Everyone knows luck plays a big part in any Mario Party game. But Mario Party 8 decided to bring luck in as a strategy. Ok, maybe that’s an oxymoron, but they tried to do it. The concept at hand is the Lucky Space, a yellow space that takes you to a hidden part of a board map where you can get free coins and a star. It’s depicted as a magical land with only blue spaces and three coins on top of every space there and a star at the end of the one way road. Once you get the star you are taken back to the regular board map. Now you can easily see this concept having some good effects…and some bad effects.
But the Lucky Space was actually a decent idea. Why? It can easily reward someone who plays terrible but gets that lucky dice roll. But you always look out for it. And don’t say you don’t cause you’re only fooling yourself. Sometimes you’re driven to go a certain direction just because the Lucky Space is there. You may even take an alternative route from where the star may be just so you can have a chance at the Lucky Space. And like it or not, if you land on it you don’t care how cheap it is you get the feeling of satisfaction.
This concept can show its ugly head in two ways. And both of them involve candies. The first one is the Slowgo Candy. You can easily get Slowgo Candy and just pick the dice roll you need to land on the Lucky Space. That takes absolutely no skill and only the person choking while using it can prevent the deed from happening. The other is the Springo Candy. This one is not as bad due to the somewhat random dart selection, but when someone goes to the lucky route and another person has Springo Candy, they can easily attempt to join the person there. That also does not require much skill. But thinking strategy here, it can prevent you from buying candies like a Thrice Candy to aid your Running Star performance or Bitsize Candy to help add to your coin count (and amuse yourself by the 2-D characters).
When I first saw the Lucky Space, I immediately wrote it off as one of the dumb ideas that helped make Mario Party 8 too luck based and take a lot of attention off of actually winning mini-games and earning coins. And I still don’t disagree with that sentiment, but I have eased off my dislike and now deem the Lucky Space as a decent idea that wasn’t executed perfectly but not terribly either.