Unlike all the other entries in the series, Mario Party Advance has a strong singleplayer focus. Bowser spreads an array of minigames and Gaddgets across the land and it is your job to retrieve them all. To do this, you will travel on a large board game styled map and go to one of more than 50 spots in the world.

Every stop gives you a quest or mission to tackle and it is here where the real grind begins. The missions start easy enough to grasp and some can be considered quick and easy fun. You will have to, for example, roll dice against a bomb-omb boss or duel against a Chain Chomp. A good chunk of the missions you have to deal with, though, are more or less fetch quests. You can find fun ones along the way, but there are truly long winded ones as well. There is a robbery at a bank, for example and you will have to travel all across the map to question three possible suspects. Next to being rather text centric, the character animations are rather stiff looking too.

That is only the start of the game's problems, though. To move around the map, you will need Mushrooms to keep going. You will start out with five and after every three turns, you get the chance to either earn three or six new ones by playing a minigame. While there are additional spots to collect Mushrooms, you will never reach them as easily as you think. Juggling between objectives and staying in the game is rough and it becomes even more annoying when you lose the minigame. The minigames and Gaddgets are enjoyable, but they never reach their full potential. Gaddgets are nothing more than some weird toys that you collect and the minigames contain some throwaway ones throughout.

Mario Party Advance is a strange game that is not really fun to play. There are some novel ideas for the solo player mode, but the game never reaches a certain level of satisfaction. The board game is punishingly hard and a large majority of the game is quite bland. The animations are stiff as well and that is a bummer, mostly because the game does look sharp and the colors pop on the big screen. It is just a shame that barely anyone will experience it, because Mario Party Advance is not the GBA classic you are searching for!