By changing the series, Mario Party 9 becomes the one guest everyone wants to see on any party's invitation list
Mario Party 9 still has all the elements that have always stood as the series' basic pillars: players still go around a board rolling dice and landing on spaces that cause different events to take place; there are still over 80 mini-games that award those who perform better; and characters can still acquire items that allow players to mess around with their strategy. However, all of those elements have been arranged so differently, that even players who have had the patience to play through all of Mario's previous parties will barely feel like they have been through this before. Mario Party 9 does not just look different, it feels different, and it does not play like any Mario Party game before it, therefore making playing this ninth game nearly as refreshing as rolling the dice for the first time so that your character would step on a board where moments of happiness, frustration, excitement, anger and thrill would be waiting for you.
The first big noticeable change is that characters now move all together along the board by sharing a special vehicle. Every player gets its turn and suffers the effects of the space where the car will land on the turn where he is the captain, as the game itself says. In addition, the boards themselves have suffered big changes in their structure, going from being cyclical maps where players lap around until all the turns end to being almost completely linear, with the game reaching its end when the players' vehicle gets to end of the map, instead of making them go through a certain amount of turns that can take forever to complete. Looking at it from a positive angle, those two shifts in gameplay make the game much more dynamic, because as the board features no intersections or other delaying points, players do not have to wait long before they can roll the dice. Besides, as everybody moves together, the position of the vehicle is of universal interest, therefore watching other people in their turn becomes much more important and entertaining, since – in many ways – your fate is also in play. Once upon a time, playing a Mario Party board could be fun and dynamic or boring and dragging, Mario Party 9 eliminates everything that caused board games to last for too long, and bets in a much more dynamic gameplay that keeps players attentive through the whole affair.
With turns being faster, longtime Mario Party fans would expect mini-games to also come up more frequently, but here the mini-games do not appear at the end of the turns, instead they show up either when players wither land on a mini-game space, or on an item space, which will occasionally come packed with a surprise mini-game. It may initially sound as a disappointment that the appearance of the game's best feature has been relegated into a chance occurrence, but by placing a mini-game at the end of every now fast turn, developers would have severely broken the pace of board playing, which would have worked against their bid to give dynamism to the game. What matters is that it never feels like it has been too long before a mini-game shows up, as the developers were smart enough to scatter plenty of mini-game spaces around the boards and to make sure that at least one-third of the items players get came paired with a mini-game; and, when it is all said and done, a board game that now lasts about thirty minutes will present around ten mini-games or so, which is pretty much the same rate on which they appeared before.
Upon winning a mini-game, we – as Mario Party enthusiasts – have grown used to being awarded shiny beautiful golden coins so we could buy ourselves some stars, but Mario Party 9 is so radical that it even flips the game's solid economic system on its very head. The game replaces coins and stars for mini-stars, meaning that frantic races around the board to be the first one to get to the star's new location have been completely eliminated. Surprisingly, that change does not affect gameplay that much, because now, instead of battling to see who ends up with the biggest amount of stars, players are just fighting to be the one who collects the most mini-stars. Interestingly, though, the way on which those mini-stars are awarded has changed quite a bit in relation to coins, and this fact definitely alters the game's general landscape. For starters, mini-games now give mini-stars to all players except for the loser, obviously giving more stars to the first one than to the second or third. It is a small tweak for sure, but even though the player who wins the mini-game does not have such a big advantage anymore, since he only gets two more mini-stars than the second-placed gamer, this alteration makes mini-games interesting all the way through for pretty much everybody, as those who lose first place still have plenty to fight for once the winner does whatever it is that must be done to be the victor.
With mini-games becoming less relevant in defining who has the most mini-stars, unless a dramatic Battle Game happens (where players must give away a few mini-stars so that a mini-game with inflated values can be played) or a player manages to win a big amount of the mini-games that appear, the focus comes back to the board, because it is there that most of the action will take place. Gone are the spaces that give or take coins away from players, and in come sets of mini-stars of negative mini-stars that are spread through the board only waiting for the captain to show up and snatch them. Mario Party 9 has little to no spaces on its boards where nothing happens. Wherever you are and whatever you roll on the dice, chances are the vehicle will wind up landing on a space that triggers some sort of event, either lucky or terribly unlucky. Players can try to affect the result of the dice rolls positively or negatively by using special dice of various sorts, which are the only available items in the game. However, those dice are only acquired by landing on item spaces, which are – I might add – plentiful, but the fact remains that getting good items no longer relies on being skilled enough to collect coins that will allow good purchases, instead, getting the chance to think strategically with the items at hand depends on being lucky enough to land on the right spot.
Ultimately, what Mario Party 9, with the decreasing value it gives to mini-games by making their rewards more even, does is that it puts a huge amount of value on what happens during board play; in other words: there has never been a Mario Party where luck counts this much. Nearly all of the game's amazing boards are literally out to kill you. With the exception of the first board, all other stages have one or two traps that can cause the captain of the vehicle to lose half of his mini-star collection. On Boo's Horror Castle, your host will run after your vehicle by moving three spaces per turn, and if reached, the vehicle's captain will lose half of his mini-stars; on Magma Mine the same fate will await those who do not get high enough numbers to get away from the increasing level of lava; and on Bob-omb Factory, a hot potato Bob-omb will drop from the ceiling and explode in the face of the vehicle's captain once the vehicle has moved a certain amount of spaces. All of the boards, with no exception, are amazingly designed and extremely entertaining to play, but those who lose their minds a little bit too fast over the losing of some virtual currency might experience some really rough moments here.
Even though they do not count as much as they used to, Mario Party 9 offers the most solid mini-game collection of the series. Eventually, older players will stumble upon some familiar moments that have been obviously inspired by previous Mario Party classics, but even those are fun all the same. Thankfully, after Mario Party 8 became plagued by uninspired mini-games that occasionally suffered from motion controls, Mario Party 9 mostly presented activities that either make use of the Wiimote's very precise pointer or from its old-school setup, as it is turned on its side. Aside from the mini-games where two players face off against Bowser Jr. in an attempt to stop Bowser's most annoying minion, the big highlights of the this title's vast collection of games might be the boss battles that take place twice at specific points of each board. Those battles are nothing but cooperative mini-games where players must do something to defeat one of Bowser's minor bad guys. In those battles, points are awarded according to the number of hits each player lands on the foe, with the winner being decided accordingly. Not only are those moments rather refreshing, because they bring a style of mini-game gameplay that had never been tried out before, they are also quite fun because they feel like grander mini-games and because defeating each boss requires very different and unexpected strategies.
By being shorter and much less bland, it is now much easier to string together many sessions of board games one right after the other, and it is extremely likely that, due to the positive changes that have been implemented, the game's Party Mode will be the one that is most played. Still, Mario Party 9 still invests in the traditional extra modes of the series, featuring a single-player mode with a very silly backstory that tries, and fails, to motivate players to try the game whilst their friends are away; the always present, and very nice, Mini-Game mode where it is possible to take part in different kinds of mini-game-only competitions; and an Extra Mode where some very fun mini-games await players - such as Wii Sports-inspired bowling alley with moving Goombas for pins and a Koopa shell for a ball – or it is even possible to play some of the game's mini-games in a totally new camera perspective, making them much harder, especially given the fact that Mario Party 9 will challenge players to survive for up to 60 seconds on those dangerous arenas. Due to how much it has strayed away from the series' usual pattern, Mario Party 9 already offers plenty of gameplay hours in its Party Mode by itself, but it seems that developers have tried really hard to turn plentiful into endless, by packing the game with great extra content in addition to the amazing boards, and it would be fair to say that they have succeeded in their mission.
In the end, Mario Party 9 is the very best that the industry can offer in terms of party games. Sure, its heavy reliance on luck will make some players turn the game away even before giving it a try, but doing so would be an awful mistake. By evening out the playing field, Mario Party 9 becomes an extremely competitive mess, and between the beginning of a board and the end of its final boss battle there will be laughter, either from total joy or despairing sadness; thrills, after all trying to hit a good number on the dice to escape from mini-star eating lava is up there in the top of video games' most tense moments; and many other emotions that only such a social gaming experience can offer. What Mario Party 9 does most effectively, is that it makes us care more about the journey than about the ending itself. Winning is still important, and everyone will try their best to do so, but losing half of your mini-stars a few steps away from the end becomes ridiculously irrelevant in the light of so much simple silly fun among friends. By doing so, Mario Party 9 gets away from being so dependent on luck; in fact, it even becomes deserving of praise for making even our most skill lacking friend a worthy opponent, and making all gatherings much more fun. A few years from now, when some Mario Party games are long forgotten either for being bad or for being too old, Mario Party 9 will still be played over and over again. It will become more essential to friendly parties than music, conversation or food itself; it will be the one guest everyone wants to see on the invitation list.