During today’s Nintendo Treehouse Livestream from E3, we got our very first look at a brand new Mario Party title heading to the 3DS. The Mario Party: Star Rush coverage today began with a look at the game’s main mode: Toad Scramble. This mode reinvents the Mario Party formula in a fast-paced and exciting way. Instead of a classic Mario Party board, it is more of an open space and separated into squares, almost like a checkerboard.
The most important part of Toad Scramble is that it is always your turn: everybody rolls their dice and picks the space they want to move to at the same time. As indicated by the name, everybody starts Toad Scramble as a different colored Toad, and you can recruit classic Mario characters by landing on the spaces that they are occupying.
The goal of Toad Scramble is to collect stars that have been stolen from you by the bosses that occupy the stage. Only one boss is on the stage at any one time, so everyone has to try and make their way towards the fiend as they move around the board. An interesting mechanic regarding this is that each player has to travel the exact number of spaces that they rolled on their die. This will play heavily into the strategy of the game, as each player tries to make their way to the boss or to recruit characters to play on their team.
Another change that has been made to the classic Mario Party formula is that there are not mini games at the end of each turn, instead they only occur during special circumstances, such as when somebody finds a coin balloon or when the boss is reached. When you do encounter the boss a special mini game occurs, specific to the boss that is being fought against. We also saw that whoever reaches the boss first gets a little bit of a head-start in the minigame, putting them at a great advantage. Whoever wins the boss minigame will win the star that the boss has stolen.
Other modes are confirmed, but we don’t have concrete information on them as of yet.
The last thing that we saw was a mention that all of the Wave 2 Super Mario amiibo will be compatible with Mario Party: Star Rush. I think that, in light of that information, all of the Wave 1 Super Mario amiibo will be compatible too. Stay tuned for more info on Mario Party: Star Rush as we get closer to the game’s launch on November 4, 2016!
Leave a Comment
Written by Jaxson Tapp
As a lover of gaming and the written word, Jaxson currently fills his time not only with playing games, but also writing about them. Ready for anything, Jaxson’s passion for puzzle games, JRPGs, tough platformers, and whimsical indies helps him bring a well-rounded opinion to Nintendo Wire’s reporting.
