Biggest Problems With Mario Party 5

It seems every board here has a theme so uninspiring and basic with no unique quirks or gimmicks that were poured into them. Legit, everyone of them has one or more major flaws in their design as their theme doesn't scream originality in the slightest. They're all just based on different types of "dreams", say Toy Dream, Rainbow Dream, Future Dream, etc. They all just have that basic theme but nothing else. Compare it to say Mario Party 7 where each board had a unique real world theme, with interesting and fun gimmicks thrown all over the place. And of course, there's Bowser's Nightmare, which surprisingly though isn't as bad as much of the other boards in the game, but it's still pretty bad. The only ones I liked to an extent was Pirate and Undersea Dream and that's it.

Mario Party 5 might hold the record for worst Mario Party minigames overall, down there with the original first and Star Rush. There are a few cool ones as always, like Frozen Frenzy, Hotel Goomba and Panic Pinball, but those good are in a minority. Most of the minigames from this game involve luck, button mashing, or if unlucky, both. The worst offender of this is obviously Get a Rope, but there's a handful of other types of these minigames, like Head Waiter, Merry Poppings, Will Flower, Vicious Vending, Mathletes, and..., Button Mashers.

I'm mostly pointing my fingers at my two least favourite Mario Party boards of all time here: Rainbow Dream and Future Dream, which use my least favourite board gimmick of all time: island hopping. I've always hated island hopping, but in other Mario Party boards with this feature, there has always been redeemable parts of it though: Bowser's Enchanted Inferno makes it easy to hop between islands, Kamek's Library is very small and has the golden pipe, and Megafruit Paradise has stunning graphics and is bearable in Partner Party. Rainbow/Future Dream though, are too big, look awful, and it's completely luck-based. You might be trying to get to the star, but someone else gets it first, and the star moves to a completely different island. It's freakin' ANNOYING.

This is obvious in half of the minigames, but even on the board it's just so painful. I know the and Cube games were even more relient on luck than this game, but those games at least have a different type of gameplay where luck is more prevalent and acceptable, whereas Mario Party 5's gameplay is heavily taken from the older games that were more skill-oriented, and as such, the luck is just irritating at best (besides it's easier to get back lost mini stars in the and Cube games, unlike coins/stars this game). The way you get items is random:, you pass machines and they'll randomly give you a capsule, but you can't choose which. And the board gimmicks are horrendous as I said, as the island hopping in Future/Rainbow Dream makes it impossible for you to get any stars.

This throw-away character was only used for the N64 and Gamecube Mario Party games and he quite finely summarizes the state of Mario Party: unoriginal. Especially considering Hudson Soft could've used Bowser Jr. starting with 4 instead, a much more interesting character. He was first introduced in Mario Party as a supporting antagonist, but 5 saw him playable, a feature I despise. At least he was removed from the roster in 7, and better yet, removed completely by 8.

Something tells me this mode was only added so that Skolar could have a mode to host in the game, and wouldn't surprise me because it's just so out of the blue and random. Essentially, you're building machines using different parts you can buy using party points, and then you use it in tournaments agianst CPU or friends. While this does SOUND interesting, and it is for the first few minutes, it's the same thing every time to play. There's no variety in tournaments: it's the same thing. It could've worked if online existed back in the day, but without it, it's just some obscure fighter side mode with no relevance.