YMMV / Mario Party 8

• Accidental Innuendo: One of the minigames is called "Shake It Up", where you must shake the soda can harder and faster then your opponents, and the one who can shoot the highest soda fizz wins. This is visualized by the player characters shaking the can vertically, and the player must do the same with the Wii Remote. The vast majority of older players quickly noted how much the minigame and the process of playing it resembles male masturbation, to the point where it's popularly known by unflattering monikers such as "the jerking off minigame."
• Contested Sequel: Being one of only two installments on the Wii, 8 probably has one of the most divisive amounts of opinion on it among the Hudson era of Mario Party, ranging from it being the pinnacle of the series to it being the nadir of the series. On one hand, the game had a huge amount of minigames and characters, with a lot of effort in the presentation of the games, but on the other, the reliance on motion control gaming (8 coming out during the more experimental era of motion control for the Wii) and the more realistic environments compared to 6 and 7 came with less positive reception.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The game allows you to use Miis in some game modes. Nintendo then made Wii Party, which was primarily developed by ND Cube. Then, the developers of that game went off to make Mario Party 9 and all subsequent entries in the series.
  • The game's main host, MC Ballyhoo, is accompanied by a talking hat with eyes.
  • The minigame "Paint Misbehavin'" is a team competition to see who could paint the most amount of Goombas. This was years before an actual video game by Nintendo ran with this idea.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Cut From the Team, because it's a Luck-Based Mission, and the delay between each cut attempt and the reveal of whether or not you get eliminated, makes for very tense moments. The fact that this minigame is reminiscent of Bomb Defusals in movies does not help.
  • In Spector Inspector, once one player successfully finds three of the five creatures, the room lights up and the winner stands with all five as they all wave happily at the player. And then the camera zooms back to show that they're all trapped inside a painting in a dark room, as ghosts leer at it. Remember, this is for the winner...
• Special Effects Failure: In "At the Chomp Wash" in Mario Party 8, the grass in the background doesn't meet the flower patch behind it, resulting in a black void between them that can be seen in the intro and ending. This was fixed in the minigame's Top 100 incarnation.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Miis are only playable in the Extras Zone, with no option to play as them in the other game modes.
• Unexpected Character: Blooper joining the party. While Hammer Bros were NPCs in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, Blooper never had any friendly representation in the Mario series aside from a disgruntled partner of Luigi in said game.
• Values Dissonance: The original US release features an event in Shy Guy's Perplex Express where Kamek can reorder the train's cars, chanting "Magikoopa magic! Turn the train spastic! Make this ticket tragic!" The game was localized in the United States, where "spastic" was seen at the time as a generic synonym for "unintelligent" and/or "erratic." In the UK, meanwhile, "spastic" is a hugely offensive ableist slur, which forced Nintendo of Europe to recall the game at the last minute so they could replace the offending term with "erratic." Later US editions would rewrite Kamek's dialogue entirely, changing the line to "Let me use my magic to make this all a little more interesting!" The scandal the slur caused also resulted in subsequent European releases of Nintendo games featuring unique English localizations done in-house at Nintendo of Europe rather than recycling Nintendo Treehouse's efforts.

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