My past Mario Parties can be divided into two distinct but miserable circumstances: Mario Parties played years prior with friends that I forced myself to replay alone, and Mario Parties experienced purely in isolation. This ongoing experiment into Mario Party's effects on my mental health needed more variables, so for Mario Party 5 I decided to rope in two additional test subjects who I must assert were not tricked or coerced into participating.  Appreciations (Toad) and TransWitchSammy (Boo) have even agreed to help me play through each subsequent Mario Party, a decision that was perhaps brought on by some sort of Mario Party mania or chemical changes to the brain caused by playing Curvy Curbs thirty-eight times...

This left one vacant spot which could've been filled with another human player, but we all agreed that leaving a single CPU opponent in play (Bowser Jr.) would result in more pandemonium and dickery. This was true for the first board, where Bowser Jr. ran a clinic and forced us to form a united front against him. Very quickly, Mario Party 5 became a man vs machine story, wherein we intrepid three mortals of flesh and bone formed a pact to undermine and defeat Bowser Jr. at the expense of our own individual victories. Not that we needed to, as Mario Party 5's CPU is wildly inconsistent, and whether we set Bowser Jr. to "normal" or "hard," he constantly flip-flopped between being a cunning strategist and cheater to ripping the ass of his pants and farting every turn.

It's also a bit hard to form a concentrated attack on any one player when so many of Mario Party 5's minigames are based purely on chance. Sure, no Mario Party prior has been a true "game of skill," but an overwhelming amount of MP5's games involve spinning a wheel and hoping you win. Take Random Ride, a 4 v 4 game where you place bets on which vehicle you think will win a race, with the most fortuitously named ride having the best odds. Whether you choose "100% Assured Destruction" or the "Dogshit Dumbasscopter" is wholly dependent on where you fall in the turn order. Other minigames like Bus Buffers have instructions that straight up say "yo, the controls suck," so that's fun!

Like all Mario Parties prior, MP5 loooves to re-roll minigames instead of showing you new ones. In our weeks long playthrough, I don't think we ever rolled Handy Hoppers, Fish Upon a Star, or Manic Mallets once. We did, however, get Quilt for Speed no less than four times during our last 25-turn game. Though this is the worst collection of minigames yet, Mario Party 5 does at least have Hotel Goomba, and there is something extremely funny to me about running through a hotel and decking Goombas in the face in what can only be described as an act of unprovoked savagery. Shout-outs to the minigames Coney Island and Heat Stroke for having names that make me giggle.

Bowser Jr. was our collective enemy throughout, but after the first night it was Toad Time all the time thanks to Appreciation's incredible luck and astounding ability to mash buttons with a ferocity I've never encountered before. Though they won the vast majority of our games, Sammy and Bowser Jr. did eek out their own victories whereas I struggled to the very last. I'll admit with some embarrassment that I got Mad For Real a handful of times due to the game's dickishness and Dolphin's shoddy netplay screwing me over mere spaces in front of stars, which usually resulted in me getting up to pour myself a drink and returning to bemoan my luck with an increasingly common refrain: "I just want to win a Mario Party."

At least boards are much more forgiving and easier to navigate than past games, featuring far fewer hazardous spaces while being overall less reliant on luck to move about. The inherent lack of gimmick spaces is meant to accommodate Mario Party 5's capsule system, which allows players to permanently alter individual spaces on the board, progressively making the game more chaotic. The layer of strategy capsules introduce is razor thin as you can rarely activate a capsule's effect on a space's occupant immediately, and you risk landing on a space you teed up to harm a specific player. New DK spaces allow players to compete for bananas that can be cashed in for varying amounts of coins, and Boo's star and coin stealing spaces are now represented by Chain Chomp due to his inclusion in the main roster.

Now if you want to become a true Mario Party professional, convince everyone to play on the Future Dream board, then spend a significant amount of the game doing loops around the upper-right section where the Chain Chomp lives and just keep stealing stars from everybody while occasionally grabbing one when it spawns in your territory. Do this enough and you'll humble Bower Jr. turning him into a pathetic fail son. His old man still shows up during the last five turns, permitting the player in last place to spin the wheel and alter the board because "it ain't Mario Party if it's easy." Of course it's Bowser Jr., who has been forced into a star deficit and ruined. "My own son," Bowser thinks, looking at him not in disapproval but disgust. Well guess who's the Dream Star now. Happy Waluigi Wednesday, bitch.

Mario Party 5's greatest asset is how it deepened my friendship with two of my best pals on Backloggd (you're all my pals, but we're just not on the "suffer through Mario Party for six weeks" phase of our relationship yet, sorry.) Were it not for Mario Party Thursdays I wouldn't have had the chance to make fruitless attempts converse with Appreciation's cat, nor would I have been on the edge of my seat as Sammy grappled with Gigabyte's flimsy hardware while trying to upgrade her PC, and neither of them would've had the pleasure of hearing my speech slur, two glasses of rum deep to dull the pain. A friendship forged in the fires of Mario Party's bullshit is surely one that will remain unbreakable. Thank you, Hudson.

2 out of 5.

Played with Appreciations and Weatherby

I have a lot of memories with Mario Party when I was a kid. I'm sure I played 3 and 4 somewhere for some reason but most of my core partyin memories lie with Mario Party 6 and 7. I would boot em up in between a fresh sesh of Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix and trying to perfect Always Smiling cause that shit is fuckin FIRE. I would play with the AI cause I didn't really have many who wanted to play party games like this with me and even though those motherfuckers cheated I still had a time with them.

As I've grown older though I tend not to find it that fun to go back to these games in the same way. Dealing with cheating AI that will absolutely dunk on you alone just sounds frustrating in a way that kid me could deal with but the me now just doesn't have the time or patience for.

Now what I do have time for is making friends and having experiences though! When played with friends and especially as like something to bond over it's such a fuckin funny experience. Bowser Jr, that son of a bitch, steamrolling all of us in the first game without any effort, causing us each subsequent game to ignore our goofy deceptions and instead go all in on making sure that little bastard doesn't win. It was so funny the lengths to which we would go to make sure Bowser Jr would lose (or at least not get 1st) while doing small things here and there to benefit ourselves.

The mini-games themselves causing even more laughter as a good chunk of them are absolutely based on luck and shit completely out of your control, which in a way is the fun of a chaotic board game, but can be frustrating when the game can end up being "hey asshole hope ya get first in the turn order/hope your opponents can't read or you lose".

We had so many funny things happen constantly, the amount of times it was Toad Time was pretty funny, the amount of times Bowser Jr was denied anything had me dying, the Board Loop strat being deployed, the happening spaces completely keeping me from doing anything constantly. It all adds to this very funny and very chaotic experience that is Mario Party.

So I know it's kinda weird that in spite of all of that and the clear fun I did have in spite of the actual game itself I'm giving this such a low score. The real answer to that is that I would never play this again on my own really, but for something really comfy like a friend hangout that ain't too serious it's a really funny time and a pretty solid way to get to know people you've been wanting to get to know for a bit.

Anyway, fuck Bowser Jr. If I see Bowser Jr in the streets it's on sight.

Imagine removing item shops in favor of random capsule machines that give you:
A. a trap that you can land on yourself.
B. an item that costs money to use on yourself 💀

The minigames CARRY this game. Only 2 boards out of 7 that I would call good.

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.

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.