A collection of minigames hurt by the means we are to explore them.
Mario Party is basically the party game for Mario, excluding all of the sports games, the Smash Bros. series, and New SMB Wii. Obviously, Mario Party 5 is the 5th in the series that now has 9, not including the portables. In my opinion, 5 is the best one in the series, but that's only because the other ones are worse.
Basically the game works by rolling a dice to move the number of spaces on the board, kind of like a board game, but at times the dice doesn't seem to like you, just like in real life. Anyway, you collect coins to collect stars, and the player with the most stars at the end of the game wins. After each turn you play a minigame with which the winner gets 10 coins, or some other total depending on the senario. The minigames are actually fun, and imagenative, but not playing much of the first 4, they might have been working from a cheat sheet.
However, what ruins this game for me is the focus on luck, instead of skill, and skilled players can really feel gipped when the lose after winning most of the minigames, either because of the dice, or the board. These games all have things that piss me off really badly.
Let's start with the big ones. This game has 2 huge problems that are frustrating as all hell, and it's not the "I just want one more shot at it" frustrating, it's the "Oh my f@%king god! What the F@%K?!" then bang all of your expensive electronics together frustrating. 5 words; "Bowser space, and Goomba capsule".
The Bowser space is a returning thing. If you land on it something bad happens to you. That's fine, but when someone lands on it, and something bad can happen to everyone, that's taking a good idea, and bum f@%king it til it gos numb. 4 things can happen when you land on the Bowser space.
Bowser Bonus, which is just him taking away a star from the person who landed on it, which is what this space SHOULD be; Bowser Shuffle, which he basically just rearranges all of the players positions on the board; Bowser Minigame, which mind you, is a good idea, but everyone is suseptable to it, and the losers lose something important, like all of your coins. That's tolerable, but when one of the minigames that can be randomly selected has to do with luck whether or not you win, then the game starts to be a pure dick; and Bowser Revolution, which evenly distributes all of the coins collected by the players.
The Bowser Revolution is by far the worst, because it can help the one who landed on it. That's right, you can be in 1st place with a 300 coin cushion, then someone else with 0 coins lands on the Bowser space, only to have all of the coins for every player go to 75. This really pisses me off, because I'm usually the one that this is happening to.
The other thing that really pisses me off is the Goomba capsule, which simply swaps coin totals. This type of thing really needs to be left out of Mario Parties, then I would like this game a lot more. Imaging the comfortable coin lead of 300 getting swapped with some other assh@le who never collected one coin. At one point, this happened to me on the last turn when I had no chance to correct it. Also, the dice hated me throughout that time, so I didn't have the star lead I would have liked at the time. I eventually lost by coin lead, because if the stars are equal, then it comes down to the number of coins, and guess how many I had.
I usually don't leave this little for the story element, but the frustration overshadows everything else. The story involves Bowser corrupting peoples dreams, and you need to stop him. You stop him by beating all of his Koopa Kids that are on each dream. Basically, the story isn't much, so there's not much to talk about, but at least it's entertaining, and the final boss is an incredably satisfying payoff. It was better than anything I had expected out of a Mario Party game.
So, to sum up. This is basically a collection of fun minigames with a weird boardgame framework, and a frustration level that luck based games can only bring. Just remember, the level that core gameplay relies on luck is a direct coralation to that of blodd pressure and the rate of controllers flying into TV sets. I only recommend this to people who have an incredable tolerance to bulls#!t.