Regardless of what you think of Mario Party Superstars as a whole, I'd be willing to bet we can all agree that it looks fantastic.
I've been playing it a bit lately, and I'm consistently impressed by the quality and consistency of the art assets and overarching art style utilized in this game. As usual with Mario Party games, Nintendo has more performance headroom given the small scale of the mini-games that make up the bulk of the gameplay. This allows them to crank up the detail while still maintaining that all-important 60fps framerate for responsive four-player action. The end result is a never-ending parade of visually pleasing character/item models and backdrops, many of which are bespoke to only one mini-game out of 100.
Up until now I've always maintained that Mario Kart 8 has been the best that Mario and all related characters/locales have ever looked. That game brought Mario Kart into the HD era with 60fps performance and tons of detail crammed into every inventive track design. I'd say that it's still more of an accomplishment given how much more that game is doing than Mario Party while maintaining 60fps and a beautiful graphical style, but Superstars is just the overall best-looking iteration of the Mushroom Kingdom "universe" that I've seen to date.
I'd say that Luigi's Mansion 3 is comparable in terms of impressive visual style, but it's 30fps and wasn't developed by Nintendo themselves. So as it stands I think Superstars takes the cake for a first-party Nintendo game. Ultimately, it makes me wish that we could see what Nintendo first-party games would look like on more powerful hardware.
I've been playing it a bit lately, and I'm consistently impressed by the quality and consistency of the art assets and overarching art style utilized in this game. As usual with Mario Party games, Nintendo has more performance headroom given the small scale of the mini-games that make up the bulk of the gameplay. This allows them to crank up the detail while still maintaining that all-important 60fps framerate for responsive four-player action. The end result is a never-ending parade of visually pleasing character/item models and backdrops, many of which are bespoke to only one mini-game out of 100.
Up until now I've always maintained that Mario Kart 8 has been the best that Mario and all related characters/locales have ever looked. That game brought Mario Kart into the HD era with 60fps performance and tons of detail crammed into every inventive track design. I'd say that it's still more of an accomplishment given how much more that game is doing than Mario Party while maintaining 60fps and a beautiful graphical style, but Superstars is just the overall best-looking iteration of the Mushroom Kingdom "universe" that I've seen to date.
I'd say that Luigi's Mansion 3 is comparable in terms of impressive visual style, but it's 30fps and wasn't developed by Nintendo themselves. So as it stands I think Superstars takes the cake for a first-party Nintendo game. Ultimately, it makes me wish that we could see what Nintendo first-party games would look like on more powerful hardware.
