I’ve always been a huge fan of Mario Party. Ever since I was very little, it’s always been a series I really love playing, especially by myself. Recently I had to get a new GameCube, since my old one was losing the ability to read discs, and the one I happened to get online came with a copy of Mario Party 6. Out of all the MP games on GameCube, this is the one I at least recall playing the least, as I put a ton of time into 4, 5, and 7 as a kid. I decided to rectify this, as I’ve also just been in the mood for some Mario Party, it seems, and I played a bunch of MP6 over the past couple weeks, really getting acquainted with what I’d say is the entry of the main series I’m least acquainted with. As I played more and more, memories kept coming back to me suggesting that I actually have played a fair bit of this game, but just haven’t remembered it very well, so perhaps it’s actually more accurate to say that this is just the Mario Party that’s left the weakest impression on me, rather than the one I’ve played the least XD. At any rate, as this game actually doesn’t have a sort of story mode single-player mode like most of the other Mario Party games of this era did, I sorta had to set my own parameters for what “beating it” entailed, and I set that as beating the hard mode computers on every map at least once, and unlocking the credits. I played over a dozen games over the course of a week and a bit on the Japanese version of the game on real hardware. I couldn’t begin to think of how many actual hours I’ve put into it, though XD
The story premise for Mario Party is always pretty slim, and 6 is no different. The sun and the moon are fighting, and they have a Mario Party to settle which one of them is right. There’s a tad more to it than that, but that’s really it, given there’s no proper story mode or anything. There are story books you can buy and read in the game’s shop, for a sort of “story” to things, but as far as the normal game goes, there’s not really much you could call a story. Which certainly isn’t a complaint, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a fun thematic choice, and it’s also a neat excuse to push the day & night gimmick that this game’s boards and mini-games are tied to.
As for the overall design of the game’s mechanics, it’s a very nice evolution on what had come before, while also not being quite as polished or innovative as its immediate successor, which is to more or less be expected for the third entry in a series that had four games on the same console in four years ^^;. He mini-game design is, for the most part, very good. Playing against the hard computers, there were only two or three games that they were just unconquerably good at, which is a nice change from usual. The biggest issue I’d say this game’s mini-games have, which is not an issue unique to this game, is that the 1 vs. 3 mini-games are by and large very poorly balanced. Many of them are basically impossible to win as the three players, regardless of the CPU or human status of those players, and many others are winnable as one team or the other, but one team has a much easier time winning than the other, making them feel very unfair. I think how good the controls feel and how well the design is of the other mini-games make up for this, generally, but the 1 v 3 games are definitely the weakest part of the game for me.
The board design is overall really good. They’re big, but not too big, and the new spins on the kind of board objectives is a very cool advancement from 5. We don’t have as many board types as MP7 would have, but we do have two classic-style “go to the star and buy it, it moves when you buy it” type boards, a board where the star stays static but the price changes and you can buy up to five at a time (one of my favorites), a board all around stealing stars instead of buying them, a more linear board about getting to the end at the right time, and the extra board where you need to chase down the star seller during the day and run away from the star stealer at night. The day and night mechanic changes aspects of boards every three turns, as big as changing the location of the star or your ability to buy them at all, or as small as just changing how you can get around it. It’s a really clever mechanic, and while it’s barely used in the mini-games (I think a whole two mini-games out of the 50+ in the game are actually changed by the status of daytime), it at least changes the aesthetic of the mini-games, which is a neat touch.
The boards’ size also factors well into how the orb system, or rather capsule system, works in this game. In MP5, they abandoned the item system they’d used since MP2 for a more quantity-over-quality orb system, and this game expands on that further, ditching a lot of the more useless orbs and giving you a bunch of more useful and dynamic ones. Being able to throw them down and create hazards that trigger either only once when passed or are there forever until they’re replaced by another player’s orb is a really cool feature. Playing most of my games at only 25 turns, it was a very neat bit of strategy how me and the CPUs would almost carve out Monopoly-like chunks of the board to be our “safe” spaces, where we didn’t need to worry about other player’s traps hecking over our games.
Orbs are also cheap and plentiful enough that mushroom orbs to give you more die blocks to roll means boards feel a lot smaller even when they’re still quite big, so you have incredibly star-heavy games compared to similar turn limits in older Mario Party games. A 20 turn game where there are 12+ stars gained would be an unthinkable thing back in the N64 days with just how big those boards are, but it’s a pretty common thing in MP6, and I loved it. Factor that in with how stealing stars through Boo is something only a single board in this game has, and you have an overall gameplay loop that’s much more about outscoring your opponent rather than making their scores go down, as older games were more focused on. It’s a change I love, and it’s really warmed me to the style of these late GameCube-era Mario Parties in a way I really never had felt before, and it’s made me very excited to check out MP5 and 7 again soon to reexamine their board and item design in a similar way.
The presentation is very nice, but in a fashion very typical for how these games were made at the time. The music is nice as are the graphics, but a lot of this is asset reuse from previous Mario Party games. Not all of it, absolutely, but enough of it is that it means the game carries a very similar overall aesthetic to previous GameCube Mario Party games, so it’s kind of a nice thing that they have the day & night thing as a theme, since it helps this game’s aesthetic try and stand out a little from the pack. The music is also overall quite good, but I wouldn’t say the sound design is nearly as good as the N64 Mario Party days (I know in my time playing MP6 and MP2 in Discord with my friends watching the past week and a bit, I heard way more comments about the quality of MP2’s music & sound than I did for MP6).
Verdict: Recommended. I don’t think it’s the best Mario Party on GameCube, but it’s a lot better than I gave it credit for. I grew to really appreciate its approaches to refining the formula as it had existed up to that point, and while its successors like MP7 and for sure Super Mario Party stand over 6 pretty well, MP6 still manages to hold its own and still be a fun experience. You can certainly do better for your Mario Party, even on the GameCube, but you can also do a lot worse. Unlike the last MP game I did a ton of play like this with (that being 3), this is one I really enjoyed, and I’m glad I spent more time with, and almost certainly will spend a bit more time with after I’ve finished this review. I may’ve hit the credits, but I’m still having fun, dang it! X3
The story premise for Mario Party is always pretty slim, and 6 is no different. The sun and the moon are fighting, and they have a Mario Party to settle which one of them is right. There’s a tad more to it than that, but that’s really it, given there’s no proper story mode or anything. There are story books you can buy and read in the game’s shop, for a sort of “story” to things, but as far as the normal game goes, there’s not really much you could call a story. Which certainly isn’t a complaint, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a fun thematic choice, and it’s also a neat excuse to push the day & night gimmick that this game’s boards and mini-games are tied to.
As for the overall design of the game’s mechanics, it’s a very nice evolution on what had come before, while also not being quite as polished or innovative as its immediate successor, which is to more or less be expected for the third entry in a series that had four games on the same console in four years ^^;. He mini-game design is, for the most part, very good. Playing against the hard computers, there were only two or three games that they were just unconquerably good at, which is a nice change from usual. The biggest issue I’d say this game’s mini-games have, which is not an issue unique to this game, is that the 1 vs. 3 mini-games are by and large very poorly balanced. Many of them are basically impossible to win as the three players, regardless of the CPU or human status of those players, and many others are winnable as one team or the other, but one team has a much easier time winning than the other, making them feel very unfair. I think how good the controls feel and how well the design is of the other mini-games make up for this, generally, but the 1 v 3 games are definitely the weakest part of the game for me.
The board design is overall really good. They’re big, but not too big, and the new spins on the kind of board objectives is a very cool advancement from 5. We don’t have as many board types as MP7 would have, but we do have two classic-style “go to the star and buy it, it moves when you buy it” type boards, a board where the star stays static but the price changes and you can buy up to five at a time (one of my favorites), a board all around stealing stars instead of buying them, a more linear board about getting to the end at the right time, and the extra board where you need to chase down the star seller during the day and run away from the star stealer at night. The day and night mechanic changes aspects of boards every three turns, as big as changing the location of the star or your ability to buy them at all, or as small as just changing how you can get around it. It’s a really clever mechanic, and while it’s barely used in the mini-games (I think a whole two mini-games out of the 50+ in the game are actually changed by the status of daytime), it at least changes the aesthetic of the mini-games, which is a neat touch.
The boards’ size also factors well into how the orb system, or rather capsule system, works in this game. In MP5, they abandoned the item system they’d used since MP2 for a more quantity-over-quality orb system, and this game expands on that further, ditching a lot of the more useless orbs and giving you a bunch of more useful and dynamic ones. Being able to throw them down and create hazards that trigger either only once when passed or are there forever until they’re replaced by another player’s orb is a really cool feature. Playing most of my games at only 25 turns, it was a very neat bit of strategy how me and the CPUs would almost carve out Monopoly-like chunks of the board to be our “safe” spaces, where we didn’t need to worry about other player’s traps hecking over our games.
Orbs are also cheap and plentiful enough that mushroom orbs to give you more die blocks to roll means boards feel a lot smaller even when they’re still quite big, so you have incredibly star-heavy games compared to similar turn limits in older Mario Party games. A 20 turn game where there are 12+ stars gained would be an unthinkable thing back in the N64 days with just how big those boards are, but it’s a pretty common thing in MP6, and I loved it. Factor that in with how stealing stars through Boo is something only a single board in this game has, and you have an overall gameplay loop that’s much more about outscoring your opponent rather than making their scores go down, as older games were more focused on. It’s a change I love, and it’s really warmed me to the style of these late GameCube-era Mario Parties in a way I really never had felt before, and it’s made me very excited to check out MP5 and 7 again soon to reexamine their board and item design in a similar way.
The presentation is very nice, but in a fashion very typical for how these games were made at the time. The music is nice as are the graphics, but a lot of this is asset reuse from previous Mario Party games. Not all of it, absolutely, but enough of it is that it means the game carries a very similar overall aesthetic to previous GameCube Mario Party games, so it’s kind of a nice thing that they have the day & night thing as a theme, since it helps this game’s aesthetic try and stand out a little from the pack. The music is also overall quite good, but I wouldn’t say the sound design is nearly as good as the N64 Mario Party days (I know in my time playing MP6 and MP2 in Discord with my friends watching the past week and a bit, I heard way more comments about the quality of MP2’s music & sound than I did for MP6).
Verdict: Recommended. I don’t think it’s the best Mario Party on GameCube, but it’s a lot better than I gave it credit for. I grew to really appreciate its approaches to refining the formula as it had existed up to that point, and while its successors like MP7 and for sure Super Mario Party stand over 6 pretty well, MP6 still manages to hold its own and still be a fun experience. You can certainly do better for your Mario Party, even on the GameCube, but you can also do a lot worse. Unlike the last MP game I did a ton of play like this with (that being 3), this is one I really enjoyed, and I’m glad I spent more time with, and almost certainly will spend a bit more time with after I’ve finished this review. I may’ve hit the credits, but I’m still having fun, dang it! X3