YMMV / Mario Party 10

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The final boss, where Bowser turns into Dry Bowser at half health. In several other Mario spinoffs, Dry Bowser is a Decomposite Character of Bowser's, so it could be that Bowser disguised Dry Bowser as himself to fight the players for him, then he sneaks off undetected while his copy takes all the punishment.
• Best Boss Ever: While the boss minigames are mostly seen as a step down from Mario Party 9, Mega Cheep Chomp's Shell Shock is a major exception due to having a lot more strategy and thinking involved than most of the other boss minigames in both 9 and 10, along with giving players ways to directly sabotage each other.
• Breather Boss: Petey's Bomb Battle is extremely simple controls-wise, and barely lasts longer than a standard minigame. While there are brief moments where you can lose points for attempting to attack, the tell for these is fairly obvious.
• Critic-Proof: The game received mixed reviews from critics and was hated by many fans, yet the game still managed to sell 2 million units (1.7 million of which were Western), becoming the tenth best-selling game on the Wii U and the fourth best-selling of the numbered Mario Party games in the West.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Whoever plays as Bowser in Bowser Party mode is virtually unstoppable. The rest of you really don't want to be caught by that player, as your crew desperately tries to put distance between each other. Bowser is giant, so all his minigames hit like a ton of bricks, especially if he becomes angry, and can potentially KO the lot of you in one round. In most cases, you're all powerless to fight back. You have to be extremely lucky to survive, thus the core of the problem is exacerbated by how unbalanced it all is. Usually, Bowser only can roll after all non-KO'd party members roll, but Bowser gets 4 dice to work with (which can reach up to six with the random "Helper Jr." event and special spaces) to nearly always catch the party. And if he gets a bad roll, Bowser can reroll, and if the reroll isn't enough to catch the car, Bowser gets angry, which changes the skill-based minigames into minigames that involve luck or incredibly painful attacks.
  • Chaos Castle is the culmination of the brokenness of Bowser Party. There are many, many places where the party can lose half of their hearts, usually from the traps Bowser can set. The worst part is the final stretch. Bowser only gets a single die, but can roll every time Team Mario rolls. If Team Mario gets further than six spaces away, they are still not safe, because if Bowser rolls his emblem, he catches them regardless.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Sledge Bro's Card Chaos is essentially an easier, simpler version of Deck Dry Bones from Mario Party 9 that suffers from egregiously slow pacing. While Dry Bones would last up to a minute and a half at most, Sledge Bro drags on for upwards of three to four.
  • Kamek's Rocket Rampage seems like it'd be a fun, simple Unexpected Shmup Level but ends up being a clunky, annoying mess since you can't fire at will and have to grab rockets floating around for ammo while also having to deal with stiff movement and getting bumped around constantly by other players.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: A major criticism towards Bowser Party is its dearth of content, only having 3 boards and 10 minigames; you can see everything it has to offer in about an hour or less.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Bowser Party is seen by many as the main draw of the game, at least for those who don't mind the aforementioned balance issues and/or low amount of content; you'd be hard-pressed to find very many people that actively enjoy the standard Mario Party mode by comparison, in spite of the fact that it's evidently where most of the game's development efforts went.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Bowser Party mode is exactly what it says: Lets a player take control of Bowser. It's simple: Mario and his friends must get to the end of the board and claim the Power Star while being chased by Bowser. If Bowser catches you, he'll force you into a minigame. If he takes out all of your characters, you lose. At first, it seems like a delightful spin on the Go-Karting with Bowser trope until you start to think about it from the perspective of Mario and his friends. Essentially, they are being relentlessly pursued by their Arch-Enemy, and if he catches them, he gets to torture them in very sadistic minigames. ^note I.E. smashing them with a hammer, chasing them as they climb a tower, breathing fire on them while they run helplessly, crushing them underneath him, placing them on a moving platform while he tries to hit them with fire bars, placing them on a wheel with electric amps and stopping the wheel to make them run into the amps and electrocute themselves, placing them on a literal Pinball game, and more. Even in a light-hearted spinoff game, Bowser can still be a terrifying piece of work when he wants to be.
  • Bowser's appearances in the standard Mario Party mode are just as scary. Throughout the course of the board, rolling each side of a six-sided dice (1-6) will break a lock on Bowser's prison. Things get incredibly nerve-wracking when Bowser only has one lock left, and if you're the one who breaks that final lock, Bowser will claw the screen apart, revealing a hellish landscape and incredibly dark and ominous music. He will "thank" the person who freed him by taking half their mini-stars, and then unleash a volley of fireballs that will turn into Bowser spaces. If Bowser gets freed, prepare for some serious pain.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In amiibo Party, any players using an amiibo have to touch the figures to the Gamepad to perform any action that isn't selecting what dice to roll or playing a minigame. Equipping a token, rolling a Dice Block, stopping a roulette, and other vital actions are all controlled with the amiibo rather than simply pressing a button. Most of these actions can also be performed by pressing A on the Gamepad, but it's still inconvenient to have to reach for another controller every time. Players can choose to simply not use an amiibo to avoid this, but doing so makes them unable to collect or use tokens.
  • Bowser Party is horribly unbalanced (despite the developers insisting otherwise in an interview) to the point that Bowser losing is a very rare achievement. Among the problems that it has is the ability for Bowser to redo the dice roll if he is unable to catch the team of four, giving whoever is playing as him two chances, and the final stretch has several spaces that can aid Bowser. Perhaps the worst of them, though is that when the team of four gets to the end, they have to play a luck-based minigame which will fling them back along the board if they lose and most likely end up getting flung into Bowser if he is close enough.
• Sequelitis: Often considered the worst mainline game in the Mario Party series. It keeps already contested formula shift from Mario Party 9 with slight tweaks to it being more often than not regarded as bad even by those who were okay with 9, Bowser Party being comically skewed in favor of Bowser, and locking an entire mode, which in itself is seen as a heavily watered-down version of the classic Mario Party formula, behind Amiibo.
• Unexpected Character: This game's playable mook is Spike, a green shelled enemy that produces spiky balls and throws them at you. No one really expected him as his species had never really been that prominent in Mario Party games (aside from a giant-sized specimen who served as a Mini-Boss in Mario Party 9) or the overall Mario series (this was before later games like Mario Tennis Aces and Paper Mario: The Origami King made Spikes more notable part of the Koopa Kingdom).

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