Hello folks. You may remember me from my Mario Party Party analysis video that made the rounds last year. Once Mario Party Party 6 came out, I knew I had to make a sequel. However, I lack a microphone and the time to make a video, but still decided to put some thoughts to text. With that out of the way, here we go.

(A pre-emptive apology to all the real philosophy majors and students, since I'll probably fuck up some important concepts in this post.)

As most of you have noticed by now, Mario Party Party 6's main theme is disappointment. One of this video's main flaws is the map choice. Without the whole buy stars steal stars part of Mario Party, the game has become something else, something none of the crew members particularly like. It's so distant and so hard to grasp that it has lost all meaning, and by extension, it has lost the power to provide meaning to the crew member's time spent playing the game.

What's interesting is that at the same time, Mario Party 6 is the most 'skill' game out of the entire series (so far). The Chain Chomp mechanic requires a degree of skill the other games didn't ask for. Logically, this should be the game that finally lives up to those sarcastic "game of skill" comments, right? Technically, yes. But Mario Party is not a game of skill. It wasn't born out of a desire to measure skill like Mario Kart or Smash Brothers, and the game just doesn't mesh well with the 4-player environment it exists in.

One could say videogames are one of the main driving forces of the GB Crew's lives. Snowflake Lake creates a product so dull that you can no longer form a connection with it, be it of love or hatred. The first manifestation of this is Jeff. Like before, he is the audience surrogate. He manifests what we feels in regards to the game. Before, that feeling was hatred. But now, he can't even hate the game. The mechanics that made it so random and so unlikable are either gone or replaced with inane counterparts. He is disappointed with the game's inability to make him hate it.

Disappointed in the game, Jeff searches for meaning through understanding, dissecting and eventually completely destroying the rules that operate the world of Mario Party. The brainstorming minigame bit is the apex of this arc, with Jeff coming up with ideas so Mario Party-like that Dan actually says "those sound pretty fun". And the audience did the same thing: just look at the comments in the video and how so many have dissected what made Snowflake Lake an awful choice. When Mario Party refused to give Jeff some meaning, Jeff searched for that meaning through analysis, trying to understand what killed the game he loved to hate.

Brad, however, rejected the changes Snowflake Lake presented. Instead, he relied on the safe and comfortable nature of the recurring Mario Party tropes. Brad seemingly smiled at every Chance time, at every random block, at every random number generator minigame. Throughout the entire video, he presented a mild distaste and disregard for the rules the map presented over and over. And while that could be attributed to the map being really bad, I dare to say Brad's longing for the previous game's shittyness played a part in it. Because while the other games were shitty, it was a kind of shittyness Brad could revel in and manipulate. There is no manipulating Snowflake Lake.

Drew, at first, looked like he didn't care. That is, until Jeff & Brad's attempt at 'cheating' the game by playing Dan's turn for him. Like before, the game punished the perpetrators, but it punished Drew the most because he was just the patient observer who let Jeff & Brad's evil scheme take place. Mario Party 6 looked at Drew and it saw something worse than Jeff & Brad: not someone who wasn't even interested in the game, but someone who was interested in the game for nefarious purposes, going as far as to wait for everyone to do something only so he could do the opposite.

Sounds familiar? That's right: in Mario Party 6, Drew and Dan switched roles. Drew became Dirty Drew Scanlon, whilst Dan became the hero.

(In fact, isn't it interesting that when Drew, Jeff and Brad played Dan's turn, threw away his Snack Orb and stole one Star from him, Dan arrived with Oreos and Cheese, the one thing they probably hate more than Mario Party, AND he stole that Star back from Jeff?)

Ever since the video started, Dan displayed a humbleness and a kindness that was missing from Mario Party 5. Humbled by his loss, he remembered the true meaning of Mario Party and decided he was in it to have fun with his friends. He constantly tries to find the good in the bad of Snowflake Lake and even proposes changing the map several times.

Snowflake Lake represents Mario Party's attempts at meeting the Giant Bomb crew halfway through, while also missing the point behind its existence. The game disappointed the crew members, yes, but Dan was the only one who tried to find good in this disappointment (until the very end, but by then the game had made its choice). Others tried to dissect it, chide it or manipulate it. But Dan was always one hundred percent behind the game, even at its worst. He wasn't even angry when the others played his turn. In fact, Dan's victory was decided when he uttered these words:

This is hitting all the Mario Party beats. But I like this! It's the most joyous time of the year when I can play Mario Party. I wish this could last forever.

Interestingly enough, Mario Party 6 reminds me of the works of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. When faced with the loss of their main 'provider of meaning', the crew dealt with their angst and resentment in different ways. But only Dan dealt with this loss of meaning by going over it and 'becoming the Ubermensch'. Could it be that, in their failed attempts at shaking up the formula, Hudson have created the first existentialist videogame?

... well, it's either that or this is just a really shitty game.