I think there is a very persuasive argument to be made that capsules are objectively poorly designed. They take autonomy away from the player by removing any choice of what items you can get, there's little that you can do to directly benefit yourself and even less you can do to hinder other players without exposing yourself to risk, it makes the boards have fewer unique spaces and thus less interesting things can happen on them, and overall way more risk with way less reward. More often than not all that strategy amounts to is having the chance to screw over your opponent, putting you ahead by association, rather than doing something that will put you ahead.

With all that said, I still like the capsules. There's so much fun and chaos that can come from how much is thrown onto every board, and there's still plenty of strategy that can go into them. I think the strategy comes a lot more from adapting, both to what capsules you have and what events everyone lands on, and I think each game is unpredictable and interesting because of that. And pretty much every board is really good, all except Rainbow Dream. They're all interesting aesthetically and thematically, they're the perfect size and the paths are well laid out, and overall a huge improvement from Mario Party 4.

I think the mini games took a hit though. There are a lot of stinkers, with many that aren't interesting like all of the coin collecting ones, and many that are just not fun like Dinger Derby or Fish Sticks or Berry Basket. The 1vs3 minigames are often VERY unbalanced, with many that feel like it's impossible for the 1 to win and even more that feel impossible for the 1 to lose. The rumble minigames are lame, there are too many button mashing ones.

But there are some good ones, Pushy Penguins being the easy standout, but I also like Hotel Goomba, Leaf Leap is also good I'm just bad at it, and all the ones where you're trapped in an arena and beat each other up are a good time.

Mario Party 5, WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?? I THOUGHT WE WERE 4LIFERS!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬 WE PLAYED THE MINI-GAMES TOGETHER, COLLECTED STARS, AND LAUGHED AT BOWSER'S SHENANIGANS TOGETHER, ETC!! 🔪🔪🔪 THIS IS NOT FUNNY!! 👿👿👿👿 Wario steals your coins and you lose W-WAIT, NO MARIO PARTY 5!! I DIDN'T MEAN TO! WAKE UP!! PLEASE!! ⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️👿👿👿👿👿👿🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 NO!!!!! MY PARTY LEVEL FIVE GYAT ONE TWO BUCKLE MY SHOE MARIO STARE MARIO PARTY 5!! NOOOOOOOOO!! IM SO SORRY!!!! WAKE UP, PLEASE!! i-i must go... i hurt my Mario Party 5, the one i swore to play no matter the cost. i'm so sorry Mario Party 5. gamer loves you.

Score: 7/10

Played for the Tarvould's Quest Mario Party League, viewable here.

DIY Mario Party, basically. Hudson went all-in on the Capsule system, and the consequence is that the boards themselves end up feeling pretty dry. Few central gimmicks, little personality inherent to the boards, no major NPCs, nothing like that. Heck, even the unifying theming is pretty lackluster, with everything just being a generic "dream" of a given thing, not a dream ascribed to anyone in particular. The Star Spirits are really cool to see here, one of the few times Mario RPG characters were allowed to exist outside the RPG subseries, but Eldstar can only do so much to elevate the experience.

But the boards themselves are so bland to facilitate the Capsule system - a complete overhaul of the traditional Item system that lets players remodel board experience on the fly. It's certainly an intriguing idea, but it's definitely a rough first draft here. Not all of these should be functions accessible to the player at any given time (goodness sakes, making a Chance Time Item just lends itself to certain abuses), and not all of these are compelling outside of the fact that the player can throw them wherever (you probably should never use Hammer Bro Capsule on yourself). Also, the fact that the player has no agency in which Capsules they receive... kinda sucks?

Also booooooo this is the game that removed playable DK as well as Boo as a board function. I guess having a nice equivalent to Bowser is interesting, but it's a big bummer that it comes at the cost of one of the main series regulars!

I honestly have to say that the writing is pretty noticeably devoid of personality, too. Usually I don't think a ton about Mario Party's writing, but a lot of it reads like placeholder dialogue, so generic and unremarkable a lot of it is. There's even a bit where the narration for DK quickly switches tense to the first person! Has to be stock.

Having said all this - because Mario Party 5 places so much of its design into the players' hands, games become as interesting as the people playing the game. This is true of Mario Party in general; if there's one thing I've learned from Mario Party League, it's that Mario Party is at its most engaging once politics filter into the standard gameplay loop. But this is at its most apparent when it comes to Mario Party 5. This is probably why 5's singleplayer experience is as lopsided, as my friends have observed (me, I've never played this with fewer than two other players) - hard to create compelling politics and intrigue with CPU opponents. But when you have a full crew, and ESPECIALLY when you have the Miracle Capsules in play? Now you're on to something.

Continuing to play a bit more Mario Party in the evenings to unwind and indulge in some nostalgia, I played through a bunch of Mario Party 5 over the past couple weeks. This was the first GameCube MP I had as a kid, and I remember not liking it nearly as much as my N64 ones. Until replaying it now, I had always chalked that up to the orb system just being bad compared to the old item systems. However, with how much fun I had with the orb system in MP6 a few weeks back, I knew that couldn’t truly be the only flaw between the GameCube and N64 games. I did my best to set aside those childhood biases and go into this with a fresh mind. I played through story mode and then a few maps (as many as I could stand ^^;) against normal and hard CPUs before I called this one beaten. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

The conceit of MP5 is that it’s all taking place in the realm of dreams. Therefore, the star spirits from the first Paper Mario are (strangely) here to guide you through it. The story mode consists of doing miniature versions of the normal boards, competing in mini-games against mini-koopas and trying to rob them of their coins to knock them out of the match and keep Bowser from destroying that dream (the board) that the map takes place in. It’s another conceit that’s more than fine enough to get the job done, and while it’s a little stronger than MP4’s birthday party theme, it still don’t quite approach MP3’s “drawn into a pop-up book” theme.

The mechanics though, ohhhh the mechanics. You may’ve noticed in the intro that I said I only played some maps of normal party play instead of each of them at least once like I had with Mario Party 6 and 4, and there’s a good reason for that ^^;. While I have certainly confirmed that the orb system is not the only reason that MP5 was less fun than the N64 MPs when I was a kid, I got so, so much more than I bargained for. Starting a bit positive, the mini-games are once again quite strong. I’d say they’re easily stronger than most of MP4’s, and even a good few of MP6’s, but a few too many of them are a bit too random for my liking (and the hard mode AI cheats a bit too much, be it in mini-games or die rolls), they’re one of the strongest points of the game.

Getting into more explicitly negative stuff, it’s honestly hard to pin down just one thing to start with because so many issues relate so heavily to the others. If I had to summarize it as quick as I could, though, I’d say the principle problem with MP5’s design is that money simply doesn’t matter. This may come off as a bit odd of a statement, given that money to get stars is the whole point of Mario Party, but I’ll do my best to explain why in a shorter answer than I so often gave friends who asked why I was so frustrated with this game while I was playing it XD.

First, let’s get into the orb system. As I explained in my MP6 review, the orb system replaces the item system used in earlier games, and this is the first iteration of it. You get orbs from capsule machines placed around the board, but you don’t get to pick which one you get. You just get a random one (which isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself). The bigger problem is that orbs are kinda useless the large majority of the time. In later MP games, using orbs that have hostile effects mark territory as yours. It’s your space, so if you land on it, nothing bad will happen, but if an enemy lands on it, then the bad thing will happen. In MP5, there is no such system. In MP5, you either spend a fee to use the capsule on yourself immediately, or you can throw it on the board up to ten spaces in front of you for free. If someone lands on that space, then the effect of the orb happens to them.

Though it’s kinda cool that you can either use on yourself OR throw any capsule in the game down on the board (including ones you’d never do that with, like mushrooms for more die to roll or a Flutter to take you straight to the star), it’s ultimately an awful system because there’s no reason to use so many of them. It’s an incredible gamble to throw down an orb with a negative effect, because you might land on it that very turn, and there’s no guarantee an enemy will ever land on it. There are far too many orbs and far too many of them are flat-out useless like this, so it’s ultimately a really poor replacement for the old item system. There are also no shops to buy orbs at in the game, so the money you spend to use your randomly acquired ones on yourself is really the only “cost” associated with this orb system, and since the large majority are ones you’d never want to use on yourself, it’s pointless.

And that’s a nice segue into the board design of MP5, because in a word: It’s awful. But it isn’t awful in the way MP3 and 4 have awful board design. It’s honestly kinda fascinating how this is a whole new way to make boards just as awful and pointless-feeling. As stated before, because there are no shops, only random orb getting points, the only thing to ever go for on the board is the star. There’s no reason you’d ever go anywhere else, and there are no alternative game modes for acquiring stars dependent on the board (as MP6 introduces), so the boards are really just a challenge to see who can roll the highest and get to the star. There’s no strategy present of any meaningful sort.

The orb system also has a knock on effect that they contain basically ALL normal board effects (from chance spaces to coin & star-stealing chain chomps to even the koopa bank), so the boards themselves are incredibly barren save for a few boring happening spaces. And these boards are also HUGE and very cumbersome to get around. If you’re rolling low, you’re not going anywhere, since you can’t even buy a mushroom in a shop to get a boost of speed or something (since there are no shops where you’d do such a thing). These massive, barren boards have nothing to do on them but chase the star, and that’s why money is so useless. Even if you’re running the table and winning every mini-game, what does it matter? Even just the blue spaces your opponents land on between the vast distances between themselves and the new star location will likely be enough to buy the star when they get there, so the fun mini-games end up feeling utterly pointless too. Why even try in them if the money they give matters so little?

You could say that you’d want to do them to get coins for the bonus stars at the end of the game, but that’s also a pointless-feeling exercise. This is the first (and mercifully last) MP game to not just have a mini-game star (most coins won in mini-games) and a coin star (highest maximum coin total in the game) bonus star awarded at the end of the game, but to also have the coins you win from battle mini-games count towards the mini-game star. In earlier games, battle mini-games (where everyone has to put in a bunch of money and the first and second place winners of the game get to split the prize pool) could be a fun equalizer for people a bit farther behind. In this game, since battle mini-games aren’t even spots on the board, they just randomly replace 4-player mini-games at the end of a turn, you simply get huge, game-altering (often RNG-focused) games that can far too radically alter the outcome of the game. You have so little agency in the board game part of the game, that those bonus stars at the end matter a LOT for who is going to win, and it feels pretty bad to have one or both of the mini-game & coin stars snapped up by someone who happens to win a huge prize pool on the very last turn even though they’d been doing poorly the rest of the game. MP5’s boards are lousy for different reasons than MP3 and 4’s, but the source is the same: Players have too little agency to affect the outcome of the game, and that makes it a boring and frustrating experience.

Presentation-wise, this game is thankfully at least in this regard a step up from MP4. Gone are tracks of spaces floating above ugly masses of 3D with vaguely-themed textures. Now we have proper 3D spaces that hold these boards, and it makes the whole game so much more appealing to look at as well as making each board just feel that much more like a real space (or as much as a Mario Party board can feel like one, at least :b). The music is also once again very nice & Mario Party-ful. No real complaints there.

Verdict: Not Recommended. Mario Party 3 has sat at the bottom of my ranking list of console MP games for a long time, but I think MP5 has just about taken its place. MP5 is a bold new direction for the series in many ways, and it’s trying a lot of new things. Heck, it even brings back duel mini-games! But it fails so aggressively in implementing these new systems that it makes for a frustrating and boring time whether your game is 35 turns or only 15. You can do better than this with virtually any Mario Party game, so if you wanna get your retro Mario Party on, you’re better off looking just about anywhere else.

The second Mario Party game for the Nintendo Gamecube. While I'll admit that I like the previous one more, this game is the better package, with its revamp of the item system, the streamlined story mode, and all the extras included within this package. The drawback, like the last game, is that this is made for multiplayer. If you want to play this as a single-player game you are able too but it's more fun with friends. Regardless of its faults, this game is still fun and I would recommend it to anyone who likes Mario Party.

Lost the charm of Mario Party

This is the game I mark as a decline in quality for this series. Maps have just generic themes like “Toy Land” or “Space Land” with only a handful of familiar characters populating them.
There is the addition of capsules that replaced the standard items, becoming something you place on the board rather than using instantly. The strategy of placing capsules becomes unsatisfying since you have to rely on the randomness of a player rolling to even land on that space, and by that point, you had forgotten what you even put there.
Minigames are also less enjoyable, with either complicated controls or just boring gameplay.

Where this game surprisingly shines is the singleplayer content, with a neat solo partyboard mode designed with unique minigames and a battle-vehicle mode where you can customize your rig to dominate an opponent.