Mario Party 3 is the third and final Mario Party title for the Nintendo 64. A total of eight characters are available to choose from: Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Yoshi, Wario, Donkey Kong, and newcomers Waluigi and Princess Daisy. Mario Party 3 features duel maps, in which two players try to lower each other's stamina to zero using non-playable characters such as Chain Chomps. It is the first Mario Party game to feature Luigi's main voice and also it is last Mario game where Princess Daisy appears in a yellow and white dress, and with long hair, as well as the last Mario game (until New Super Mario Bros. Wii) in which Yoshi's "record-scratching" voice is used. It is also the first Mario Party game to have multiple save slots.
Reviews View More
Honestly? MP3 is probably better than MP2, but I still give an ever-so-slight edge to the latter because of the costume gimmick. Yes, I am that silly. For real, though, MP3 is solid. All-new minigames, interesting boards & some welcome change-ups to the formula. You can carry three items now to allow for more strategic play? Sign me up!
tem o waluigi
Out of all the Mario Party games, this one feels the most chaotic. Between items, board gimmicks, and the presence of battle minigames and Game Guy spaces, games can radically shift 5 times per turn. Yet, it never feels unfair. Every element, under the right circumstances, can be used to your advantage, and how well you do depends entirely on how well you can shift the chaos in your favor. For that reason, 3 is my favorite Mario Party.
It's a good Mario Party game! Better than the first Mario Party, but not better than the second Mario Party!
I got threatened to get my shit beat like 5 times while playing this,might be one of the best or worst games to play with friends or siblings depending on your perspective.
I played a lot of Mario Party 2 over the Golden Week vacation two weeks ago, and it made me want to try out some of the other ones again since it's been so long since I've played most of the games. It's been at least like 10 years since I've played any Mario Party before 9 to any great extent. N64 games tend to be very cheap (at least the more popular/common Nintendo first-party ones) around here, so I went and got Mario Party 3 the other day for a whopping 600 yen (200 yen off because it had the box but not the manual XD ).
In my youth back before I even had a Gamecube, Mario Party 2 was always my favorite of the original 3 Mario Parties, and 3 was always my least favorite. I'd never really been able to put words as to why other than that I didn't like the boards, but the great amount of time I've spent beating story mode twice over the past weekend (once on easy once on hard) has really allowed me to put words to why Mario Party 3 is not just a game I don't enjoy as much as its predecessor, I can also put words to more significant faults in its overall game design. Now I want to make clear I am not trying to state that Mario Party 3 is an outright bad game. I think if one were to do that you'd be taking all the pre-9 Mario Parties down with it with how much greater DNA they share. But all Mario Parties are not created equally, and I am definitely arguing that Mario Party 3 is built of lesser stuff than many of its console-borne brethren.
Mario Party 2 was in MANY ways a "fixed" version of Mario Party 1. A significant amount of the mini-games aren't so much recycled so much as they are improved upon from the first game (although there is the occasional 1-to-1 copy like Hexagon Heat). Other than the new maps, Mario Party 2's main innovations upon the first game are the introductions of concepts like items, a bank, duels during the last few turns, and far fewer ways for players to directly steal items from one another via the normal end-of-turn mini-games. By doing this, Mario Party 2, however unintentionally, amplified the main design flaw from Mario Party 1: It is very easy to run the table by just being very good at all the mini-games. Two of the end-of-game bonus stars are linked to winning them frequently, and things like items and duels gave the best players more ways than ever to utilize that cash advantage and rob other players of their own coin advantages. If everyone wasn't around the same skill level, Mario Party 1 and 2 would quickly turn into a game where the winner was very obvious from the start, and it ironically enough made it an awful party game because of the amount of how difficult casual play was with players of varying skill levels.
Mario Party 3's apparent solution to this was to introduce more random chance into not just the mini-games, but all aspects of the game's design in several ways:
1) Chance Time, the frequently frustrating equalizer that, while rare, would give anything from 10 coins to ALL a player's stars to another player if done correctly, now has a much more frequent sibling in Game Guy. Game Guy is a solo-player event that whisks you away to his casino and forces you to bet ALL of your coins in a very easy-to-lose game of chance. Where Chance Time at LEAST involved several players (one pushing the buttons of the game and at least one other being affected by it), Game Guy is not only a totally solo event that really slows the pace of the game down, but it is also something that either totally cripples one player by funneling ALL of their coins into the garbage, or granting them a coin lead so massive that no other player has the slightest chance of topping them (making one of the 3 bonus stars for the highest coin total at one time basically pointless). There's even a rare item you can use to sic Game Guy on any player (even yourself) if you want, as kind of a tacit acknowledgement from the game itself that going to it is a BAD thing you don't want to do. Game Guy's games, in isolation, aren't terrible, but the impact they have on the overall flow of the board game adds an element of randomness that doesn't really do anything but rob agency away from the players in a series that already has issues with random chance.
2) The mini-games. A lot of MP3's mini-games are really good fun. Some take way longer to play than I'd like, but the addition of a selection of item and duel mini-games instead of each map having its own really spices things up for those parts of the game (although both of those do a LOT to slow down the overall pace of each game). Overall I'd say it's a game with higher mini-game highs but lower mini-game lows than its predecessors. However, something that is in MP3 a lot more than 2 are games that rely on random chance to win. It's something that gets far more apparent on higher CPU difficulties as well, but other games too are just designed in such a way that the CPU has a fundamentally easier time to the point where some games are literally impossible for a human player to beat them in. Any game that relies around knowing the character's hit-boxes to a very exact degree or being able to move to adjust to an upcoming obstacle quickly is one the CPU will almost always win. I reached a point where there were times I'd just put down my controller if the game came up because there was genuinely no point in even trying. Although their sporadic length does a lot to slow down the overall pace of the game, the increased amount of games where no amount of skill (or human-attainable skill) makes MP3 a very frustrating experience especially in its special single-player mode.
3) The board design. This is the #1 problem that Mario Party 3 faces as far as I'm concerned. Every single board has a varying level of the core conceit of it tied to randomness. Whether its being flung across the entire board by a happening space, needing to guess a 50/50 chance to not get sent back to the start instead of progressing, or just not rolling well on a particular turn so you can't go the direction the game lets you go that turn, the boards are incredibly difficult to purposefully navigate compared to the previous two games. Largely because of happening spaces dictating when and how certain parts of the board can be accessed, this makes items that do things like teleport the player to the star or change the star's location very valuable, because often times no player can even get lucky enough to even GET to where the star currently is. All of the randomness put into the board designs, on top of just how winding their paths are and visually cluttered their design tends to be, makes it not only difficult to tell how to get to places but to get to them at all. It frequently robs the board part of the board game of any kind of player agency to the point where even having it at all seems like a waste of time between mini-games.
4) The dueling mode. The 1 vs. 1 dueling mode is more of a side-point, as it's completely divorced from the usual Mario Party mode and is honestly more of a gimmick for the single-player mode to have some more length and break up its pacing a bit, but the execution is so poorly done that I cannot leave it without comment. The concept is really cool: Two players going around on a board, each with Mario Bros. baddies as partners that they use to hurt the other player. The better/stronger the partner, the more salary they take per turn, so you need to keep winning mini-games to be able to afford your partner at all! However, in practice, it is just a microcosm of how badly the randomness is in this game. Depending on the map and on the partner you start with, it is VERY possible for a match to be over in two whole turns if one player just gets lucky rolls. It's also even more frequently the case that the board is so difficult to navigate, or the players are just rolling unluckily enough, that no combat ever takes place, so the winner is decided by coins. This would be fine, but mini-games only happen when initiated by landing on space on the board, so if there aren't many that game or if you happen to keep getting unlucky with the partners you get (who are of course assigned randomly, why wouldn't they be), you'll have barely any coins by no fault of your own and just lose. The duel mode was a noble effort that honestly came out so badly I almost wish it weren't in the game at all. It is genuinely as random as two children just playing the card game War with one another: the duel mode may as well be one competing die roll to see who scores the highest and call it a day.
Mario Party 3 doesn't fail in the aesthetic presentation, certainly. Sure, you have the fun map-determinate costumes from the second game gone, but you have a colorful (if cluttered) paper cut-out style to all the worlds and games, as well as a bunch of good music. You even have two new playable characters in the form of Daisy and Waluigi, and all the silly campy cutscenes in between rounds in the story mode. MP3 certainly looks and sounds as good as it should for being such a late-life N64 game. Although you could certainly argue that the toy box style was just a clever way to use mostly 2D sprite assets rather than proper polygon'd models to get the game released quicker, it still looks nice.
Verdict: Not recommended. This is not a bad game, but you can do SO much better for a Mario Party even on the N64 that I just can't recommend this in good conscience, especially for the increasingly steep price point it commands outside of Japan. As said earlier, while there really aren't any strictly terrible Mario Party games outside of the GBA one, not all are created equal, and Mario Party 3 is definitely one below the rest. In an effort to distance themselves from how similar the first two games were from each other, they really tried to reinvent the wheel in a way that just was not really necessary, and the series honestly keeps a lot of these problems, even if not quite to the same degree, well into Mario Party 4. Just get Mario Party 2 or bite the bullet and start trying to hunt down the later Gamecube games if you really want great Mario Party in the pre-9 style, because you can do a LOT better for a LOT cheaper than Mario Party 3.
In my youth back before I even had a Gamecube, Mario Party 2 was always my favorite of the original 3 Mario Parties, and 3 was always my least favorite. I'd never really been able to put words as to why other than that I didn't like the boards, but the great amount of time I've spent beating story mode twice over the past weekend (once on easy once on hard) has really allowed me to put words to why Mario Party 3 is not just a game I don't enjoy as much as its predecessor, I can also put words to more significant faults in its overall game design. Now I want to make clear I am not trying to state that Mario Party 3 is an outright bad game. I think if one were to do that you'd be taking all the pre-9 Mario Parties down with it with how much greater DNA they share. But all Mario Parties are not created equally, and I am definitely arguing that Mario Party 3 is built of lesser stuff than many of its console-borne brethren.
Mario Party 2 was in MANY ways a "fixed" version of Mario Party 1. A significant amount of the mini-games aren't so much recycled so much as they are improved upon from the first game (although there is the occasional 1-to-1 copy like Hexagon Heat). Other than the new maps, Mario Party 2's main innovations upon the first game are the introductions of concepts like items, a bank, duels during the last few turns, and far fewer ways for players to directly steal items from one another via the normal end-of-turn mini-games. By doing this, Mario Party 2, however unintentionally, amplified the main design flaw from Mario Party 1: It is very easy to run the table by just being very good at all the mini-games. Two of the end-of-game bonus stars are linked to winning them frequently, and things like items and duels gave the best players more ways than ever to utilize that cash advantage and rob other players of their own coin advantages. If everyone wasn't around the same skill level, Mario Party 1 and 2 would quickly turn into a game where the winner was very obvious from the start, and it ironically enough made it an awful party game because of the amount of how difficult casual play was with players of varying skill levels.
Mario Party 3's apparent solution to this was to introduce more random chance into not just the mini-games, but all aspects of the game's design in several ways:
1) Chance Time, the frequently frustrating equalizer that, while rare, would give anything from 10 coins to ALL a player's stars to another player if done correctly, now has a much more frequent sibling in Game Guy. Game Guy is a solo-player event that whisks you away to his casino and forces you to bet ALL of your coins in a very easy-to-lose game of chance. Where Chance Time at LEAST involved several players (one pushing the buttons of the game and at least one other being affected by it), Game Guy is not only a totally solo event that really slows the pace of the game down, but it is also something that either totally cripples one player by funneling ALL of their coins into the garbage, or granting them a coin lead so massive that no other player has the slightest chance of topping them (making one of the 3 bonus stars for the highest coin total at one time basically pointless). There's even a rare item you can use to sic Game Guy on any player (even yourself) if you want, as kind of a tacit acknowledgement from the game itself that going to it is a BAD thing you don't want to do. Game Guy's games, in isolation, aren't terrible, but the impact they have on the overall flow of the board game adds an element of randomness that doesn't really do anything but rob agency away from the players in a series that already has issues with random chance.
2) The mini-games. A lot of MP3's mini-games are really good fun. Some take way longer to play than I'd like, but the addition of a selection of item and duel mini-games instead of each map having its own really spices things up for those parts of the game (although both of those do a LOT to slow down the overall pace of each game). Overall I'd say it's a game with higher mini-game highs but lower mini-game lows than its predecessors. However, something that is in MP3 a lot more than 2 are games that rely on random chance to win. It's something that gets far more apparent on higher CPU difficulties as well, but other games too are just designed in such a way that the CPU has a fundamentally easier time to the point where some games are literally impossible for a human player to beat them in. Any game that relies around knowing the character's hit-boxes to a very exact degree or being able to move to adjust to an upcoming obstacle quickly is one the CPU will almost always win. I reached a point where there were times I'd just put down my controller if the game came up because there was genuinely no point in even trying. Although their sporadic length does a lot to slow down the overall pace of the game, the increased amount of games where no amount of skill (or human-attainable skill) makes MP3 a very frustrating experience especially in its special single-player mode.
3) The board design. This is the #1 problem that Mario Party 3 faces as far as I'm concerned. Every single board has a varying level of the core conceit of it tied to randomness. Whether its being flung across the entire board by a happening space, needing to guess a 50/50 chance to not get sent back to the start instead of progressing, or just not rolling well on a particular turn so you can't go the direction the game lets you go that turn, the boards are incredibly difficult to purposefully navigate compared to the previous two games. Largely because of happening spaces dictating when and how certain parts of the board can be accessed, this makes items that do things like teleport the player to the star or change the star's location very valuable, because often times no player can even get lucky enough to even GET to where the star currently is. All of the randomness put into the board designs, on top of just how winding their paths are and visually cluttered their design tends to be, makes it not only difficult to tell how to get to places but to get to them at all. It frequently robs the board part of the board game of any kind of player agency to the point where even having it at all seems like a waste of time between mini-games.
4) The dueling mode. The 1 vs. 1 dueling mode is more of a side-point, as it's completely divorced from the usual Mario Party mode and is honestly more of a gimmick for the single-player mode to have some more length and break up its pacing a bit, but the execution is so poorly done that I cannot leave it without comment. The concept is really cool: Two players going around on a board, each with Mario Bros. baddies as partners that they use to hurt the other player. The better/stronger the partner, the more salary they take per turn, so you need to keep winning mini-games to be able to afford your partner at all! However, in practice, it is just a microcosm of how badly the randomness is in this game. Depending on the map and on the partner you start with, it is VERY possible for a match to be over in two whole turns if one player just gets lucky rolls. It's also even more frequently the case that the board is so difficult to navigate, or the players are just rolling unluckily enough, that no combat ever takes place, so the winner is decided by coins. This would be fine, but mini-games only happen when initiated by landing on space on the board, so if there aren't many that game or if you happen to keep getting unlucky with the partners you get (who are of course assigned randomly, why wouldn't they be), you'll have barely any coins by no fault of your own and just lose. The duel mode was a noble effort that honestly came out so badly I almost wish it weren't in the game at all. It is genuinely as random as two children just playing the card game War with one another: the duel mode may as well be one competing die roll to see who scores the highest and call it a day.
Mario Party 3 doesn't fail in the aesthetic presentation, certainly. Sure, you have the fun map-determinate costumes from the second game gone, but you have a colorful (if cluttered) paper cut-out style to all the worlds and games, as well as a bunch of good music. You even have two new playable characters in the form of Daisy and Waluigi, and all the silly campy cutscenes in between rounds in the story mode. MP3 certainly looks and sounds as good as it should for being such a late-life N64 game. Although you could certainly argue that the toy box style was just a clever way to use mostly 2D sprite assets rather than proper polygon'd models to get the game released quicker, it still looks nice.
Verdict: Not recommended. This is not a bad game, but you can do SO much better for a Mario Party even on the N64 that I just can't recommend this in good conscience, especially for the increasingly steep price point it commands outside of Japan. As said earlier, while there really aren't any strictly terrible Mario Party games outside of the GBA one, not all are created equal, and Mario Party 3 is definitely one below the rest. In an effort to distance themselves from how similar the first two games were from each other, they really tried to reinvent the wheel in a way that just was not really necessary, and the series honestly keeps a lot of these problems, even if not quite to the same degree, well into Mario Party 4. Just get Mario Party 2 or bite the bullet and start trying to hunt down the later Gamecube games if you really want great Mario Party in the pre-9 style, because you can do a LOT better for a LOT cheaper than Mario Party 3.