By this time, the series was pretty tired and should've been put out to pasture. Instead, the series soldiered on for another several games before finally collapsing under its own weight. Giving characters unique items sounds like a good idea, but makes the characters wildly unbalanced. Also, it was around this time that the series abandoned the classic 3 bonus stars (minigame/coin/happening) for 3 random ones drawn from a larger possible pool, making a series famous for rage-inducing RNG even less strategic and more random.