[h1]Summary:[/h1] As a huge Mario Party & minigame-focused partygames fan, I was delighted to learn about this obscure little game called Monster Jaunt! A cute hommage to the N64 Mario Party games and similar titles (like Pokemon Stadium's minigame mode) that aims to make it more skill-balanced and less chaotic which is pretty different from most partygames and a very welcome experience that I HAD to check out!
[h1]Presentation:[/h1] The game looks dated on purpose. The graphics are very Nintendo-64 inspired and are, as a result, overall pretty basic but it gives a nice charm to the overall game (as well as running smoothly on my potato pc!). Not only that, but there's a lot of little details like every character has their own winning jingles, logos and more of small details like that! The roster of monster is also VERY VERY adorable. The playable characters are also very varied and have interesting designs and cute little bios but I wish they had a common theme linking them together as their designs do not blend perfectly together, unfortunately. The music is also very hit-or-miss, it's usually pretty cute and a few tunes feel straight-out of a Mario Party game but some sadly miss the mark for me and the sound mixing for the character voices sadly doesn't help even if the performance are great for those that can be heard! Finally, the text is pretty weirdly worded, especially in french where there's multiple grammar errors and weird wording choices. It's still understandable overall, thankfully, but it's still really jarring and a huge shame but I'm glad the options there, the more languages, the better!
[h1]Gameplay:[/h1] But what about the gameplay itself? Well, the game has only three simple modes which is more than expected for that price! There's free play, a basic minigame mode and a party mode with FIVE different boards which is great! The party mode itself however is very basic. It is indeed less chaotic than basic Mario Party but I don't know if it's more strategic because it's pretty simple and very predictable. It's also not made for comebacks which is a shame for something inspired out of Mario Party but it's still an interesting and chill concept. The minigames, however, is where the game excells at! The vast majority of them feel like actual Mario Party minigames with just one more layer of complexity like adding shortcuts, forcing yourself to cut your attention in half or mixing reflexes and memory together. There's a lot of super interesting ideas in this title and it's so refreshing to see a partygame get out of it's way to propose interesting ideas, there's not even a single mashing minigame which is honestly fantastic! Like any minigame compilation, the quality can vary, like the only platforming minigame is more of a miss for me and some are a bit too difficult for my liking (although the vast majority can be enjoyed even if you struggle which is amazing) but that's also another great feature of that game, you can customise the minigame selection to your liking! Remember "My Music" in Smash? Basically the same thing but with minigame probability, that's great stuff and you can even pick if you'd like any repeats or not, amazing feature that could definitely make the game for a lot of people! The difficult of the AI is also great although I do wish there was an in-between of "medium" and "hard" because hard is REAL HARD OH MY GOD I never played a partygame with such skilled computer players but for whoever wants a challenge, this game is for you and I can't recommend it's minigames enough!!
[h1]Final thoughts:[/h1] Overall, Monster Jaunt is a very competent Mario Party-inspired game. It's not perfect in every aspect, sure, but it still manages to be amazing despite of that! The game has a lot of care put into it, if it's either it's designs, the little details or the minigame concepts. It's a bit of a shame to play a partygame where the rankings almost never get challenged but it's still a very fun experience and I definitely recommend it to ANY Mario Party fan, even for solo-players because for me, it was a great experience against the CPU players!
