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Mario Party is one of the video game franchises with the strangest trajectory, and despite the fact that everything apparently went well with its first installment (released in 1998 for the Nintendo 64), over the years it has done nothing but experiment for better and worse.
While the era of the Nintendo 64 and the Nintendo Game Cube were relatively conservative (all the Mario Party sequels within these generations did not radically change the formula and were limited to adding new characters/maps and minigames), everything changed drastically when it came to the turn of the Nintendo Wii and the Wii U.
"If it ain't broke, don't break it apart" is a philosophy that I generally believe in, although the video game industry tends to err on the side of conformism and avoids evolution when it is not strictly necessary. The problem with Mario Party, however, was the inability of developers to understand what really made their games enjoyable, which resulted in disastrous experiences like Mario Party 9 and 10, as well as some minigame compilations that were released early in the Switch cycle.
The idea of a virtual board game built around the universe of the most popular plumber in the world is simply brilliant, and Nintendo knew how to exploit it very well from day one.
However, it is important to find the exact point between simplicity and chaos, giving control to each player, but adding random touches that give freshness to the experience without becoming too intrusive.
I mention all this because although it is questionable that Super Mario Party Jamboree represents a number of improvements almost null with its predecessors for Nintendo Switch (Mario Party Superstars and Super Mario Party), its small novelties are enough to warrant a purchase, even if it errs on the side of being extremely conservative.
That's right, in terms of gameplay the changes between Jamboree and the other Mario Party games are almost non-existent, and the same goes for their graphical aspect and general gameplay scheme. In fact, with a couple of small adjustments they could pass as simple DLCs that include new characters and maps that had not been included before.
In the end, preferring Jamboree or another of the video games available on the Nintendo handheld is a matter of preference, since there is no title that is objectively superior.
There are small details in which progress is felt (especially when it comes to customization options within each game), but these three games provide a fairly vanilla Mario Party experience.
Is it perfect? Of course not, and those looking for innovation will not find it here, but they are still very decent games, with fun minigames, good maps and beautiful graphics.
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