I have both good and terrible news for you if you have been living under a rock for the past year and are itching for a Mario role-playing game. Fortunately, Nintendo has released three of them in the past 12 months, including amazing re-makes of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Super Mario RPG. Unfortunately, Mario & Luigi: Brothership, the sole completely original adventure in this plumber roleplaying renaissance, is by far the worst of the lot and an annoying comeback for a series that I enjoy.
It clings to the worst traits of the greatest Mario & Luigi titles, such as excessively chatty dialogue, intrusive hand-holding, and dull, runtime-padding fetch quests, and, aside from its action-packed, turn-based fights, fails in nearly every aspect to recreate the charm of those games. By the time the credits rolled, the nearly ten-year wait for a brand-new Mario & Luigi game had hardly been worth it, especially when combined with incredibly poor performance problems that were distracting at almost every step.
On paper, it sounds like a great idea to have Mario Bros. sail a giant island-ship hybrid to find and explore new islands, but in reality, navigation is essentially a rather boring ocean map where you choose the next destination you want to sail to and wait as you inch your way there. The results are ultimately pointless. Neither The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker nor even the little open-ocean section of Paper Mario: The Origami King ever gave me a sense of discovery that came close to that. Rather, I felt like a child in the backseat of a car, asking whether we had arrived yet.
Speaking about children, Brothership seems a lot like Baby’s First RPG because of a few choices. This is the only Mario game that feels like it was made just for kids between the ages of six and twelve rather than six and sixty-six. That is probably for a lot of kids out there, so it is not necessarily a negative thing. Your hand is continuously held by the tutorials and dialogue. For instance, nearly every time you enter a new area, the camera slowly moves to your objective and back again, followed by a torturously lengthy explanation from Snoutlet, your new assistant, who essentially lays out exactly what you need to do.
Brothership spends much too much of its already bloated 34-hour runtime repeating the same stale notes, and the language constantly reminds you of the main plot and goal. I do not remember how many times new characters were taken aback when they discovered Mario and Luigi were trying to reunite all of Concordia’s islands. You are constantly pressing the A button to advance to the next line in these unbearably lengthy scenes because of the high font size, which also limits the number of words that can fit in a single speech bubble to about a dozen lines at most.
If the tale and humor were spot on, I would be more understanding of the excessive quantity of text, but the writing is terrible. The comedy in Brothership largely consists of repetitious scenes, purposefully stupid puns, and dad jokes, where the punchline is seeing Mario and Luigi look blankly in awkward silence. Mario RPGs all try, with differing degrees of success, to create a comical and whimsical tone. Telling everyone he encounters that he is not a pig is Snoutlet’s big joke, while the main villain’s piece is forgetting people’s names—another unfunny joke that has been driven into the ground long before Brothership stops coming back to it. Once more, even after playing this game for many hours, the jokes never improve or change.
The plot repeats the same stale notes for far too long in its bloated runtime.
Another area where the concept is superior to the implementation is brotherhood, which makes a commendable effort to convey a message about the value of friendship and relationships as well as the perils of isolation. I did not like any of Brothership’s big cast the way I did for so many of the characters and partners in previous Mario RPGs, and the writing is simply so uninspired. Some of that might be related to character design: I think Mario and Luigi look fantastic in this cartoonish manner, and many of the opponents do too, but I did not connect with the amiable Concordia people who resemble power outlets.
Although it is good to see original characters in a Mario & Luigi game again after everything was Toadified by Paper Jam, I find these designs to be a little too simple, and their blocky appearance goes against the aesthetic of Mario, Luigi, and other Mushroom Kingdom characters and foes that appear.
Brotherhood is another area where the idea is better than the practice, as it tries admirably to communicate the importance of relationships and friendships as well as the dangers of loneliness. The writing is just so unimaginative, and I did not enjoy any of Brothership’s large cast the way I enjoyed so many of the characters and companions in earlier Mario RPGs. I think Mario and Luigi look great in this cartoonish way, and many of the opponents do too, but I did not get along with the friendly Concordia people who look like power outlets. Part of that may have to do with character design.
In addition to being unsightly, it can interfere with certain platforming sequences that call for perfectly timed jumps. If you were hoping that the Mario & Luigi series would finally make the switch to a home console, I am sorry to say that I did not enjoy playing Brothership on my television and I would not recommend it. Performance is more consistent during the brief period you are inside a dungeon or building, and I noticed the framerate was not quite as bad when playing in handheld mode.
Luigi Takes the L
However, as a devoted follower of this series, I could have put up with a lot of technical jargon if it meant I was receiving what I wanted. While Brotherhood is not inherently awful, it is especially frustrating because it essentially misinterprets the positive aspects of its series, particularly in the way it treats Luigi. Luigi follows closely after his older brother in previous Mario & Luigi adventures. The two of them work together to overcome puzzles and platforms: A to jump as Mario and B to leap as Luigi. You switch between the two with ease when they part ways. However, Luigi is more of an NPC ally than a secondary protagonist in Brothership’s overworld.
He can jump without a button being pressed, he follows Mario at an uncomfortable and disjointed distance, and a lot of puzzles involve just telling Luigi to do something for you. Although this strategy is no worse than follower characters in other role-playing games, it feels so diluted and loses the distinctive flavor of earlier games.
Verdict
For an RPG franchise that I have always adored, Mario & Luigi: Brotherhood is an underwhelming comeback. In addition to the fighting, it utterly misinterprets its prior achievements and mishandles Luigi’s role in exploration and puzzle-solving by treating him more like a nuisance than a collaborator. Its attempts at humor are unsuccessful, the tale is unoriginal and basic, and the excessively talkative prose holds your hand to an absurd degree. Although the exciting, spectacular turn-based battles are among the best this series has ever had, they somehow wear thin as the monotonous final act drags itself across the finish line of this roughly 34-hour campaign, which has surprisingly poor performance most of the time. Nintendo has seen numerous successful revivals on the Switch, but the Mario & Luigi franchise has regrettably fallen behind.
