Mario Party is one of my favorite side series in the Super Mario series besides Mario Kart and some of sport games consisting of board game play, unexpected twists and turns, and of course chalk full of minigames. The Nintendo 64 was the beginning of this series, and they had some fun moments in the three games, however my least favorite one that feels like an innocent pain to me is the second one. This game had problems I encountered while revisiting this one. Before I explain what those problems are, I don’t hate this game since there are things about it that I do like and there are worse Mario Parties than this one (cough cough Star Rush cough) that being said, let’s take a look at the negatives of Mario Party 2.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: the costumes. Now as much as this was a cool feature, they’re not really in most of the game. When I took a look at the game all the way to its 100% completion, I found out that only 10% of the game had them: the first five boards and their duel minigames, meaning that the rest of the 90% has everyone in their regular clothes. It feels like a false advertisement to me since it’s the first thing you’ll see on the cover as well as the official artwork. In fact despite Toad having his own costumes for each board, the one that appears in the Star Space has his regular self. Negative #1 is the main feature: the costumes are only in 10% of the whole game. Another new feature that’s introduced from this game is items which will help you along the way, however unlike other games, this one lets you hold only one item at a time, which doesn’t sound bad at first, but imagine you played this game after any other Mario Party game after this one and thought you could hold three items, then you would probably be frustrated or confused. Negative #2 is while the items are a nice introduction, you can only hold one at a time. The game also introduces Item and Duel minigames which I found their concepts great, unfortunately each one is limited depending on which board you’re playing which can get repetitive to me. What’s worse is that two of the six minigames are just a cup and ball game where you have to keep your eye open for a certain item whether with barrels or coffins that open and close to shuffle the items, while two others have you stopping a wheel at a certain time whether pulling a level to stop once or smash a rock twice to get the item you want, the other two have different variations whether slamming a strength bell or a slot machine. The Duel minigames aren’t any better: they’re extremely short and only last for a few seconds whether pressing a button combination as fast as you can or a rock, paper, scissors game with Mario, Peach, and Bowser. Negative #3 is Item and Duel minigames being limited to a certain board with the former having two minigames having similar concepts, and the latter being too short. Although the boards’ gimmicks are decent to good, my least favorite is Mystery’s Land where the board’s divided into four sections, however you can’t get to the other sections unless you land on a happening space which you have to be very lucky with the dice block hitting the number you want. But there are two other ways to access the areas depending on where you’re at. There’s the skeleton key area and the teleportation pod which costs ten coins to use, but it doesn’t help the fact that the one at the start is near a bank, meaning that if you want to use it on the first couple turns without winning minigames, tough luck! If you want to see this gimmick done correctly, check out Rainbow Dream from Mario Party 5. It has four sections just like in Mystery Land, but there’s a path that can be opened by paying five coins and takes you to the section on the left side of where you’re at, there’s also a wind gondola that you can ride to take to a random area if you want to ride in it. That being said, Negative #4 is Mystery Land’s main gimmick. Although the endings of a board map are different compared to the other games, these ones feel formulaic and predictable. It starts with Toad about to announce the winner after telling the number of stars and coins everyone has, as well as the optional bonus stars if turned on, suddenly a Koopa Troopa interrupts the event(which to me feels incredibly rude when I think about it.) and then it cuts to Bowser about to do something bad to a Koopa Troopa as an unshaped shadow appears, revealing the winner, and then defeats Bowser something relating to the board you’re playing from hitting him with a cork gun in Western land to guessing his puzzle to his head in Mystery Land which may look cool, but when I honestly thought about it, they feel a bit anticlimactic to me. Not that I’m saying I support Bowser, even though he’s ironically one of my favorite villains of all-time, it just feels like there was originally a battle against him at first, but then they scrapped that idea and made it into a cutscene. Negative #5 is the endings of the board maps. Despite this game fixing some of the problems the first game had, they left a couple of things from it in here. One of them is how you’ll see the titles of minigames whether you played them for the first time or not, and you still have to earn coins in the boards to spend on the minigames you played by Woody: a giant tree who sells you the minigames as fruit, then you can play them in the Mini-Game Park whenever you want to. To make matters worse, Item and Battle minigames aren’t available to be purchased even when you play at least one of them on any of the boards.(We’ll discuss that later.) Negatives #6 and #7 are the fact you still need to buy the minigames to play them in Minigame Land, as well as Item and Battle minigames not included with the other categories. Speaking of buying minigames, to add more insult to injury, two modes are locked behind buying minigames: Minigame Stadium which consists of Battle where you try to win a certain number of random minigames, Trial which is like the stadium from the first game only with a different map, and Duel which is the same as Battle but with Duel minigames; the first two are unlocked after buying a certain number of minigames from Woody. The other mode being Minigame Coaster, which is unlocked after buying all of the 4-Player, 1 vs. 3, and 2 vs. 2 minigames, and is like Minigame Island only you can’t go back to previously played minigames to earn more coins for extra lives which to me felt worse, but reasonable since you’re in a coaster and there’s only going forward. Negative #8 is Minigame Stadium and Coaster being locked on startup. A lot of people’s biggest problem with the first Mario Party is the control stick rotating minigames and how they get blisters by using the palm of their hands instead of their thumbs, as for me with this game, they had to be the button mashing minigames, which also happened in the first game too, along with any minigames after this one. My thumb gets tired after pressing it too fast, and the worst kinds for me are Mecha Marathon: where you have to wind up your Mecha Shy Guy as tight as you can by pressing A and B at the same time, and Abandon Ship: where you have to keep mashing A to climb up the mast before you sink to the ocean but also change directions because there are posts that block your way, and if that’s not enough there are Cheep Cheeps that jump up and stun you making you slide down a bit. The former to me has difficulty with triggering both buttons whether the controller thinks I’m pressing one button earlier or later than the other, while the latter is what happens when a concept has too many ideas at once. To make this even worse for me, I was stuck on Mecha Marathon in the Minigame Coaster, and with that extra negative where you can’t go back to any previous minigames you already completed, I’m forced to complete it no matter how many lives I have. Doesn’t help either that Abandon Ship is the next game, and I could use a turbo controller, but it feels like a waste of money to buy one just to get past these minigames. Negative #9 is the button mashing minigames Mecha Marathon and Abandon Ship. While we’re still on the subject of minigames, the other two that are a big pain to me are Sneak n’ Snore and Bob-Omb Barrage. The former has you sneaking past a sleeping Chain Chomp to press a button to open a door behind you, but if the Chain Chomp wakes up, you need to hide in your barrel fast or else the Chain Chomp will snag you and get you eliminated. The latter has the lone player dodging the team player throwing Bob-ombs at him/her while they dodge the attacks. Both of these games sound interesting on paper, but the worst things about them though are their controls with the former having you hide by stop moving which can be annoying since you have a couple seconds to respond to the Chain Chomp waking up(thankfully it’s fixed with Mario Party Advance’s Barrel Peril minigame.), and the latter having the team players use the control stick to aim where they want to throw the Bob-omb and adjust the power which can be difficult since if you tilt too light, it only goes too close to you, but too hard and it goes past the water. All it basically needs to do is mimic Ekans’ Hoop Hurl from Pokemon Stadium with the D-Pad to aim where you want your Ekans to go and the control stick to adjust your power. Negative #10 is the minigames Sneak n’ Snore and Bob-omb Barrage’s controls. The last thing I like to talk about is the Virtual Console release. It’s a great feature to play old-school classics from various systems including Nintendo 64. Unfortunately, this game is the only one that was on the Wii Virtual Console and is only on the Wii U Virtual Console. Granted though, I can understand the first game not being on there because of the rotating control stick minigames, but I don’t understand why 3 wasn’t on the Virtual Console for either system. Since Nintendo 64 games are coming to Nintendo Switch Online, I sure hope Nintendo will put all three games on the service and not just this one again since they need some attention. Negative #11 is how it’s the only N64 game that was on Virtual Console.
Thankfully, Mario Party 3 fixes some of these problems and made them much better like holding three items instead of just one, putting minigames that aren’t played behind a group of question marks, letting you play multiple Duel and Item minigames in a board and giving more variety and longer time, as well as keeping whatever minigames you play without spending coins on them. Although all three games have flaws, they’re still fun to play with their minigames and board game elements, however 2 shouldn’t have all the attention so if you ever play a Mario Party game on Nintendo 64, be sure to give all three games a try, especially 3!