I feel like this does away with a lot of the improvements that made Superstars my favorite Mario Party game to date. It's also very possible that this "Super" Mario Party series is meant for a more casual audience. I just don't like how the buddy system works in this. Whoever gets to a buddy first on the board initiates a jamboree mini-game, in which all players compete to earn the buddy who gets you incredibly overpowered bonuses. In addition to the unique effect different buddy characters have, buddies also double the effect of any space you land on, so you can get double coins/items/lucky spaces. They also allow you to double up on item purchases from shops and, most importantly, buy double stars and double your Boo uses. The game tries to balance this somewhat by making it so that anyone who passes you on the board steals your buddy for themselves, but it doesn't happen enough to really balance out just how much more powerful having a buddy makes you on the board. Initiating a Jamboree mini-game is also irritating because these mini-games are around three minutes long, and the player who initiates the mini-game starts with a bonus, making it so that any competent player is almost guaranteed at winning from the start.

One of the things I loved most about Superstars was that it knew how to keep things moving along at a good pace. Like the aforementioned Jamboree mini-games, Jamboree is has too many things that slows the game down. A few of the standard mini-games are also multiple minutes long (Camera-Ready is my most hated one), and every now and then you'll get a literal boss mini-game thrown in there taking up way too much time. On the board, mercifully they kept the feature that speeds up cpu actions. I have major beef with just how many stopping points there are on a board like Rainbow Galleria. A part of me loves this board for its complexity, but another part of me hates it because it makes even a board like Horror Land, the most complex board in Superstars, pale in comparison to how many stops you have to makes during a single turn. Escalators, elevators, shops, stamps, all of these slow the board down to a crawl, especially on high rolling multi-dice turns.

Being able to play Mario Party online is what made Superstars one of my most played games to date. I had a host of complaints about how it was handled that you can see in my review of that game, but the allure of being able to play Mario Party with 4 players at any time was still enough to keep me going for a long time. Needless to say, Nintendo still hasn't really figured out online gaming yet, and I feel like Jamboree is a step back from Superstars in how it handles online as well. The most glaring problem is that there is no longer an option to search for all boards. There are 7 boards in this game (3 of which are unlockable so even less chance of finding a game there), which are also split between searching for party or pro rules. So when searching for a game, the player base is now divided into 14 different sections, all hoping that at least 3 other players picked their option around the same time. It was already somewhat difficult to get a full game going in Superstars; but as a result of these changes in Jamboree, I don't think I've managed to find a single 4 player game online yet. You also can't see who is already in a lobby while searching for other players, meaning if the timer to start the game is about to end, and you only have 2 people, you can't just back out and look for another game anymore. Instead, you wait for the game to start, see that 2 of the players are exhibiting obvious bot behavior, and then decide if you want to spend the next hour playing with 1 other human player.

Jamboree also boasts "the most mini-games" of any Mario Party to date. This is misleading however, as these mini-games are spread across many different modes that have nothing to do with the main party mode that most players are here for. For the typical FFA/1v3/2v2 mini-games that you get in party mode, Jamboree only has 53 compared to the 95 that Superstars had, making it feel much more repetitive in comparison.

For the casual Mario Party-er, who is only going to play each of these boards a handful of times with their friends, this game will probably give them some fun for a bit, and they may not notice some of the balance issues that were glaring to me. For me though, Superstars is still the king of this series, and I would've preferred to just have boards like Western Land and Rainbow Castle added as dlc to that game instead. Here's hoping that Nintendo figures out functional online gaming at some point, so we can have a Mario Party where we can consistently find full games without disconnects.