mario Party soon after purchasing this one.

Still, my faith in the Mario Party series is not lost. I didn't like Mario Party 2 or 4, but I've seen that even though the game can be a bit bland for one version, there always ends up being an awesome version or two that follow next.

And remember, this game is for four or eight people to play at once, now more than ever. While you can play by yourself or with two or three total players, the main fun is playing with either four (or now eight) players on the board at once.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 01/19/06