Upon completing the Switch version of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, I wrote that I hoped it and the Super Mario RPG remake would find enough success to send the message to Nintendo that there is still a place for bona-fide RPGs starring Mario. As it turns out, they’d been working on answering my prayer all along! After nearly a decade, we finally have a new title in the Mario & Luigi RPG sub-series with the release of Mario & Luigi: Brothership.
After original Mario & Luigi developer AlphaDream went under back in 2019, the fate of the beloved handheld RPG series was in question while Nintendo fully transitioned from dedicated handhelds into the modern era of their hybrid Switch console. Development duties this time went to Acquire (best known for working on games like Octopath Traveler), with some additional assistance from collaborators Racjin and Grounding Inc. Given how long it’s been since Mario and Luigi’s last RPG journey, I’ve been awaiting this release to see what was next for the red and green plumbers.
Inside Story
Rather than another romp around the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario & Luigi: Brothership starts off with a mysterious portal summoning the residents of the kingdom into an alternate dimension to Concordia, a realm predominately taken up by ocean with a scattering of islands throughout. These islands all used to be united, but the destruction of the Uni-Tree (a large electric tree linking the islands) caused them all to be split apart. It’s up to the Mario Brothers to travel the seas on their boat island (Shipshape Island) and reach the lighthouses atop many islands to connect them all back to Shipshape and rebuild the Uni-Tree and Concordia.
They soon find out that the unraveling of Concordia came at the hands of a villain named Zokket, who seeks to harness a resource called Glohm (a portmanteau of gloom and Ohm, trust me there are a lot of references relating to either electricity or plants). Glohm has the power to invoke negative energy in people, leading them to be more aggressive and desire solitude.
At its core, Brothership’s story is a pretty simple one that largely has to do with the nature of bonds between people and the power of friendship and connection. For how ubiquitous this theme is in media, Mario & Luigi: Brothership is a lot more candid about it than I would have expected. Typically this series has a rather goofy tone, and by the time Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam came around back in 2015, the series started to delve a bit too much into meta-jokes and irony for my liking, so I appreciate this shift in course. Still, it’s a rather basic storyline, one that didn’t do a lot to interest me outside of a choice few memorable moments and scenes. For as easy as it is to ask what one reasonably might expect out of the story of a Mario game, there have been Mario RPGs in the past (Super Paper Mario and Partners in Time in particular) that I felt had more consistently interesting stories and scenes than this game.
A Superstar Saga
Mario & Luigi: Brothership features a colorful cast of characters. Similar to the Beanbean people of Superstar Saga and the Brocks of Bowser’s Inside Story, the residents of Concordia are a unique bunch, with a cartoonish form resembling that of an electrical socket (which further plays into the game’s electric + nature aesthetic).
At the beginning of your journey, you meet a girl named Connie who introduces you to the world and key plot points. She’s a fairly simple character, but she is also absolutely adorable. Throughout your journey connecting the various islands, you come across dozens of Concordians, many of whom join you on Shipshape Island to make up the community of your hub. Alas, I found many of them to be rather forgettable. There are some minorly interesting little groups here and there, but they don’t do much to stand out otherwise.
An unfortunate weak spot I felt with this game’s cast is its main antagonist. Zokket is pretty no-nonsense, with his one recurring gag being his tendency to misremember names, and ultimately he lacks the personality of many of the charming main villains that at times define this series, to say nothing of his meager motivations. He has a trio of goofball minions who follow you throughout the game known as the Extension Corps, and they have their share of amusing scenes, but can sometimes be just a tad annoying. There are a couple of villains introduced in later parts of the game, and while one of them is a welcome presence, the other is honestly even more simple and less interesting a character than Zokket despite being more expressive.
I also felt the titular brothers themselves weren’t quite as fun this time around. Typically in M&L games, Mario and Luigi are quasi-silent co-protagonists, usually spouting some uncaptioned faux-Italian gibberish for others to interpret in conversation, and they get into all sorts of goofy little scenes. They tend to exude a lot of personality despite their lack of scripted dialogue, leading to many of the funnier and charming moments you’ll see across these games. While I don’t think Brothership needed as much outright slapstick as prior installments to make them work, they don’t really demonstrate quite as much of that personality as I would have hoped for in this series’s return. The one exception to this is with “Luigi Logic”, in which Luigi sometimes thinks to himself and comes up with inventive ideas to solve puzzles or bosses, which is admittedly welcome given how much he tends to be the butt of the joke in previous games.
Brothership is still a game with charm, and I appreciate that they pulled back a bit on stuff like the self-indulgent meta-humor from Paper Jam or making Luigi a bit of a punching bag again, but I definitely was left wanting more out of the characters given how much dialogue and cutscenes it has.
Jam Bros
The Mario & Luigi RPG series has always built its gameplay and combat around heavy interactivity, and Brothership continues that legacy. In this area more than any other, Brothership truly feels like a proper iteration of the Mario & Luigi series.
Combat is turn-based, with Mario being mainly controlled by the A button and Luigi the B button. As with previous Mario & Luigi games, a defining feature of battle is that every attack can be dodged or even countered with a well-timed button press. This enables the player to take a lot more risks with their resources depending on how confident they are in their reflexes. I love this system, and Brothership’s combat is a ton of fun when it’s at its best because of just how satisfying it can be to absolutely deny an enemy’s entire turn.
This does, however, mean that you must pay attention to and learn enemy attack patterns if you wish to get away with things. You can quickly rack up a lot of damage taken, especially if you invest a lot into offense instead of defense like I did. I game overed quite a few more times in this game than I would have expected, and while I wouldn’t describe Brothership as especially difficult, it can bite back more than you might expect a Mario RPG to if you’re coming off of the likes of the Super Mario RPG and Thousand-Year Door remakes.
Brothers in Arms
Like most previous Mario RPGs, Mario & Luigi: Brothership gives you hammer and jump attacks to hit your opponents (typically one being more suited towards particular enemy types than the other). You also have Bros. Attacks at your disposal, which are your specials that consume Bros. Points (BP) but do more damage, provided you nail the sequence of inputs attached to each one of them. Many of this game’s Bros. Attacks are newer iterations of attacks from previous games such as Green Shells (a staple), Bomb Derby (Dream Team), and Jump Helmet (Bowser’s Inside Story), though often with a new twist to account for the technology of the Switch being more powerful than Nintendo’s old handhelds. There are also several new ones, and I found myself using pretty much all of the Bros. Attacks depending on the situation.
The bosses in this game stand out as a particular highlight. A lot of them have rather unique and fun attacks and gimmicks to them, making for many of the game’s best parts. The final boss especially may be one of my favorites in this entire series.
The newest battle mechanic is the Battle Plug system, which is a significantly improved system over the quasi-deckbuilder Battle Cards mechanic from Paper Jam. In Brothership, you get slots for Plugs which each offer benefits that consume charges. These benefits include damage reduction, an increase to your damage to enemies on counterattacks or enemies of a particular type, or auto-using healing items when HP or BP gets low, to name a few. Not only do many of these benefits stack, but they’re purposefully designed to combine effects in certain situations to further enhance your actions. Once all of their charges are used up, they go on cooldown for a certain number of turns, but you can freely swap them in and out during battle to fit proper use cases. They make for a lot of fun in battles once you unlock them and add an additional element of resource management that has generally been lacking in this series.
The Dream Team
Like with the rest of the series, Mario & Luigi: Brothership features the titular brothers traversing an overworld with plenty of platforming mechanics in between battles. You can jump across gaps and solve puzzles with your hammer, and enemies on the overworld can be interacted with to start battles (or have battles sprung onto you, depending). As you progress, you unlock more special overworld abilities. Many of these are variations of those found in previous Mario and Luigi titles, though they have their own fun little twists. The enhanced versions of these overworld abilities became some of my favorites in the entire series (including my absolute favorite by a significant margin, one which makes overworld movement more fun than I honestly expected). My one issue is that a lot of uses for Luigi on the overworld involve pressing the L button to make him run off and do actions on his own rather than fully controlling him, which makes him feel less involved mechanically in overworld navigation than in previous games.
While the game is generally compartmentalized across each of its various islands you trek to, there’s a wide variety of locales and biomes. There’s perhaps a greater variety of places you can go to than this series has seen in quite some time, and some of the elaborate dungeons were among my favorites of this series to date.
Slow Go
My biggest concern for Mario & Luigi: Brothership was in regards to the game’s moment-to-moment pacing. From the infamous amount of tutorials to the overbearing amount of minigames, long boss battles, and long minigame boss battles found in several previous installments, I’ve felt that the Mario & Luigi series has developed a bit of bloat over the years compared to its rather simple beginnings in Superstar Saga. As for how Brothership addresses this issue… I feel it shifts some of its slowness around for a more balanced experience in some ways, but it doesn’t quite solve the issue.
There are still a decent number of tutorials throughout, but Acquire and Nintendo have done a good job making them as unobtrusive as possible, usually with a very quick and short slideshow rather than forcing you to play out each tutorial like with early games. There are remarkably few forced or gimmicky minigames on the overworld when it comes to making progress, and there’s nothing like the extremely slow giant battles of the previous few games that involved tilting the console. These are welcome improvements over the games since Bowser’s Inside Story. However, many smaller minigames are integrated into boss fights in peculiar ways (e.g. through Luigi Logic), meaning they’re not outright gone.
Speaking of bosses, for as much as I enjoyed many of them, man the combat in this game can take quite some time. Enemies often have multiple different attacks with lengthy animations, even when many of them attack together to cut down on volume. Some single encounters will have around ten enemies on the battlefield, all of whom get a turn. While dodging/countering provides some interactivity during battle, the waiting for their animations (which sometimes have lengthy wind-ups) can drag the pacing of fights down considerably. Some enemy turns can last upwards of a minute. The pacing of battles isn’t helped either by how long certain Bros. Attacks can take on your turns.
Some late-game boss fights took me nearly 15 minutes to defeat on a successful attempt (so not counting deaths/retries). It also feels like enemies get too many turns, as they usually strike first (despite me having decent speed) and then get another set of turns in between Mario’s and Luigi’s. As a result, I invested quite a bit into increasing my counterattack potency just given how effective it became to accrue damage. Beyond this, fights often take around 7 seconds just to even initiate upon triggering an encounter (for reference, Dream Team, the longest game in this series, takes about 4 on average), which feels more like the loads of a PlayStation 1 RPG than that of a modern game.
There are also a lot of cutscenes, and while several can be skipped (and most can be fast-forwarded), my lack of interest in the story or characters made these drag just a bit. Much of the game’s “overworld” involves sailing through currents on your ship, and the early portions of a playthrough are thus made quite slow until you gain the fast sailing ability. Even with fast sailing, navigating the seas still involves a decent amount of waiting around.
In total, my playthrough clocked in at about 35 hours, while feeling a touch longer than that. There are a lot of bandaids thrown onto the series’s pacing issues here, as certain aspects are less egregious timewasters than they’ve been in previous games, but the game still feels like it could have stood to be about 20% shorter than it was through snappier animations, tighter pacing, and cutting out some of the excess in its story. The game’s final act felt especially long for what it was, forcing some awkwardly placed backtracking between its otherwise climactic final dungeons and setpieces. Make no mistake, I enjoyed the vast majority of my playthrough, but I definitely can see a less patient player who maybe doesn’t click with this system as much as me finding it to be more tedious overall.
Presentation
Mario & Luigi: Brothership was developed in Unreal Engine 4, which is somewhat unusual for a Nintendo game. It features a cel-shaded look to its aesthetic, giving it a cartoonish and expressive look to its characters and animations. I genuinely love the way it looks both in screenshots and in motion. I played a majority of my playthrough in handheld mode (with the occasional docked mode session), and I found that for a UE4 game on Switch it usually performed well. Certain flashy cutscenes experienced noticeable slowdown, but I rarely had significant issues when it came to the actual combat or overworld navigation. It has some shortcomings regarding performance, but it’s a lot smoother than some other less successful Switch games made using the engine (e.g. Shin Megami Tensei V).
Brothership is the first game in the Mario & Luigi series not to have its soundtrack done by Yoko Shimomura. Occupying the composer seat this time is Hideki Sakamoto, an accomplished composer known for being one of the composers for the games Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers and Yakuza 2 & 3, as well as working on other areas of audio for dozens of other games. His sensibilities and style of arrangement are noticeably different from Shimomura’s usual ethos with this series, giving it a bit of a different vibe overall. While I think he had incredibly large shoes to fill (Partners in Time and Dream Team in particular are some of my favorite OSTs ever), the music for this game still ended up being pretty darn solid. There are plenty of great and memorable tunes here, such as the catchy big band main boss themes, the bouncy rhythms and melodies of Heatfreeze Island’s music, or the really interesting arrangement of a certain classic Mario theme found on Wayaway Island.
Like most Mario games, they put a lot of work into making it look and sound both good and true to what makes Mario so Super.
Verdict
The Mario & Luigi series began to grow stale over time, so I’m happy to say that Mario & Luigi: Brothership is a welcome refresher in several gameplay areas. When it’s fun, it’s very fun, and there are a lot of neat ideas and sections that make this game get generally better as you get more into it. The Plugs and some of the overworld abilities make those sections some of the most fun I’ve seen from the M&L series to date. It also made the leap from handheld to console quite well, with some really nice aesthetics and animations to its visual components.
In some ways, Brothership feels like two steps forward and one step back for the series. While not quite the worst game in the series pacing-wise, Brothership still has its share of slow sections that drag on a fair bit more than I would have liked. This ultimately holds it back from being as tight and consistently great as it could have been. I also appreciate that the game’s attempts with its story are a touch more earnest rather than just being fully comedic, and the game still has its charm, but I found its narrative a touch too basic and lacking in interesting developments despite the amount of its runtime taken up by cutscenes.
Ultimately though, there’s a lot to like with Brothership. If you want a generally upbeat and at times wacky RPG with a neat and skill-rewarding combat system and don’t mind something a bit simple on the story, it’s a pretty fun game.
MARIO & LUIGI: BROTHERSHIP IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another JRPG, you may enjoy Metaphor: ReFantazio.
Many thanks go to Nintendo for a Nintendo Switch review code for Mario & Luigi: Brothership.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
