Great for losing all your friends!
Sweet party game, Mario Party meets Pokemon... Combat is simplistic - basically a glorified version of Paper, Rock, Scissors; not even as deep as Pokemon battles - but that are quick and really secondary to the coin/town/item collecting aspect... There's a lot of luck involved so that even my 6 year old sometimes gets ahead of my wife and I when we play... Very good "Family" game if your family is mature enought to handle the competitive aspect; for example when you fight Player vs. Player, the winner gets several options on how to treat the loser... Take all their Money, Take their Weapon/Shield/Magic item, Take some of their Equipment, Take ownership of one of their towns, Scribble on their face with a marker(!), Cut their hair (Including such (random) outcomes as 'Baldy', 'Monk Ring' or (my fav!) 'Poo Hair'!!), Change their Name (be careful in renaming your wife less than flatteringly - Poo Hair will soon be yours!), or you can be a coward and Let Them Off...
The Mario Party-ish board game movement can be frustrating for a "strategy" type player (dice rolls) but helps to even things out among different skilled players and as I mentioned before, combat is extremely simple but it has made it so that all the kids are able to play, something that the skill required in the Mario Party mini-games usually frustrates my youngest and has kept us all playing a couple of hours a night for about a week (games can be set to 999 'weeks' of 7 turns each) (or less!)... There's also a interesting feature that every so often (thankfully not *too* often, a little character appears and offers a 'contract' to the player in last place that allows them to take that contract to a place on the map and trade it for a *uber-power-up* that last for 14 turns and gives them a Huge Advantage (strongest weapon, shield, magic and defenses in the game; multiple dice on easy movement roll; ability to put monsters back in town (for XP!) removing them from another player) it does also cost all their items, gold and towns, but my 6 year old absolutely delights in getting it and destroying all our hard work and wrecking havoc on the game board... It also usually allows here to get several levels ahead of us so she enjoys being on top for a while and quickly recovers all the 'stuff' it cost her to go all *uber* on us...
There are a few catches... The game has some bugs - it loses player/controller settings (who was on which remote) often when saved/restored and even sometimes *during* play, though that's easy enough to fix; using the controller in the 'candybar' (sideways) orientation is pointless and annoying (one handed play is best for a party game I feel and the orientation offers no upside that I can see); In the single player "story mode" there are at least 3 exploits that I found in my first run through it that, while that *can* be avoided, make it somewhat disappointing (one obvious money cheat that let me max my cash at maybe 1/3 through the game and a different one that gave the the max weapon/shield/magic combat about the same time)
None of those flaws are game-killers, but that simple to find exploits pretty much ruin the single player mode - that said, this is *much* better as the Party Game it's obviously meant to be... (I do wish it had an online mode tho)
I liked it enough to have purchased 3 copies so far, one for home, one for my daughter who lives with the ex (she loves the cutesy animie stuff), one for my Mom (who loves the Wii!)Read full review
