Mario Party Franchise Twitter Rant

Tbh I liked the old Mario Party games. 2 was probably my favourite. I liked them all the way to six, skipping five. Five is awful. Illogical
Seven was okay. But also not really. It was really stale.
Every other one past that has just been awful. There is no redemption. But how else will they figure out what works and what doesn't.
The absolute core of Mario Party was the competitiveness. You're all goofing around and trying to reach the top competitively.
Co-op board games wouldn't make sense at all, especially if just one person gets the benefit each time.
Like if you're playing Monopoly are you really wanting to move everyone together while only one person gets to decide what happens?
"But they alternate leaders each turn" sure, everyone COULD get a chance, but there's no fun in that. Mario Party isn't about tourism.
Mario Party is supposed to be the fun, creative, competitive virtual board game with minigames throughout that turn tides every which way
I think Mario Party has shown its heart of their ideas of the older format. In 10 there is amiibo party. You're given a rectangular board
with so few spaces it is not really worthy of being looked at. The mechanic is certainly unique but inconvenient because it still establishs
the need for cooperative play. The figures are just renders of the amiibo themselves. No animation, no uniqueness. They look plastic n cheap
iirc they still use the main game mini games every so often. But the game you're playing already feels empty.
There's no real redemption for the current gen of Mario Party. It feels fake.
If you're into that format, go right ahead. Enjoy it. If you can, tell me the benefits of it. It feels too streamlined, too simplified, easy
A great part of the older games were how everything could change by getting lucky and landing on a space. Or even unlucky.
The board could be interacted with or interact with you in special or random events. It could change your entire strategy.
There used to BE strategy in Mario Party. Complex steps you'd have to recalculate almost every turn. Now it's just determined by spaces.
"If I get this many spaces then I won't have to take the nega-stars" or "if I get X block I can do so and so to get the most stars"
They hand you stars. They're just shiny coins. There's no special value to them. There's no strategy.
It's just "Be the one rolling when you pass through a star gate."
Where's the fun in that?
"There's a bowser event if you roll all the numbers on a die" yeah? Bowser spaces were mandatory and had HIGH risk when landed on previously.
In the newer games you can charge right through the board and if you don't free bowser, you get Jr. instead who is not nearly as relentless.
And even though when you free bowser he follows you around and shoots if you land on his targets or spaces, the only risk is you get shot.
And it can happen regularly, sure, but it's usually avoided despite it being short-distance. Bowser games aren't that tough either.
Older bowser games were difficult, even if they were simple. There was so much going on that you just hoped you held out.
Even if you were the BEST at Mario Party, bowser games would wreck your entire game.
There was risk. There was relief if you won. There was even comedy in the oldest. Small things that had high reward in the end.
And the older games were more regularly formatted. You could go around the board and land on only the same forty spaces by some unluck.
Or you could hit every space. You could win or lose, it didn't matter. You just had to know how to play your matters right.
People win by buying all they can and dominating the board, orbs or otherwise. Win by having the highest coin. Lowest coin but highest star
I won a game by only getting the star once. I had the most coins, won the most minigames, and hit the most special spaces.
Bonus stars were the reward that pushed me in first in an otherwise unlucky game.
Even the AI could be brutal and not be told apart from competitive players. They took revenge on players. They had vengeance.
The AI now? What point do they even serve in the game? They're just there to fill the roster. A game with just computers is as fun as none.
The format is just awful. It's too linear. Older ones had so much more to see and use to your advantage.
The environments were all unique and had their own unique interactions or some boards had their own special mechanics.
They didn't just look like they were taken from 3D World or whatever. Sure, that'd be fun for a few levels. All of them? Certainly not.
I would be more forgiving if they all had their own mechanics. But they don't. It's Point A to Point B.
And it's easy to see more of their attention went into how the board itself was interacted with because everything is block-based, spaces.
They have to have a new block come up and say "oh! It's time for a minigame. Hit to see what you get!" And then its randomised.
Part of the challenge in the older ones was to NOT be separated from a 4vs bc you could be pitted up against or you would all be dominated.
Which meant it was a less fair fight, but also had high risk, high reward. So you WANTED to play it.
The core of Mario Party gameplay is competition. It's high risk, high reward. Strategy. Domination. Knowing how to play matters right.
There should be nothing absolutely linear or streamlined or even simple about Mario Party. The only co-op should be wanted or randomised.
Pit players against each other. Make them have to form alliances if necessary. One versus all, work as a team against another or one.
Have exchanges. Strategy comes in when trading off a sum of default value for a single higher value or tools to attain more of either.
There's no advantages to take in the new Mario Party games. There's no risk. No reward. No strategy. No adventure. No competition.
From a marketing view? No selling point. Use your mascot, sure. But if people buy your game just in the hope it has the core it did some
time ago, what are you really trying to sell?
I was excited to get a Wii U. But eventually it was shown they don't seem to want to move on much in their big-title games.
Further and further they just seemed to want to refine old ideas. Which is fine, in some cases, but didn't always work out.
I don't know if I'll ever buy a new Mario Party again. I don't know if I want a mainline Mario game again.
Why play a new version with new graphics if you've already released it before with older graphics? Why play what's deviated from its core?
Thank you for sending your attention to my talk of Mario Party.