It’s almost hard to believe that Mario Party has been around for almost 25 years, and yet by this point we’ve gotten 12 console entries and 5 handheld ones (with some stragglers here and there). The original Mario Party for the Nintendo 64 was brought to us by Hudson Soft and has been destroying friendships and controllers since all the way back in 1998. The series continued its patented board game formula on the GameCube, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, and Wii. It was like seeing a rockstar with hit after hit enjoying his prime.
But then said rockstar started getting addicted to controlled substances and desperately needed to go to rehab. When NDCube took over the series starting with Mario Party 9, it took a long time for things to get back on track. The 9th and 10th entries brought in the universally loved and in-no-way-controversial car mechanic, and the less said about the 3DS entries they also made the better.
But things finally *did* get back on track with the Nintendo Switch with Super Mario Party, which became the best selling and most critically acclaimed game in the series in a very long time. But although it was a huge step in the right direction, not everyone found it fulfilling. The game boards were bland, there were way fewer of them, and you couldn’t even play the core party modes online at launch. Fans were generally left thinking “that’s disappointing, oh well maybe next time.”
And it finally happened! At E3 2021 right in between the announcements of Kazuya for Smash and Metroid Dread, Nintendo and NDCube announced [Mario Party Superstars](https://youtu.be/2jEq0F656aY) for later that October. This was the true return to form that everyone has been waiting for, complete with 5 remade boards from the N64 era, 100 remastered minigames from across the series, full online play right out of the box, and a bevy of game modes and quality of life features. Reviews of the game eclipsed those of Super Mario Party, and fans and newcomers have been begging for DLC ever since. Well at least we’re getting the N64 trilogy on NSO, so that’s something right?