YMMV / Mario Party DS

• Awesome Bosses: Kamek is by far the best boss in the game due to being a difficult, but fair fight on top of being an Unexpected Shmup Level. Unlike the other bosses in the game, the player has to go through a Rail Shooter gauntlet before they can actually face Kamek, and once they do, the boss is an excellent test of aiming precision and dodge reflexes. Satisfying revenge against the one who tricked the cast into getting shrunk by Bowser in the first place.
• Breather Boss:
  • For those who're good with memory-based minigames and quick reflexes, Hammer Bro can be easily defeated quickly without much effort. All what the player needs to do is just to tap the correct drums in order, in three different patterns.
  • Dry Bones, the third boss, can be possibly seen as even easier than Hammer Bro. Dry Bones' boss minigame also involves memorizing the order, however, the buttons that you're required to ground pound on are highlighted over time, making them even more obvious and easier to remember. Dry Bones' attacks are also pretty easy to avoid, and while Dry Bones can do a certain move that can cover the buttons in leaves, hiding them, it takes a while before Dry Bones even starts doing so, and it's likely the player will defeat him before he can do any harm to the player's character.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The ability to buy multiple items. It is very easy to get around the board and make it to the star space simply by buying multiple Double or Triple Dice Blocks (which are very cheap). Alternatively, if you have a lot of coins, buy multiple Star Pipes.
  • Star Pipes allow you to instantly travel to the Star on the board and collect it (provided you have enough coins to afford it). With Star Pipes only costing 15 coins, it's far easier to chain them together than previous installments, whose equivalents were far more expensive.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Bowser Jr.'s figurine description states that he's actually a pretty lonely kid, and that could be a powerful motivator for him. As Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam and Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle proved, DS was spot on.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Dust Buddies, which has the characters being chased by a vacuum. While this normally wouldn't be too bad, the fact that the players are tiny means the vacuum could very easily suck up and potentially kill one of the characters. This one is especially bad for those who had a fear of vacuums when they were little.
  • In the final stage, Bowser's Pinball Machine, if you land on any of the Green Spaces at the bottom-right corner, you will be launched into the Bowser Zone, provided that you don't get launched into the Star Zone instead. In the Bowser Zone, if you roll a number less than 6 and landed on any of the five Green Spaces here, you will be hit with the Zero Flame, a flame that removes all of your Coins and Stars. It's not too bad if this happens during the first few turns of a longer game, but if it occurs within the last ten turns of the game, then you may start panicking.
• Scrappy Mechanic: As The Runaway Guys found out, whenever the CPU player uses the Snag Bag, it will always target who between the other three players has the highest player number as long as they have items, moving over to the next highest numbered player if they don't have one. This means that they will always steal in the order of P4-P3-P2-P1 even when who they are stealing from has worthless items.
• That One Boss: Piranha Plant is infamous for being a sudden Difficulty Spike, especially since it's the first boss. The boss is revolved around Button Mashing to avoid getting sucked into its mouth, catching the Bomb Seeds it spits out, and throwing the seeds back into its mouth. The problem is that the pace at which the game expects the player to button mash is well above average, needing much faster reflexes than most of the button mashing minigames require. By the time the player gets to the third phase, their arm will likely be tuckered out from the previous two outings. To put how bad the difficulty comparison is between the boss minigames, Piranha Plant makes the next two bosses, Hammer Bro and Dry Bones, feel like Breather Bosses, as those two don't put as much pressure and can be defeated more quickly.
• Vindicated by History: The game was mostly ignored at launch, with the general consensus being that it was a game that is So Okay, It's Average. But as a result of various videos showcasing fake anti-piracy measures for the game going viral in late 2020, many people decided to go back to the game and give it a try, with it receiving praise for its unique minigames and boards as well as having an exceptionally interesting story mode for a Mario Party game. Another strong point of the game is that it actually feels like a true Mario Party experience in comparison to the other portable installments in the series.

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