I feel that this game is criminally underrated. I remember not liking it much when it released back then because the graphics seemed underwhelming and it was missing the orb system from the previous two entries, but let me just tell you how much I love this game nowadays! It's the Mario Party with the best game boards - I mostly only like 2 or 3 boards tops in every Mario Party, while in this one, every board with the exception of the Bowser board is really really good! There's something for everyone. The mini-games are also great with only a few duds. I especially love how they reworked many 4-Player-Minigames as 1vs1-minigames, making this Mario Party the one with the highest amount of duel mini-games.

Also, I will be in the minority for saying this, but: I like the semi-realistic graphical style. It's so weirdly "not Mario". Mario games all look the same these days, but back then they tried something new. Use the "Disable Low-Poly Models" Gecko code to make the character models look good, too. The only really negative thing about this game is the lack of a real 16:9 mode. Only the menus and the title screen are 16:9; the rest of the game runs with borders on both sides which really sucks.

Give this game a try again on the Dolphin emulator.