Mario Party 3

Developer: Hudson Publisher: Nintendo

Released: May 7, 2001 Rated: E 9/10

I remember growing up as an avid Game Informer reader (RIP) that Mario Party, as a series, was often considered a punchline at best and a punching bag at worst. As someone who enjoyed the early entries he had played, while only having really played one entry in the GameCube era of the series — 2003’s Mario Party 5 — I never really understood the vitriol towards the franchise. Today, on the other hand, even though I still love the series to death with few exceptions, I admit, I can kind of see how they got to that point. Yearly entries for any franchise can get rather tiring, and it’s the sort of thing many of us roll our eyes at and cite as one of the worst practices amongst bigger companies and their major titles like Call of Duty and Assassins’ Creed. And without even an alternate naming convention by the time they reached double digits, those steadily-increasing numbers only highlighted just how much partying those folks were doing.

This highlights what is, essentially, the only real issue to be had with Mario Party 3, the third entry in the series in as many years on the Nintendo 64, though fans will be unlikely to complain about having more of what they love. Not only that, but being the very last title to be published by Nintendo themselves on a system slowing to a crawl, I’m sure the party seemed, at least to some, to be going on a little too long already. But while the true assessment of the best Mario Party often comes down the personal experience and nostalgia, Mario Party 3 is just as much worth your time as any other entry before or after, as Hudson once again delivers its share of hits, misses, innovations, and backfires that set it apart from its fellow entries while remaining in a familiar framework that anybody can just about step right into.

On this third go-round, the primary focus seems to be on expanding the experience for groups of fewer than four human players, as a single player campaign now opts for more than just mastering all of Mario Party 3’s all-new array of mini games. Though labeled as a “story” mode, there isn’t really much going on other than seeking a win on each of the game’s new boards, both of the four-player battle royal and two-player duel-style variety. This duel format is certainly interesting and clearly had a lot of effort put in to differentiate, as it offers as many of its own boards to play on as the main game does, while changing up quite a lot of what Mario Party traditionally does. It eschews stat collecting for a health bar that players aim to deplete by siccing Goombas and Bob-ombs on each other while they chase around small, simple maps with one or two core mechanics.

Playing Mario Party 3 as a single player experience is what makes it feel most different from its predecessors, though the need to feature duel mode in equal measure to the established style can really drag things out. It’s definitely good that it’s designed in a way that at least tries to make a round go by a little faster, for example, by not having a mini game after every turn, but the whole thing is pretty undercooked to get equal billing. The aforementioned simple board design is the biggest culprit in this regard, but there also just aren’t enough 1v1 mini games to keep them a part of the game you’re actually looking forward to. You’ll get to the same point eventually with the wider array of games, sure, but it’s the fact that this takes so much longer to happen that really highlights the need for more content in a part of the game touted so highly for the advancement it is.

The other main attractions for this party are the series’ first roster additions in Waluigi and Daisy, another new set of boards to play on, and, quite notably, a completely fresh batch of mini games — no holdovers from previous games like Mario Party 2 had, for better or worse. These new mini game offerings are, no surprise, really, a mixed bag, with highlights such as Bounce ‘n’ Trounce and Mario’s Puzzle Party making for some of the items you really hope for in that roulette wheel. For every great game, though, there does seem to be a serious misfire, even if it’s just in one aspect, such as the aptly named The Beat Goes On, an interpretation of a road trip classic where players recite a pattern before adding their own item onto the end and pass it along. A mini game that can go on for over five minutes is, unfortunately, no longer all that mini, and to have it end in a draw after so much time is unnecessarily frustrating. In fact, games being too long is a fairly common misstep for Mario Party 3, as there are several games, particularly of the ever-challenging 1v3 variety, that only feel imbalanced due to fatigue. Spotlight Swim and Hook, Line, and Sinker effectively even each other out by causing this problem for either side, respectively, but that’s still no way to design mini games.

Bowser Toss is a real killer, it seems like the only one in the game that’s completely unbalanced against the CPU. They won by at least 10 yards basically every time.

The game boards offered in Mario Party 3 offer a bit more consistency and quality than the mini games, however. Duel boards notwithstanding, this is probably one of the more solid assortments of boards in the franchise, with only Waluigi’s Island a bit weak, and even then, it’s largely because of how heavily it’s borrowing from Wario’s Battle Canyon from the first entry. Though, at least, you can mostly walk freely between the cordoned-off sections rather than having to be randomly cannon blasted between them and having to pick your starting space at random. Chilly Waters, Deep Bloober Sea, and Woody Woods are all definite highlights, however. A key feature in the board design this time is that events will often happen that require player input, such as an angler fish that sucks players in and repositions them in a particular space already determined by a spinning arrow. This isn’t even so much about forcing players to win an additional mini game, as these events aren’t particularly difficult, as much as it is another layer of strategy. You often want to engage or not engage with the event based on the potential to basically flip the entire board in one go.

The minutiae of the regular board gameplay continues to grow in other ways as well, bringing a lot of strategy and even exploits to Mario Party 3. It’s the sort of thing you’d give a lot of credit to a particular entry for introducing or refining, only it’s the nature of Mario Party as a franchise to continue tweaking, meaning that good ideas and bad ideas were never treated the way we expect them to in hindsight. Still, the ability to carry up to three items, for example, is a huge addition to strategizing turn by turn, while even something as small as the design of skeleton gates — which would be gone from the series after this entry — becomes something worth thinking about. You may not even want to go down that pathway, but you can take two spaces off your roll by going up to the gate and back to hit the space you want. Other items continue to get introduced and evolve like the all-powerful, impossibly cheap Reverse Mushroom (only five coins) and the Magic Lamp, which although it stays the same, is joined by the similar Lucky Lamp, which moves the star from where it is to another location at random — move it away from your opponent or as a Hail Mary if you’re halfway across the board approaching the endgame.

There’s a ton of really small details that can be gone over all day (and ZoomZike on YouTube already has), so the only other thing to really go over here is presentation. As mentioned, finally having Daisy and Waluigi as additional playable characters is a lot of fun, even though they’re not even selectable in story mode and, no, it will not affect gameplay whatsoever. Millennium Star is a cool character, with his big brows and stache, but Tumble is the highlight for the new characters. The ultimate “no thoughts, head empty” NPC, he gets so upset if the star moves to a bad spot on the board that he starts panicking on your behalf. Baby Bowser and Toad remain key figures, and knowing that the former would be replaced by Bowser Jr. going forward, it’s hard not to find the little guys really endearing with their sass and, frankly, their status as punching bags in mini games.

With unique mini games, tertiary characters, boards, and mechanics, it’s hard to pit this Mario Party against any of its brethren simply because good, bad, complex, intuitive, or exploitable aspects of any one entry just don’t seem to hold any definitive sway. They really do just tend to even out when trying to be objective, because there’s just so much to account for. But this is why the series, love it or hate it, is pretty consistent — up until it completely changes the format in 9 and 10, at least — so judging the games comes down to personal preference/nostalgia, and how much you like the series as a whole. Taking a look at Mario Party 3 is going to be as enjoyable as any other, if only to see exactly where the franchise was at that point, so if you want more Mario Party in your life, come and get it here, on the GameCube, or wherever — there’s no wrong answer or clear-cut superior in these numbered entries.