The Mario Party series is a staple of Nintendo, first debuting on the N64, and quickly becoming a behemoth of a franchise, with iterations on every Nintendo system since, as well as holding the record for the longest running mini-game series around. Most of these games have taken place on consoles, where multiplayer could support a somewhat flimsy single-player mode. But on the GameBoy Advance, a device built for solo play, how will the Mario Party Franchise hold up on its own?

The answer is a mixed bag. To their credit, the developers of Mario Party Advance understood that there would have to be some fundamental changes in the game coming from a multiplayer-centric design ala the previous Mario Party games and going into a solo world. Gone are the competitions for coins and stars. Instead, you simply play to keep on playing, with each win in a mini-game adding to your stash of dice rolls so that you can move your character around the board (by him/herself) to tackle fetch or other types of quests (by him/herself). The challenge, then, of this game comes not from beating out your three other opponents, but from beating the clock, beating the computer, beating whatever obstacle is placed in your way throughout the course of your session. Each victory allows you more dice rolls which means a greater potential to complete the games multiple quests.

Yes, instead of collecting stars, Mario and his friends are out collecting and completing quests, such as "Bring me a DvD" (I'm not joking). This is where the majority of the game fell short for me. The minigames, as the case always is with a Mario Party game, are quite fun to play and these single-player outings are not worse for their lack of extra players. But as they serve simply as the means to obtain dice rolls, and the meat of the game is driving around the board completing the quests, I am left feeling bored as completing the most fun part of the game (the mini-games) means I get to spend more time with the least fun part (driving around and completing the quests).

An added bonus though are the myriad of gadgets that you collect by beating the quests, which for me was exciting to see what I would unlock next. Though this did remind me less of Mario Party and more of his nemesis Wario. The gadgets were more like that which you unlock over the course of the Warioware series.

They make a valiant effort to bring the Mario Party series to a single-player device, but in the end it falls short simply because of one thing, and it comes from the name: a party. It needs multiple people to be fun. That doesn't mean this game isn't fun at all; it's just not as fun as something else you could spend your time on.