100% Orange Juice

This game would've been a 5/5 for me if you asked me when I first started playing it. I put countless numbers of hours into it, loved playing it immensely. I would be absolutely immersed in the game, specifically the multiplayer where I clocked in the most time. A lot of times listening to music while chatting with friends casually in the game's chat box, just casually winning matches and making certain people upset to the point where they'd angrily message Fruitbat asking for the weakest characters to get nerfed just because they couldn't fathom losing to them. Even with how many hours I put in, I still wouldn't have everything unlocked and there was always more to do. Just learning meme strategies and decks was fun on it's own because of the dumb things you can pull on anime mario party. It's a simple doujin game made to celebrate the games developer Orange_Juice had made (who I was already familiar with thanks to playing AOSX on ps3) with a charming early 2000s anime aesthetic and some great original music mixed in with stock music. It worked incredibly well and I was hooked. But eventually, things changed and somewhat for the worse.

Now disclaimer: I haven't played for about 2 years but there are some things I noticed last time I was playing that just turned me sour on certain aspects of the game. And those things were the exact thing I'd normally praise a game for but here it was just too extreme and fatigue inducing for me to reasonably come to a conclusion that it was anything but a net negative. What were those things? Excess, particularly of events. For a while it was just non-stop event after event after a re-run of an event, back to back. No downtime, no much needed break from seasonal events. Every single time I'd log in and hop on the game, there was some event going on. It could be new or a re-run, but one thing was constant: it was always there, waiting for you to play regardless of if you wanted to. You'd start the game, get greeted with some tiring, long cutscene, finally get to the menu and try to join a game or get your buddies to play with you. Now what's the problem? Clearly the devs just want to add some life and spice to the game rather than becoming a once updated-in-a-century-type game that plagues multiplayer games like TF2. Well I'll tell you: Try getting your friends or playing with randoms and you'll quickly discover that nobody is wanting to just play the base game and have fun anymore. They all just want to grind for the event, and the events themselves (while admittedly well done in most cases) can suffer from a lot of problems. Some are boss mode, some are tied to specific actions a player must perform, some have event specific in-game modes or unlock paths for items involving specific maps or characters one must use. It gets tedious too, especially when you have to let your friend have their fun with the event while you just want to play the game in its purest, chaotic state. And most of the unlocks happening through the event can only be achieved through multiplayer. It creates a mess. Now imagine this happening everytime you boot up the game and it becomes a bit much.

Another thing: some of the "field events" that are in the game after a turn is complete are annoying. You can turn them off if you want to play a match a specific way and are the lobby host but some people really can't live without them, and beg you to turn them on. You either don't comply and lose a player, then have to wait for another friend to join and hope to fuck he doesn't do the same thing, or comply and play the game with this field events that are awful. Normally I don't care too much having to put them on but there is one field event I hate on an instinctual at this point that I used to be okay with. That field event is fucking mini-games. You see, one of the unique things about OJ is that it's a game that functions as Mario Party but without the mini-games. Because of this, the game has a surprisingly great level of depth to the board game mechanics that makes it fun and rewarding to abuse the hell out of the base gameplay, deck system, and character gimmicks. One event (can't remember which) added a field event that does put mini-games in the game sort of as a joke I suppose and it was fun (although notoriously janky if you didn't have a proper mouse), but eventually the devs made it a normal field event. People I play with, for whatever reason, love this field event and always wanted it on but all the minigames are the equivalent of newgrounds flash games you play with your mouse and hoo boy are they fucking shite. If you lose or get last place in these minigames, the consequences effect you deeply. To make matters a bit worse, it also turns a game where you don't always have to pay attention to your screen at all times into a vigilant nightmare that can greatly effect you if you go afk for a few seconds to take a piss. Once you get back, you notice your stars are gone and your soul in despair. It's a minor gripe but I really do think field events like minigames take away from what made OJ so much fun and unique in the first place and in it's wake turns it into flash mario party, something I really, really can't be assed to begin to care.

Then there's the classic problem all new players have with the game: holy fuck there's so much dlc. Thankfully, OJ has an excuse: its a game that been around since the last supper and the game's massive dlc list was a gradual process throughout the years to add more content and support the game. For its time, it wasn't expensive dlc but overtime more and more got added and some dlc characters actually got raised in price because they now have voice actors. The raising in price is kind of dumb, but at least players who already had the DLC beforehand weren't charged extra so I really don't care too much. There is also DLC cards (that I personally have only barely used). However, from the perspective of a new player, losing to these characters that they have to pay to add creates that classic FOMO feeling of "this person only won because they paid to win". Reality from my perspective is quite the opposite as I can win with some of the worst characters imaginable (I used to destroy shit with QP (Dangerous) for instance) but I can see how one can look at this and be turned away, especially playing against skilled players. Not everyone loves playing against "meta god" players with their meme decks performing impossibly stupid win strategies. I have experience with these players and can hold my own, new players don't because they haven't been playing the game since at least 2014. They see some guy playing wacky teleport poppo doing big gay on their stars as they are about to norma and just wonder "what just happened?". So OJ had a solution: All star pack, you get all the dlc characters and pay somewhere around 60 dollars for a game that costed you about 10 iirc. Not really a good option. Okay so new solution: occassional free character day where every character is unlocked for people who don't have them. Works out a bit, gets new players acquainted with the characters and might have them justify purchasing a character pack. But the ultimate issue still isn't addressed: the price for the dlc when you actually begin to be assed to buy it isn't really all that justified when it adds up as a new player. And they are adding a lot of dlc and events on a consistent basis. DLC that unlocks a new character you can never really learn to properly use because there's no downtime between the back to back events.

Congrats, you are now in OJ hell. Welcome and enjoy your stay. Still a great game, but needs some tweaking and it used to be way better. I don't really know the solution either, thats for the devs to decide but hopefully they will make a good choice (maybe they already have since I last played) but for me and a lot of players I used to play with (which is also what prompted my decision not to play much anymore) our choice was just to move on to other games. I still love other OJ games but the passion I had for this one kind of just faded after a while due to some of the above reasons that made it impossible for me to find my old friends to play with and difficult to sell to new players. If you have the time, it might be a fun game just to try out but it's sadly past it's prime.

Also that one character you can only unlock by beating a ton of bosses in a very specific way, on very specific difficulties, where you have to follow a weird unlock pathway, annoys me because I could never get her. I think you could only do it through multiplayer too and there's no dlc option for her as far as I know. I could be wrong but I really don't want to go through a whole esoteric gameplay pathway to unlock one character with friends who will undoubtedly dip after three games attempting to unlock her because we all have lives to attend to and jobs to work. Maybe one day, though.