One of the biggest milked-franchises you will probably ever see, this game fails to do anything right.
The story of this iteration of the Mario Party franchise is simple. The Mushroom Kingdom characters are trying to stop a feud between day and night. They feud all the time over who should control what, and when they should control it. Because of this fued, this starts off a new feature in Mario Party. The game actually switches from day to night after a certain amount of turns, and when it turns to and fro, the rules and regulations change with it.
Now, this may seem like a particulary innovative feature, until you discover that it was just recently put in as a way to keep the series fresh. By that time, you should have unlocked most of the content, and when you do that, there is nothing else to do except play with friends, which even then can get boring.
The look of this game is the same ol' classic Gamecube Mario Party look, nothing changes except for the boards themselves. Everything just looks the same. Now that is good for those of you who loved the look of the Gamecube Mario Parties, and don't want a change. Those of you looking for a change in the franchise, look elsewhere, or you will be very disappointed here.
When you start up the game, you seem to think that you may be listening to some good tunes, when all it is the usual sounds of Mario Party, with hardly any music thrown in. It gets old and stale after a while, and especially when you unlock the taunts. You will want to hold your hands over your ears to block out the annoying repetitive taunts that the characters throw at you.
The most disappointing thing about thi game, however, is its gameplay and value. This game has little value for a $50 game, and its gameplay is so generic and bland that you may want to take your Gamecube and break it. Nothing has changed since Mario Party 5, except some of the minigames (albeit very few) use the microphone. It feels innovative enough to use the microphone to command Mario and co around to do stuff, until you find out how unresponsive they are to your commands. It's like trying to teach your dog how to do stuff in Nintendogs, the stupid dog doesn't learn as quickly as a normal puppy would, and the dog almost always messes up your words. It's the same problem here, too. The Mario characters always mess up your words, and rarely respond to them.
I would've given this game a much higher score if it did something to push the series forward, but sadly, this game fails to do anything different from the rest of the pack, and it utterly fails at its own game. This game may be fun to play with friends, but, when you look at it closely, it's nothing more than a repetitive mini-game game, that won't ever, and will never, catch up to Wario Ware.