the curse of deciding your party game has competitive play

If your metric of a good Mario Party is “is it a good party game”, Super Mario Party Jamboree is probably the best one they’ve ever put out, and it’s not even close. Even disconnecting from all the shockingly in-depth side modes (there’s an 8 player co-op raid???) or the really fun variety of playable characters, and solely focusing on just the main boards, it hits a sweet spot of what you’d want in a Mario Party, enough player-driven choices over the course of a game to where you undeniably have some degree of agency, mixed with juuust enough things that are absolutely not in your control to where, if you play this with a hypothetical nephew of 7-12 years, he might still win.

Every Mario Party before has had a curse where, because they have certain deeply-ingrained system mechanics, boards have to tie back to them, even when it isn’t that useful or it makes the board’s gimmicks worse. Every board in Mario Party 4 needed a stupid little pipe leading to an often useless branching path, because otherwise mini mushrooms were less valuable; every board in Mario Party 5 needed to be unreasonably large, because otherwise you’d run out of space to put down all ten billion traps you’d get over the course of a game. Especially when the gimmick isn’t very good (9 and 10, naturally), it ties down the board to the point that nothing the board design wants to do can salvage itself into being fun again.

Jamboree, instead, makes a point to go the other way around, with each board having its own item pool, shops, and even modifications to core systems. The obligatory Bowser-related board has a gimmick where your one mandatory path near the start keeps getting infested with more and more Bowser spaces… but instead of losing your stars/coins to the void if you step on them, it keeps getting added to a vault, and if you happen to unlock the vault,^{[1]Link to footnote 1} you get every single thing that was stolen, which I imagine if you were a kid who won a game off of that would probably make you feel like god.

It’s not like it’s perfect, or anything. The motion control minigames requiring you hold a singular joycon in a way designed to ruin the hands of anyone over the age of 13 is completely insane, not least of which because none of the minigames do anything that a pro controller’s gyro controls wouldn’t be able to handle, and the core gimmick of the game, the titular Jamboree buddy, ends up being so unimaginably strong that you can basically compress any given game’s most important moments to the three turns they’re hanging around for, but there’s so many minigames that you can skip the motion games without noticing, and the buddy being so strong does end up adding a fun variability to the whole thing.

This makes it, in my opinion, the perfect party game. The sign of a bad Mario Party is when it stops feeling like you want to finish it, because it’s boring and nothing’s happening that matters after someone gets a lead, and a lot of those same bad games try to solve this by throwing stuff at you, not realizing the stuff needs to matter, and there’s only so many ways a -5 coin event can matter. Jamboree keeps things mattering just enough, at the perfect quantity, to where you can, very easily, set up a last-turn hail mary, and thus, make it so you want to give a shit down to the final turn.

As a party game, it’s excellent. But Jamboree is funny; it doesn’t want to just be a party game.

See, upon winning a game, you’ll unlock an extra option when you select a board. One option, the one you were already playing, is Party Rules; the other is, and I cannot stress this enough, Pro Rules.

The first time I saw this option, I nearly lost my fucking mind. “A contest of skill.” In Mario Party. Historically, when people have wanted to insult games that have been taken seriously in competition, it’s very common to do so by calling the game a party game, an insult that works because “party game” doesn’t actually mean anything other than “not that serious”, because Mario Party, the series which the party game’s name originates from, is not that serious.

The literal definition of unseriousness has a serious competitive mode. It has a ranked ladder. You can go online, and sweat in Mario Party, and compete with other people who are sweating in Mario Party.

I hope that I, too, can make you lose your mind in recognizing this, because even though I wouldn’t even necessarily recommend tryharding in this mode, it’s also some of the most fun I’ve had playing this series.

Everything operates under new rules in pro mode, and rather than explain each of them one by one, I’ll just give what I think is a change that best represents what the developers were trying to go for, with this.

Bowser spaces, normally, have a little roulette to determine your punishment. Not only were these of different severity, but some options resulted in literally nothing happening, and others, like “Bowser Revolution”, could even be situationally useful if you have less coins than everyone else.

This is different in pro mode. You still get the roulette! It’s just that literally every single option is to lose a star.

This isn’t smash, where pro-competitive changes are in the name of removing as much RNG as possible from play, because pro mode is not here to reduce randomness in a way that benefits you. What it does, instead, is create consistency in what results come from any random roll. Whereas the risk management with Bowser spaces were, previously, nonexistent–you had to get a bad roll to get on the space, and then get a second bad roll for that to even matter–it becomes streamlined here, and thus, easy to follow.

The Bowser space is consistent, in that it will consistently beat you to death with a hammer, and you will, therefore, be consistently scared shitless of passing by it. It’s not stopping you from getting fucked, it’s giving you a reason to start playing around it.

Every change lives in this mindset, with lucky spaces giving you a choice (not even a coin flip!) between 10 coins and a dice, and with many spaces being replaced by even more lucky spaces, making it way easier to move around, and thus play around, the dangers of the board, giving you better opportunities to position yourself from turn to turn.

And why would you need to? Well, I didn’t mention too much about Jamboree’s buddy system before, because it would have given away how much of this game was designed for pro mode. Whereas in party mode, buddies are overkill, adding even more wild variables to a game that already has so many, buddies in pro mode are the win condition. The gimmick to them is simple: a buddy shows up on the board, usually away from all the stuff you’d want to go to, and upon passing one by, a showdown minigame happens, a 3-5 minute game unique to the exact character you’re picking up. Your reward for being the one to meet them is an advantage in the minigame, usually extra points or better positioning, but there’s no guarantee you’ll win even with it.

Should you win, however, you get possibly the most broken power in any game in this series: the ability to double down on everything. Pass by a shop, you get to buy two items! Land on a lucky space, you get to proc it twice! And, I cannot stress this enough, if you pass by a star, you can get two stars.

I have, in pro mode, been able to get 4 stars in one turn, by getting to a Boo with a buddy, stealing two stars, getting to a star spot with that same buddy, and then buying two more stars. I was able to do this because I, at 4th place, realized I needed to bet everything on winning a buddy off disadvantage, and proceeded to build up all 140 coins, and extra dice, needed to get away with that before parking right before the Boo. It was a dangerous win condition, but in getting it, I had such a massive lead that I could spend the rest of the board on the defensive, buying and spending debuff items to make sure nobody else could try to build momentum before the game ended.

I played well, and I was rewarded. In some sense, people could have also prepped for me, as buddies are complete turncoats and will ditch you if anyone so much as passes you by, letting them get all the reward you put so much effort into obtaining. All it would have taken is some prepositioning behind me, giving themselves a safety net where either them or me winning the minigame gives them a chance to win, and if they were smart about it, they would’ve deserved the win just as much as I had.

It’s insane, but against all reason, there is skill in here. Once you’re in, and there’s three other people you’re against, this is less like a party game (derogatory), and more akin to a strategy game regularly interrupted by wipeout-esque obstacle challenges, your ability to keep up good strategic awareness being augmented by a general jack-of-all-trades mindset that comes with the minigames, and especially the showdown games, something more akin to taking a real life game show seriously than anything else.

And what’s especially absurd is that this gives it a significant edge over a lot of other competitive games! One of the big weaknesses most competitive games run into is how quickly they become linear, predictable. Good competitive games give the players enough freedom to where you can basically unmold that predictability through sheer willpower, and bad competitive games often give up entirely, shaking up their own metagame every few months before people get bored of it again.

Jamboree’s nonlinearity isn’t merely here, it’s very literally hard-coded into the biggest win condition in the game. There are very real times where, to succeed, you will simply need to be someone good at pinball,^{[2]Link to footnote 2} because you need a buddy to maximize star value, and Waluigi is the guy who happened to show up. As it turns out, game show variety makes for pretty good variety!

The game, in pro mode, is great. It is fantastic, and somehow some of the most fun I’ve had playing anything in this series, and if you told me I’d say that about an officially sanctioned Mario Party competitive mode, I wouldn’t have believed you in a million years.

I need to emphasize that. The game is good! The game is good.

Unfortunately, competitive games aren’t always about the game.

Before I rip apart the logistics of online laddering, I first need to offer a legitimate defense, because even if I know why this is the dumbest shit on the planet, I can also understand what mentality would lead into thinking this made sense.

Any competitive genre, early in its infancy, has some real bad hiccups, and most of them come from map or stage design. Smash has its points where stages that are obviously cooked in hindsight were, for reasons that I’m sure made sense once, completely legal in tournament play, your auto-scrolling Rainbow Cruises and your giant, camp-friendly Hyrule Castles. FPS games often have entire game modes that turn out to be fundamentally flawed, modes that naturally lead to two teams sitting around a corner as they wait for someone to do something, and such games end up centralizing towards the one or two modes that can easily result in healthy, reasonably-fun gameplay.

I imagine, if you were somehow put in charge of developing a competitive Mario Party, you’d be acutely aware of the minefield you’re stepping into. It would be so, so easy to basically blow this entire idea up, if you aren’t careful, any one board in a random ladder setting could just ruin the entire experience forever.

So, what if you didn’t?

No, not like, what if you didn’t put in problematic boards or not. It’s not going for a for glory style one-stage-only system, that would possibly be too clever for this game. What I mean is, what if you didn’t decide on a central ladder at all?

This is what Jamboree does, and it single-handedly kills all that potential I was gushing about. Every single board, and every single setting you can choose with that board, has its own separate matchmaking system. If you pick Western Land, and you choose to have motion control minigames off, you are now in a matchmaking system where you’ll only be matched with other people who picked Western Land, and who also chose not to have motion control minigames. Just in case that’s not stupid enough, it doesn’t allow duplicate characters, and also forces you to lock in your character beforehand, so on top of all the limitations you already have, you also need to make sure everyone else in matchmaking plays a different character.

It should be noted that, for all the ways I personally think pro mode owns, it’s also possibly the most niche shit that could ever exist in a mainstream Nintendo game. Remember, we’re talking about fucking COMPETITIVE MARIO PARTY. I am only appreciative of the concept because I am a complete freak, and there aren’t that many freaks like me! Jamboree takes this tiny pool, of similar-minded freaks who I would be generous in saying there’s maybe hundreds-to-thousands of, and then splits them off even further.

Oh, but don’t worry. If it takes too long to find four people (and it will), the game just fills the rest with CPUs. It also tries to hide this fact, giving the CPUs names like they’re real people, despite the fact that you’ll notice them immediately because the game forgets to turn off all the quality-of-life menu skipping CPU players have.

People complain about competitive modes in games, because they hate losing. I don’t mind it, because I don’t mind the idea that someone else cares enough to be better than me at a game. Jamboree takes the impressive step of not even letting me have that satisfaction, because yes, you can have a sweaty, tryhard match where a master difficulty CPU who just so happens to hit the exact rolls needed to get 20 stars in a row wins out of nowhere, as they do in every Mario Party ever made.

Honest to god, Jamboree’s serious PvP mode can have outcomes where every human player involved loses, as a nonsentient bundle of scripts named Geronimo or whatever gets your points instead of you.

All of this is really, really bad, and makes it nearly unusable from any sane perspective of wanting to take a videogame seriously, and all of it was likely done in as a result of anxiety, that any one decision on rules or boards might make the game obnoxious and unfun.

Which is funny, because thanks to the buddy system, that still happens anyways.

Jamboree’s titular core system has one fatal flaw: if you pick a character associated with a showdown minigame, you remove that character from the potential pool of buddies.^{[3]Link to footnote 3}

This is in spite of the fact that there exists alt colors for every single buddy character, a feature it uses for the story mode that generously maybe 5% of people who buy the game will ever touch, the minigame mode that you only use after getting bored of the boards, and not the actual main mode everyone’s here for. This flaw is so clearly insane that, despite it being easy to prove that this is the case, you’ll still be told that it doesn’t work like that, and that duplicate characters will obviously show up, because the developers wouldn’t be so stupid as to not consider that when implementing a competitive mode, so it mustn’t work that way.

This, in any previous Mario Party, would basically be a side bit at most (we’re still in the same console generation as the Mario Party that has a character-dice tier list, after all), but now that this is a game that you can expect to take seriously, being able to ban entire strategies and minigames just by selecting your character has massive implications. If you think Peach’s ability to cut the cost of stars in half is bullshit, just pick Peach, and you can literally never have to deal with it again! If you want a higher likelihood of buddies whose minigames start you with bigger advantages, just pick the characters with weaker advantages!

This has several major consequences. One, this instantly makes over half the character list strictly worse, as the buddy characters become better by virtue of merely having something extra at all. Two, this breaks the already-horrible laddering system even harder, because people are more likely going to centralize on the few minigames or effects they don’t like, and if half the players are queueing in as Peach, and the other half are queuing in as Yoshi, then you’re getting exactly zero games with a full party of human beings.

The biggest playing-to-win strategy this game has not only manages to ruin character balance in a game where every character is otherwise statisically identical, but it also results in a lower likelihood of you actually playing with other people. The best part is, because these buddies were clearly chosen by being the popular Mario Party characters, the only way around this in a tournament format involves banning the most popular characters in the entire game.

I am genuinely more mad about this than if pro mode was just unsalvageable garbage. I think it’s because, if it was simply bad, I would be able to say “well that’s what happens if you make a tryhard mode in a party game” and then move on, comforted in the knowledge that there isn’t anything here worth taking seriously. Instead, I am now going to be troubled for the rest of my life, not just with the knowledge that there really is something to this idea, but with knowing that this was probably the one chance we’ll ever have for this idea to flourish, and be given the funding and care needed to work.

You can tell a lot of this game was designed for pro mode first, and party mode second. There’s so many little things, ways board events are timed and ways buddies can matter, that are clumsy or useless in party mode, but make perfect sense in pro mode, and the moment you see them you can’t stop seeing them.This was the game where someone had this crazy idea, who had the knowhow to tune the game to fit this crazy idea, and because we’re late enough into the console generation, Nintendo was perfectly willing to let it be respected at face value, for just this one time.

It kills me, because it almost worked.