Mario Party Advance

Mario Party Advance is the seventh game in the Mario Party series, the tenth installment overall and the second handheld installment of the series, specifically for the Game Boy Advance, after Mario Party-e for the e-Reader. The game revolves around either Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, or Yoshi travelling across Shroom City to collect the minigames and Gaddgets that fell from Party World, an area dedicated to partying high above the sky. After Bowser and Koopa Kid attack Party World, Toad tasks them with collecting everything that fell down. This can only be accomplished by helping out the city's citizens and stopping Bowser from exerting his influence. Shroom City can only be accessed with a single player; barring a few minigames, Gaddgets, and a physical Bonus Board that is played alongside the video game, the game does not focus on multiplayer and is more single-player oriented.

Mario Party Advance was released in Japan on January 13, 2005, in North America in March 28, 2005, in Europe in June 10, 2005, and in Australia on September 15, 2005. Mario Party Advance was re-released on the Wii U's Virtual Console in North America and Europe on December 25, 2014, in Oceania on December 26, 2014, and in Japan on October 28, 2015. It is the second of the three Mario Party games to be rereleased for the Wii U's Virtual Console; the others being Mario Party 2 and Mario Party DS.

Story
It is a normal day in Party World when the player first arrives there. Toad is telling Mario about the game, when Bowser drops in and scatters all of the minigames and Gaddgets throughout Shroom City. Now Mario must go and retrieve them all by traveling all over Shroom City and restoring peace to Party World.

Characters
There are four playable characters in Mario Party Advance, the least amount of any Mario Party game to date. It does, however, boast many more non-playable characters that the player helps out during the story mode, as well as other supporting characters than most other Mario Party games.

Shroom City
The main mode in the game, as well as the only one that is playable once the game is started. The player can take control of Mario, Luigi, Peach, or Yoshi and travel around Shroom City, beating the quests and collecting minigames and Gaddgets to play in the other modes.

Play Land
Play Land, hosted by Toad and E. Gadd, is a free play mode, in which the player can either play the minigames they have earned, give minigames to others, play with Gaddgets, or give away Gaddgets.

Party Land
Party Land, hosted by Toad and Toadette, is a mode in which multiple players can play duel minigames, a secret battle, a Koopa Kid battle, a 100-player battle, or a 100-player attack.

Challenge Land
Challenge Land, hosted by Toadette, is a mode in which players can play minigames to earn coins. In Challenge Land, there is a Mini-Game Attack, the Game Room, a Duel Dash, Bowser Land, and an option to trade coins for Gaddgets.

Mini-Game Attack
The player selects one of the four characters, and meets the host, Toad. Here, the player will play through fifteen mini-games in order to win coins. After Toad explains the instructions, a list of three minigames will appear, and the player can pick which one they think they can win. The minigames appear as they would in Free Play, but now have winning conditions akin to that Shroom City, but notably more difficult by increasing the criteria compared to Shroom City or making the computer players smarter. If a player loses a minigame, they will lose everything they accumulated up to this point. If they win five games, they can win 1,000 coins, ten games results in 10,000 coins, and 100,000 coins for all fifteen games. During the attack, they can either keep their total, or use their special items to help.

There are three special items, Switch, Replay, and Practice. Replay allows the player to play the games that they completed again, Switch changes three current games with three new ones, and Practice allows the player to try a game before playing it for real. The player starts with the Practice item, and gains the Switch item after completing 5 minigames and the Replay item after completing 10 minigames.

Game Room
Here, the player selects a character and enters a casino-style room and plays gamble mini-games as much as they want to earn coins. If the player has no coins, Toad will give them ten coins.

Duel Dash
In Duel Dash, which is hosted by Toadette, the player will compete against a computer to win coins. There are three modes: easy to win 1,000 coins; normal to win 10,000 coins, and hard to win 100,000 coins. In easy, the players play three mini-games, in normal, five, and in hard, eight. The mini-games are decided at random.

Bowser Land
In Bowser Land, the player is trying to reach co-hosts Bowser and Koopa Kid to earn coins, while also playing Bowser mini-games. The game and number of Koopa Kids are chosen at random. To reach Bowser, the player rides on a roller coaster, the number of areas being picked randomly. Each stop at a checkpoint counts as one space, and stopping at one results in playing a Bowser mini-game. During the game, however, if Bowser feels the player is taking too long in reaching him, he will end the game himself. If the player arrives at the end of the track at a time Bowser considers too late or early, the amount of coins won will be low.

Quests
The following is a list of all fifty quests in Mario Party Advance. Quests are obtained by talking to NPCs around Shroom City. Nearly every NPC gives only one quest, although some of them may be tied to quests given by others. A few NPCs, such as Mrs. Shroomlock, are not tied to any quests at all. Bowser also gives out multiple quests, letting the player obtain them as they complete other quests. Once the player successfully completes a quest, they earn either a Gaddget or a minigame.

Minigames and Gaddgets
Mario Party Advance offers fifty traditional minigames and sixty-one Gaddgets, which are less-involved and smaller games that often feature little interaction. During the story, all of the minigames have a specific goal to reach and a strict time limit. During Free Play, all of the minigames change so that they become based on beating a score set by the player, whether that includes gaining a large amount of points or completing a minigame in the shortest amount of time. Some minigames go on indefinitely until the player makes a mistake. Gaddgets, on the other hand, do not have any time limit and usually do not have a goal, instead letting the player toy with the Gaddgets however they want. Excluding a few of the multiplayer games, none of the Gaddgets can be lost, or at the very least, they can be reset back to their starting state.

Bonus Board
The Bonus Board is an extra feature added to the main game. It is also the only way to play a multiplayer game without using a link cable. The Bonus Board is a board made of paper which comes packaged with the game. The Game Boy Advance acts as the dice and can be used to play multiplayer Gaddgets.

Staff
Mario Party Advance was developed by Hudson Soft in conjunction with Nintendo SPD Group No.4. It was directed by Shinichi Nakata, who had previously taken smaller roles in the other Mario Party games. Most of his roles involved serving as a planning advisor or planning director, although he notably served as the lead designer in Mario Party 5. Similarly, the game director, Yukinori Goto, served as a design director in the series' other games, and the lead designer, Fumihisa Sato, served as a planner for most of the other games, only taking a design role for Mario Party: Star Rush.

Reception
Mario Party Advance received wildly mixed reviews. A point of contention was the game's minigames and Gaddgets: while some reviewers appreciated the assortment of games, others lambasted them for being wholly uninteresting, though they generally agree that at least some of them are bland. The lack of a substantial multiplayer was also a common complaint, as it required players to either use multiple Game Link Cables or make every player use the same Game Boy. The single-player campaign, on the other hand, was more generally praised, offering a large amount of variety and unique characters.

In an IGN article ranking the Mario Party games, Mario Party Advance came in last (out of twelve games), being described as "the black sheep of the Mario Party series." It was also brought up in a review for Mario Party DS in reference to handheld Mario Party games, describing it as "one of the lamest iterations of the series."

The game received the title of the "Worst-received Super Mario videogame" from the Guinness World Records, deriving its results from GameRankings as of July 28, 2014. Similarly, Mario Party Advance holds the third-lowest Metacritic Metascore in the entire Super Mario franchise, at 54, with the second-lowest being WarioWare: Snapped! (at 53) and the lowest being Donkey Kong Barrel Blast (at 46).

References to other games

 * Super Mario World: An arrangement of the Ground Theme is played on the Shroom City results screen.
 * Super Mario 64: Character designs from the original version of this game are still used in Mario Party Advance, despite it being released after the remake. This is evident in the appearances of King Bob-omb (still called Big Bob-omb), Dorrie, Piranha Plant, Amp, Whomp, Thwomp, Hoot, Mr. Blizzard, and Ukiki.
 * Mario Party 3 / Mario Party 4: Most of the minigame themes in this game are covers of minigame music from these games, and the passport theme is an arrangement of Mario Party 4's main menu theme. Also, the design for Cheep Cheeps introduced in Mario Party 4 appears for the last time in the series; the next game, Mario Party 7, retires it and the Super Mario 64 enemy appearances in favor of the corresponding modern character designs.

Trivia

 * This is the only game in the entire Mario Party series not to feature Wario. It is also the only post-Mario Party 3 game not to feature Princess Daisy or Waluigi, as well as one of two Mario Party games not to feature Donkey Kong, the other being Mario Party: Island Tour.
 * For reasons undisclosed, this game is rated as Teenage Restricted by South Korea's.
 * This is the only Mario Party game not to use voice samples.