Really whats not to love about Mario Party? Aside from it getting stale from time to time, especially when they kept releasing them for the gamecube, Mario Party is iconic. Its the best thing to pull out for gamer parties and makes sure that pesky friendships don’t last too long. It pits players against each other, and yet makes them work together. Its pretty much the same for every Mario Party, just different mini-games, boards, and sometimes characters.
Mario Party 2 is widely regard as the best Mario Party, but frankly I just don’t see it so much in the partying way. I’m sure other games have more boards, mini-games, and characters than this one does, and I bet it looks a lot nicer too. If anything there really is just a lot of nostalgia for this game because it was the first Mario party to not injure you physically. You still had bumper balls, heck even 3 different kinds of bumper balls, and a bunch of new mini-games and boards to work with. If anything this was the first true Mario party in the series for a lot of people. But in terms of multi-player I just don’t see the argument for best Mario party game. A lot of the mini-games end up repeating themselves consistently throughout playing, and oddly enough this game seems to like to go 3 vs. 1 an awful lot, which is terrible because it has the lowest amount of mini-games compared to 2 vs. 2 and free for all. Not to mention a lot of the mini-games can be very unfair to even the most “skilled” Mario party players. They just rely too much on luck or screwing a certain party over. And a lot of the mini-games in this one aren’t even very original compared to the first game, and really the only thing that changed compared to the first one was the costume changing among the cast.
Really where I think Mario Party 2 does shine though is single player. While it doesn’t exactly have a campaign going for it, it does have a mini-game coaster and a bunch of unlockables a player can try to get their hands on. Even when you collected every mini-game there is still the coaster to deal with and the varies difficulties of the coaster to get your hands on skins for certain mini-games.
Final Thoughts:
I honestly don’t see this as the best Mario Party game, compared to the majority of people out there. It certainly gave a few more things to the Mario Party formula, but a lot of this was added more so to the single player experience than the multiplayer one. Still though, its Mario Party, even if it does borrow heavily from the first, its still a wonderfully horrible game to play with friends.