I really enjoyed this! It reminded me a lot of UnderTale with how personalized (and delightfully silly) every enemy was, and I’m impressed by how much strategy they got out of pretty simple mechanics with the three regular attacks. I also loved the Metroidvania-like feel of getting new exploration abilities along with your battle abilities and just, it was really cool!
Category: Mario & Luigi Series
Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
This is the sequel to Superstar Saga, and represented a jump from GBA to DS. The main gimmick is that the brothers go back in time to team up with their baby selves, who are controlled with the DS’ X and Y buttons. The babies can also contribute to attacks in battle, making the action commands more complicated.
The game was decent but nothing outstanding. I think I liked Superstar Saga better overall.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story
The third game in the Mario & Luigi series. I played the original DS version a long time ago as a kid, so I picked up the 3DS remake for this one to see what was different.
The big selling point of this entry is that Bowser is a playable character, and in fact the main protagonist. At the start of the game he is tricked by Fawful (the understudy of the villain from Superstar Saga) into eating everyone in the Mushroom Kingdom, forcing Mario and Luigi to work with him from within his body to fix things.
This was a really great game, much improved from Partners in Time. As I’ve said previously, I love Bowser, and getting to play as him was a wonderful power trip. He and the brothers had distinct playstyles, including in the overworld, and I loved all the bizarre levels inside Bowser’s body. It still lacks some of the things I liked about Superstar Saga (no magic :( ), but manages to be good in a different way rather than feeling like a downgrade as Partners in Time did.
Mario & Luigi: Dream Team
This is the fourth and final Mario & Luigi game. It might be my favorite in the entire series; the creators clearly listened to criticisms of the previous games and went all-out in their ambitions.
Mario & co. are invited to a relaxing vacation on a resort island; obviously, things do not go as planned. The theme of this game is the power of dreams: Luigi has the ability to open a portal to the dream world when he sleeps, which allows Mario to revive the original inhabitants of the islands, who are… pillow people. Yes, they lean into the aesthetic pretty hard. This dual-world gameplay works similarly to Bowser’s Inside Story, where the real world is in 3D while the dream world is 2D with a greater emphasis on platforming challenges.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star and Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam
Paper Mario: Sticker Star
It is as terrible as the prophets foretold.
Sticker Star feels like it belongs to a completely different series than its predecessors. The gameplay and writing have both been gutted: There are no friendly NPCs except Toads, Bowser doesn’t get a single line of dialogue, and you can’t level up. Yes, that’s right, they removed the RPG from their RPG. I was willing to go into this with an open mind, because the idea of redefining RPG battles to specific set pieces rather than copy-and-paste encounters fueled only by extrinsic motivation is intriguing to me; it’s the guiding principle behind Wine & Roses, also known as the best game ever. But no, encounters are still just as samey as in the previous games, you just no longer get any XP from them.
And this feels minor next to everything else, but the set design is godawful. Everything is literally made out of cardboard. We are also repeatedly informed that all the characters are literally paper, unlike in the previous games where it was clearly just an art style. I don’t know why anyone involved thought this was a good idea. We experience art for the immersion, not to be reminded of the artifice.
Apparently this was all due to executive meddling, so make of that what you will. The more I hear about Shigeru Miyamoto, the more I feel like he is the Elon Musk of Nintendo.
Onto greener pastures.
Mario & Luigi: Brothership
Nine years after the last entry, Nintendo surprised everyone by reviving the Mario & Luigi series. It’s by a new studio and on the vile Switch, so I had high hopes and low expectations.
Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it came back wrong. The body is here, but not the soul. The new studio is technically competent, but they don’t have the charm or artistry that Alphadream had, which is pretty dire for the series’ future because that was its main appeal.