Mario & Luigi: Brothership

When I played a couple of sections of Mario & Luigi: Brothership to share my first impressions in a preview some weeks ago they couldn't be more promising. I was honestly surprised by the added depth to the combat, the freshness of the situations, and the agility of the experience, while the beautiful cartoons caught my eye and, together with the writing, seemed to retain the series' trademark sense of humour. With all that in place, I just wondered about things in the long run - if it managed to hook and surprise thoroughly, we'd be talking about the third Mario RPG hit in just one year, which would be quite the feat.

However, it is just there where Mario & Luigi: Brothership fails. Quite ironically, the otherwise funny, lighthearted RPG talks about connecting a broken world, but just doesn't manage to keep its own pieces together. And even more ironically, some of those pieces feel archaic compared to the other two Mario RPGs released for the Nintendo Switch in the past year, namely the remakes of the 20+ year old SNES Super Mario RPG and Gamecube Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door.

The premise itself is interesting as, in order to connect the world of Concordia, you navigate the currents of a large ocean, exploring its different seas in search of the drifting islands that once were part of the same continent, then connecting them back together. Very much so like in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, this gave designers freedom to create significantly different islands and themes, as well as smaller challenges in the form of islets. At the same time, with the core island of Shipshape being a moving ship, it makes your typical hub world activities somewhat more unique.

However, the execution of that game loop isn't as fun. The title takes its good time in between the more captivating bits, and it can get so monotonous so often, that it just risks putting you off completely, to the point of leaving the game. It's one of those cases where you really want it to be better, to wake up and give you the good stuff, but it rarely happens.

I firstly thought it was a matter of my own playstyle approach. That I should have skipped a lot of combat instead of wiping out every single area as per my RPG manual, because it felt too easy and repetitive. My brothers were OP, I didn't lose any combat, I had items to give away, and my economy seemed broken in opulence. But then, around the twenty-hour mark, things get trickier in one specific lava-filled island and the challenge made sense in regards to my then-current status, making me wonder about the balance, and the pace, and the meaning of those twenty "introductory" hours.

And again, when things looked deeper and more engaging around a certain "song of ice and fire", Mario & Luigi: Brothership always found a way to mess up with the pace and the interest of things, sending me on another trek or by delivering a boring portion. The side missions are particularly bland, having you complete dull errands for unrewarding prizes. And some are temporary, which should give you some sense of urgency, but soon enough will you realise that they act as a cheap filler for you to backtrack to previous islands again, and again, and then again.

Furthermore, and taking me back to the comparisons with the old games, the outdated proposal of those missions permeates the main game, which I wasn't expecting nowadays. There are several lumbering sections for which archaic game design is to blame. Some of the islands feel like they come from the 2000s, with obtuse guidance, obsolete stealth, silly dialogue tasks, or not letting you follow the logical path.

However, there are a good bunch of highlights that kept me sailing despite the overall monotonous feeling. The combat, much as the encounters with grunts get repetitive, gradually acquire depth and strategy by means of the battle plugs. In one of the better-balanced systems in the whole game, you create these plugs by spending a collectible you find around the islands, and then you equip them in-combat for different added effects. They're imaginative, combinable, and fun in themselves, giving you a ton of alternative uses for attack, defence, bonuses, combos, and more. Sometimes, you'll enter combat just for the sake of playing around with the plugs and their combined effects, as you'll get the fun from that more so than from dealing with the enemies.

Animation and visual finish is another big reason to keep opening up new areas. It does struggle a bit framerate-wise when screens get crowded, and it takes a while for you to get used to Mario and Luigi only moving in the eight main directions, but the looks and the moves of pretty much everything here (with random enemies being much, much better than the random inhabitants of Concordia) truly make it feel like an interactive cartoon.

And stemming from the last point is how much you'll love Luigi. It's not that he got a more prominent secondary role, he is just the star of the show. From the animation when he levels up, to the fact that he comes up with solutions for different situations despite being cumbersome and sleepy, he is just too hilarious and adorable, and the developers nailed his personality as if this were a Luigi's Mansion game.

Finally, the design of the bosses is as noteworthy. Luigi has some to do with that too in unique ways you'll find out, and together with the Bros. Attacks, they make for some of the most spectacular moments.

So no, we're not talking about a hat-trick of amazing Mario RPGs within a single year. The aforementioned remakes are just better games despite their age, with more engaging stories, finer-balanced combat, and just better pace to them. Mario & Luigi: Brothership just lacks some of the magic, the flavour, and the secrets those games bring, it drags considerably, and it gets a tad too dreary a tad too often. That being said, kids love it, it's good to see the return of a series many thought dead, and it does set the foundations for a new branch that can feel different to the Paper games going forward. Battle plugs, boss design, charming cartoons, and a stellar Luigi show the way.