Monopoly is probably one of the most popular board games that is still around these days despite the growing popularity of computer games. Thus it’s not surprising to see many different variations of the game being made and even brought to consoles themselves. One such variation is Square-Enix’s “Itadaki Street DS” which started off on the Famicom (NES) before it went over to Sony’s consoles. With the explosive sales of the DS system, it’s no surprise that SE has decided to bring the title back to Nintendo’s latest portable system.

For those unfamiliar with Square-Enix’s Itadaki Street series of games it is, as mentioned in the intro, Monopoly at the very basic level. You roll a dice, run around a board buying unowned property and then people who land on your square have to pay for services. Shares, which was something added later as an expansion pack to Monopoly is also present. The difference with Itadaki Street is that SE has added in many more interesting elements that make the board game even more fun.


The idea is very similar to Monopoly but with more features.

With the company best known for their RPGs, you just can’t miss out the level up element. Running around the board collecting four playing card icons and returning to the starting point bank, you can “level up” and get a certain sum of money depending on how well you’re doing in the game. There’s also a “casino” square where you can play a simple mini game of slots or, a simplified version of one of SE’s RPG battles. While the last version of the game had battles resembling those from Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, this time you have the familiar pipe passageways from the Mario games. Pick a pipe and see if you can land yourself a goody.


Final Fantasy battles have been replaced with Mario’s pipes.

Next thing is that the board layouts are all very unique and not just your rectangular, square grid. Each of the maps is based on a certain Mario game such as Mario Kart, Mario 64 or a Dragon Quest scene in the background. You have canons blasting you from place to place, switches to attach/detach sections of the board and warps too. So you can very much see there’s quite a bit of strategy involved even though part of the game depends on your dice throws. In fact, without a little bit of planning you’ll find yourself losing to the AI quite often.

As with all Itadaki Street games, there’s a main tour mode where you play through a few maps, achieve the requirements and unlock some new content. These goals usually mean earning a certain amount of money before running back to the bank or just achieving a certain rank.