My Ex Girlfriend HATED Mario Party

 "Give me back my 62 coins, you thief!"

Nintendo has a lot of franchises that makes you compete against your family and friends. It's obviously meant as a friendly competition, where the real objective is for everyone to have fun. Nontheless, Mario Party has so many random elements (or at least well hidden from the players) that makes everyone groan in agony and frustration.

Since the beginning of the franchise, back in 1998 on the Nintendo 64, Mario Party became Nintendo's Family Game. We could say that said title belongs to Mario Kart because of its popularity and accesibility, but Mario Party is pretty much a "digital boardgame" for everyone; even for those who don't play videogames.

Mario Party's premise is very simple: You roll a dice, move your character through a board to get to the star. the player who has more stars at the end of the game is the winner. In order to buy stars, you'll need to win some minigames and earn coins. And to win the minigames, you have to get good. Simple really.

One thing I love about this game is the little twists and turns each board has. There are boards where a bomb explotes after certain turns and the players who are near it lose their coins. There are others where a gigant blooper destroys a bridge and players have to find a way around to get to the other side. There are even some boards where you don't have to buy stars, but steal them from other players using Boos and Chain Chomps! 

A great time together

I have played a lot of Mario Party games on my own through the years. I utterly enjoy playing the minigames and challenging myself to become better. Since I've played these games on my own, the only way to get better is by playing agains the CPU on hard difficulty. Some minigames (throughout the whole franchise) are pretty much impossible for me to win against the CPU, but playing agains someone else... well, I know I have a chance.

Mario Party is one of those games that you can play with anyone and have a great time together, so I invited my girlfriend to play with me some Mario Party 6 on the GCN. Big mistake. I showed her how to play it, the objectives and how to "cheat" (use Boos and items to steal) and we got to it.

I picked Faire Square for her first time playing Mario Party since the Star Space doesn't move around the board like it normally does. I showed her how to navigate through the board so she wouldn't get lost. But getting lost was not the problem.

As every turn ended and a minigame began, I showed her how to play each minigame and we even practiced every one of them before starting it. She got the handle of them during practice, but for some reason, she couldn't do as well during the actual minigame as she did during practice. Naturally, she grew frustrated as we kept playing.

One of the twists of MP6 is the day and night cycle. Unlike previous entries in the series, the day will turn to night after a few turns have passed. That's when a new challenge arise. Twila, the moon of the game, will replace Brighton, the sun of the game, as the host and she changes some rules, routes on the board, item stores, board events and even the minigames themselves.

Even though my girlfriend started to get a hold of some of the minigames, she lost her mind once it was night time. The problem about the "randomness" of Mario Party is that it will always choose the worst outcome for the players, and in this case it chose to give us repeated minigames during the night, which means it wasn't exactly the same.

I remember we had a minigame where you needed to jump on tight platforms and the one who gets higher, wins. But at nightime, you have to fall. My girlfriend couldn't wrap her head around this concept. "It's the same, but it's not the same. WTF!?"

The changes in the board were also an issue. Some stores and services of each board change overnight, such as the Boos. Since they're ghosts, they only work at night and you can pay them to steal coins or stars. While I was explaining all of this to my girlfriend, I took advantage of the Boos and paid them to steal coins for me. Huge mistake. I thought of choosing one of the CPUs, but they didn't had a lot of coins. My girlfriend demanded not to chose her since she had a hard time saving a bunch of coins through different means. I was laughing my ass off trying way to hard not to chose her. Alas, I chose random... and of course the randomness picked my girlfriend!

I stole 62 coins from her. Apparently, 62 coins is the buyout price of sportsmanship. Don't get me wrong, we laughed way to hard and had an awesome time togehter, but she was kinda angry the rest of the game. I don't blame her, I get salty whenever I lose something like that happens, but it was way too funny that it happened to her even when I chose random.

She complained the rest of the afternoon... actually, she still complains about her 62 coins till this very day, but still she enjoyed the game. Needless to say, we finished the game, I won, she was mad about her coins, and we have never played Mario Party 6 ever again.

Some time later, we played Super Mario Party on the Nintendo Switch, but at least this time was a little bit more fair than the time we played MP6. We played the normal mode but there weren't a lot of crazy shenanigans this time. We also played some minigames, but she still complained about her 62 coins. 

Not the only one

A little while ago, my best friend, Johari, and I went to visit a highschool friend of ours, who we haven't seen in a very long time. He've just got his Nintendo Switch and wanted to share his happiness with us, specially since this is his first Nintendo console. He only had Mario Kart, so I took my Switch with some of my multiplayer games to play together. And obviously I took Super Mario Party with me.

Our friend's girlfriend, Angira, was also there, so we decided to begin our gaming session with Super Mario Party. She knew how to play already but we taught her the objectives and how not to lose. Maybe we taught her way too good because she was beating our asses through the whole game.

As soon as we began, she got the first turn and started moving quickly towards the first star. As my friends and I were making fun of each other and laughing at nothing, Angira was taking the game way too serious. We were having the fun we've been missing for the last few years on our own, but the girl was way too focused on winning the game.

We tried to practice every minigame before starting it, but it didn't matter since she just beated all of us time and time again! It was crazy how good she was at the game, even when she admitted that she haven't played the game before, just watched it on the internet. 

We had our chances to overthown her but she always managed to get on top! It was the hardest Mario Party game I've ever played, but I was having way too much fun with my friends and all the shenanigans of the board. There was a point when a Blooper destroyed a bridge that would lead us to the star, and the only person who managed to get across, to where the star was located, through a pipe was Angira.

When the game was finally finished, she was very happy because she knew she'd beated us; but there was something none of us thought about: the bonus stars. In every Mario Party game, there are some bonus stars at the end of each Party that rewards players even if they were losing. There are bonus stars for the player who landed on more special spaces, for the one who used more items, for the one who won most minigames and so on. 

When Toad began giving out the bonus stars, we just laughed way too hard. All of the bonus stars, and I do mean every single one of them, were given to my friend Johari. The special spaces star, item star, even the "lucky" star! There were way too many bonus stars, but just enough to make Johari the winner of the match by one star over Angira.

It was way too funny and cruel on her to be true! We were laughing and trying to process what just had happen when suddenly Angira just got up from her seat and left the room while saying "Fuck this shit!"

She utterly destroyed us all just for the game to destroy her in the end!

It's funny how Mario Party plays with your emotions like a damn fiddle. It can make you feel like the greatest gamer of the world, and it can also make you feel like the lamest loser on the Earth... but it can also make you feel like the luckiest bastard in the universe.