When writing game reviews, it’s usually an important factor to consider the game within its intended context. For example, if a game’s geared toward online multiplayer, or if it’s for late night scares, or perhaps it’s supplemental for fans of a particular franchise? That has to be central to your process.
We bring this up because Mario & Luigi: Brothership also really benefits from meeting it in its intended place: as a work for children.
Of course, children across the world have always loved Mario games, and that’s not fundamentally an issue! Because there are three primary ways to approach “children’s” entertainment. There’s the way made most famous by Pixar: making a compelling movie for all ages, while keeping themes and plots accessible to all ages. (This is how a lot of tentpole Mario releases handle it.) Or you could do things the Dreamworks way, using the narrative equivalent of parallax scrolling to tell a kids’ story in the foreground and layer references and plots behind that for older viewers.
But the third way? That’s the land of the Saturday morning cartoon. These are built not just primarily but truly exclusively for kids, and they put no stock in their capacity to remember or pay attention. It must make viewers feel like a lot is going on, but not require much from them. Episodes have to be self-contained. And characters are one recurring quirk and nothing else!
So yeah, Mario & Luigi: Brothership feels like part of this last group. The game is broken up into small islands with one episodic quest each, and these quests are almost invariably solved by “Luigi logic.” It’s talked up in the game like these are brilliant and wacky ideas! But in practice, they’re “Luigi solves the problem in a cutscene or quick-time event.” They’re either ways to block you off from solving the problem yourself until the game wishes you to do it — “weird, there are invisible walls preventing you from jumping on that platform-looking tree next to the objective” — or they’re ways to circumvent the need for gameplay — “we don’t have development time to make this playable, so just animate Luigi doing it and call it a day.”
We spent our first few hours with Mario & Luigi: Brothership figuring this was just another Nintendo hand-hold, an overly tutorialized early game that would open up and relax a bit over time. Instead, it basically doesn’t? Be ready to be told what to do three times for each step in the story, and don’t even bother trying to go off the beaten path. Oh, and there’s a story scene skip button for videos, but the overly verbose characters (admittedly a Mario & Luigi trademark) can only be slightly sped up text box by text box.
It’s sort of heartbreaking that this is the case! There are some Mario & Luigi fundamentals here. The combat is still very Mario, with timing-based actions and dodges, and all that was rebuilt well here. The worlds are whimsical in the way you’d expect. Brothership comes from the Sparks of Hope school of making exploration like a little theme park, with collectibles and activities along the way. Are they perhaps superfluous? Yes. But the last thing the developers want is to leave you with nothing to keep your hands busy.
The game is structured as a series of islands. You’ll direct the ship through a series of currents, finding islands and smaller locations as you go. There’s no time pressure here, so feel free to use the fast sailing function and navigate all available areas when they unlock to see more of the map. Once you enter an island for the first time, though, you’re stuck there, unable to return until you complete a quest and connect the location’s lighthouse to your boat. These main-quest blinders always seemed a bit strange to us, and it didn’t feel like the restriction of movement led to any clever puzzles or combat challenges. But hey, islands are generally short enough to get through without the passage of an hour.
It doesn’t help that Mario & Luigi: Brothership has to follow the re-release of the best attempt at a Mario RPG, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Remembering where the Mario & Luigi sat in the 3DS era with games like Paper Jam leads to a more favorable comparison; many (though not all) of Brothership’s failings are part of a decades-long shift in Nintendo’s approach to Mario RPG design.
Still, the combat is fundamentally engaging. It’s mostly straightforward to choose the most effective move for the situation in the menu, but executing the timing and staying on guard to dodge and counter enemy attacks is genuinely fun. The “Bros. Attack” options you unlock are little quick-time events, sometimes designed with a bit of randomness to make sure you’re paying attention. We skipped out on these for minor battles a lot, simply because of the time cost of using them, but they’re useful for bosses and large enemy groups.
The leveling and equipment systems are also a bit deeper than you’d expect. Every batch of seven levels, you can essentially pick a perk for Mario or Luigi, making them specialize in particular stats or attack types. We did our best to take advantage of this, making Mario a hammer specialist with high attack damage and crafting Luigi as a jumping tank. Equipment also has a variety of secondary effects, but generally the optimal move is to just use the ones with the best stat boosts and hoping they do an additional helpful thing occasionally.
Since the game’s built around an electrical wiring motif, there’s a part of that in the gameplay systems too: Battle Plugs. You collect little shinies around the environments and use them to add elements to your attacks. These can be boosts to damage, recycling items and such. They each have limited uses before needing to recharge, so the idea is that you cycle through these and fights have a bit of extra variety. We certainly used the item recycler as an opportunity to burn the best consumables we had at will, since they just replaced themselves. It also serves as a much more effective reward for exploring environments than coins, which quickly pile up into the thousands and are largely used to buy equipment that becomes available at the shop at roughly the same time as you find it for free in the world.
There are a few specific story points that give you an actual choice. These seem to be a way to make multiple playthroughs different, at least at the margins. We won’t spoil the narrative parts of these, but they seem to affect whether certain types of equipment are more available and how combat plays out for short stretches. This is genuinely a nice touch!
It took us some real adjustment to accept Mario & Luigi: Brothership for what it is, but once you do, there’s genuine enjoyment to be found here. You have to learn to follow its pace and accept its shortcomings, because it won’t change its ways and blossom into a top-tier Mario RPG. Still, the ride will be worth it for some to experience its bright points.
Mario & Luigi: Brothership launches November 7, 2024 on Nintendo Switch.
The brothers return for a brand-new adventure on the high seas! When the Uni-Tree is destroyed and the world of Concordia is broken apart, Mario and Luigi must try to reconnect a fractured world, one island at a time. Switch version reviewed. Review copy provided by company for testing purposes.
It took us some real adjustment to accept Mario & Luigi: Brothership for what it is, but once you do, there’s genuine enjoyment to be found here.
- Tiny nitpick: we wish Luigi selected his moves with the B button. That’s the one time in the game that the A button controls Luigi, and it regularly messes up our rhythm for the attack actions.
- Some of the Luigi segments do feel like, at one point, the game design had co-op in mind.
- It’s genuinely nice to see the franchise back; we thought it had died with AlphaDream.
Published: Nov 4, 2024 07:00 am