Mario & Luigi’s New RPG Plays It Safe

Mario & Luigi’s New RPG Plays It Safe

Review: Mario & Luigi – Brothership

Over the last year and a half or so, Nintendo has been kind to fans of Mario’s past RPG adventures. The remake of Super Mario RPG that released in late 2023 gave the classic SNES game a huge glow-up, and they followed with a remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door in 2024, revitalising one of the best Mario games ever made. The announcement of Mario & Luigi: Brothership was particularly exciting, though – it’s a brand new game, and the Mario & Luigi RPG series had been dormant for some time.

The earlier Mario & Luigi games were handheld classics. Their developer, AlphaDream, is now tragically defunct; Brothership was developed by Acquire, the talented studio behind the excellent Octopath Traveler series. This all meant that I went into Brothership with high hopes, but I’d advise anyone picking it up to temper their own. Brothership is far from a bad game – the core fundamentals are strong – but compared to the great Mario RPGs, it’s lacking a certain something.

Brothership whisks the brothers out of the Mushroom Kingdom and into the land of Concordia, a fantasy land themed, curiously, around electrical sockets. You soon learn that Concordia was once a single vast continent, which has since been split into several smaller disconnected floating islands, which only the titular brothers can reconnect. To do this, they’ll need to travel to each island, meet the locals, battle monsters, and use their combined skill sets.

A lot of the game is spent in the battle system, which is, sadly, quite repetitive, especially in the early stages. As with most Mario RPG games, there’s a timing system involved, and pressing A or B at the right time will give you extra power or defense. As the game goes on, you unlock new abilities and power-ups that can further enhance your moveset, and give battles a little more variety. But so much of the game is spent battling the same basic enemies, over and over again. There are long stretches of the game that feel like you’re doing the same battle over and over again, and because Mario and Luigi’s attacks can only be augmented so far there’s not much tactical depth to the game. Exciting boss battles are few and far between, too.

Outside of battles, Mario and Luigi need to work together to solve a few rudimentary puzzles and traverse each new level. At various points throughout the game, Luigi will be struck by an idea – a piece of “Luigi Logic” in the game’s parlance – that will lead to a new mechanic or challenge. Luigi Logic is a cute idea, but it does make a lot of the new ability and mini-game unlocks feel arbitrary, rather than feeling like things you’ve earned or unlocked. On the plus side, the mini-games where the two brothers need to act in tandem, hitting buttons to a certain rhythm, are usually fun.

Progression can feel odd in Brothership. You’re moving between locations on a small boat-shaped island, and you need to chart your course on a map to reach new areas. As your boat trawls to the current you’ve selected, you’re encouraged to explore sidequests and upgrade your kit. You unlock the ability to speed the boat up about five hours in, but it feels like a strange way of forcing you to take on sidequests, many of which are not particularly engaging, and it feels like a layer of control over the game’s flow has been pulled away from you. I found myself just wanting to hurry through the main story – side quests can offer advantages and new gear,  but the game is not very difficult regardless.

To make sure that I wasn’t misremembering things, I booted up the Game Boy Advance suite available to Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack subscribers and played through the first hour of the original Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga to see if I’d misremembered it being as good as it was. I found that the old game had more personality, was funnier, and was easier to get invested in.

 Its battle system, I knew, wasn’t quite as sophisticated as this new game’s, but there was more interesting friction to the world, some additional complications in controlling two characters that felt missing in Brothership. Now, Luigi jumps automatically now as he follows Mario; controlling both of them at all times was always part of the fun, as was the ways their different personalities would mesh against each other. Brothership is a good-looking game, with fun, elastic takes on the characters, but I still felt that the old sprites had more personality.

If you want a new Mario & Luigi RPG, and you can accept that it’s not a series high point, Brothership is a decent time. The characters are animated with a lot of personality, and the timing-based attacks are satisfying to pull off. It’s all just a little boring compared to what came before. If you want just one Mario-based RPG for the Switch, pick up the stellar Paper Mario remake.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership is available now on Nintendo Switch.  A review code was provided by the publisher.

James O’Connor has been writing about games since 2008. He is the author of Untitled Goose Game for Boss Fight Books.

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