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.
First things first: Obviously, they “upgraded” from sprites to 3D models, and as always this was a mistake. They attempted to mimic the art style and animations of the sprites and mostly succeeded, but there’s still some oversights, most notably in the item use animations:
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Left is Dream Team, right is Brothership. The sprites had actual eating animations that cartoonishly distorted the characters to accommodate the ridiculously oversized food items. Now the characters’ mouths just instantly atomize their food, which ironically looks less realistic and very obviously videogamey. There are also a truly egregious number of cutscenes that have the camera conveniently pan away so action can happen offscreen, which is just so transparently a cost-cutting measure. Previous games would actually animate their funny one-off gags. Additionally, because the Switch is about as well-optimized as a kudzu plant, the increased load of 3D introduces a significant amount of lag and loading time, which is extremely bad for a game that relies so much on precision timing. Maybe my Switch is just old and breaking down (wouldn’t be the first time), but it’s still ridiculous when my decade-old 3DS still runs like a dream.
They also changed composers, and while previous games’ soundtracks were full of bangers, this one’s is just kinda okay, which disappoints me. (There’s also no special boss music for Zokket, who is an exceedingly poor fit for the silly, perky boss theme.)
The plot this time finds us in the world of electrical outlet people whose islands must be connected by magic extension cords. A bit on the nose, I think, but not significantly weirder than previous M&L plots. It could have stood to be weirder, though. It has a similar problem to The Thousand-Year Door: there is way too much focus on flat, boring original villains and not enough Bowser. Bowser’s appearance is delayed so long I genuinely wondered if he’d even be in the game at all, which is just criminal. If you’re going to replace Bowser with a different villain they need to be at least as fun, you guys. Or at least not have a gimmick of being deliberately unfun. As always, saying “We know it’s unfunny, lol aren’t we so self-aware” is not a substitute for actually being funny.
Fortunately, once Bowser does appear he’s just as great as always — and surprisingly competent, putting the actual villains to shame in his very first appearance. He also demonstrates his chops as an actually good leader:
…but it says something unflattering that pretty much the only times I genuinely laughed were scenes with him or his minions. They were the only ones capable of actual jokes instead of “Isn’t it funny we know how stupid and unfunny we’re being?”
The writers just… didn’t seem to understand what to do with the characters in general. Starlow comes back again but barely does anything and only seems to be here for callback purposes. Peach shows up too, only to spend most of her time offscreen in an extremely redundant role. The Mario characters feel like they’re only included out of obligation, whereas the previous studio was willing to develop and play around with them. This might have been forgivable if the original characters had anything compelling about them to make up the gap, but they don’t. Snoutlet was fun (and cute), but he was the only one.
A consequence of the plot framing, which I suspect was motivated by 3D limitations, is that the game world is split into isolated areas instead of a continuous world map. I dislike this. The islands feel too small and shallow, and you have to sit through loading screens every time you want to hop between them, which you will be doing often if you want to do all the side quests. (It doesn’t help that said side quests are very low effort, usually amounting to “Talk to NPCs in a certain order.”)
But the exploration felt lacking even beyond that, and I think I know why: There’s no dual-world system this time. Bowser’s Inside Story and Dream Team both had alternate 2D worlds, which as I said was a great way to sneak in classic and more streamlined platforming. No such thing here, we’re stuck with janky 3D platforming the whole way through. Instead, the gimmick is that new side areas open up on each island after your initial runthrough, which may have been inspired by Odyssey? But unlike there, the islands are too small and change too little for revisits to feel like a new experience — it just makes it feel like it’s forcing me to go through them twice for the sake of padding.
This is only exacerbated by some weirdly slow pacing. The prologue is a little over 3 hours, and you don’t fight the first boss until after clearing 3 islands. There’s also a frankly baffling mechanic where you need to wait in real time for your ship to reach new islands, which just feels like it’s designed to waste the player’s time. The game claims it’s to encourage you to do sidequests in the meantime (because it wasn’t confident we’d do them voluntarily, I guess), but the way it actually works is that the ship goes in a loop around the island that can take you out of range, so if you mistime your sidequest breaks you just end up having to wait for another loop. You do at least get a speed-up function early on, but I still question how this adds anything.
The actual story is… odd. It’s straight out of magical girl anime with a heavy-handed plot about the villains cursing everyone to be antisocial and this being countered by the magic of ~friendship~. As usual the execution is so space-whale I can’t tell if this is meant to be actual social commentary or not. There is a subplot about the villains kidnapping people and forcing them to manufacture the evil antisocial juice, which sure seems like a criticism of capitalism, but also there’s an entire Capitalism Island that’s portrayed as just quirky and harmless.
The kidnapped slaves are also incredibly spineless and barely need any coercion to actively impede Mario & Luigi’s attempts to free them; I thought the twist was going to be this is how the villains turn people antisocial as an allegory for the alienation of labor, but no, even the uncursed workers are like “How dare you interrupt my very important work by trying to break me out of here, I love rolling over and letting the slavers abuse me.” As usual, this normalizes capitalism much more than it criticizes it. (This laziness even extends to Mario & Luigi, who politely allow themselves to get captured by enemies they can, and later do, beat in an actual battle. Why do gamedevs do this.)
Actually, the villains are weirdly lazy too? It’s established early on that they can teleport into your home base at any time, but the most they ever do with this power is take a single potshot at you, because they’d rather spend all their time gloating about how they could totally destroy you any time if they felt like it, which they don’t. Wow, such tension. (The heroes, of course, never do anything about this gaping hole in their security and keep being shocked every time the villains come knocking.) Bowser, by contrast, carpet-bombs your base the moment he sees it, causing actual consequences for you. This is why Bowser deserves to be the main villain all the time.
Then suddenly in the last, like, two hours the game gives us a new villain who’s actually fun and awkwardly pivots to a new allegory about social media and video games causing the decline of society. Yes, really, it’s quite blatant. Mario and Luigi get trapped in a dream world where they do platforming challenges exactly like the ones you’ve been doing all game, but this time it’s ~evil~ because the villain pops up to say “Isn’t this so fun? Why would you ever want to leave???” and like. Writers. Yeah it is fun, that’s why I’m playing your game. What are you trying to say here.
This also just doesn’t make sense as an allegory — the internet has connected the entire globe to a previously unimaginable degree. The echo chamber effect of some corners of the internet is a real problem, but it doesn’t come close to negating the amount of connections the internet has forged. You could make a strong case that the internet fosters a new and paradoxical kind of loneliness, in that it encourages you to make superficial connections and shallow, parasocial relationships — a kind of deprivation in excess — but that’s not what we’re shown here.
It honestly feels like a different story stapled onto the first — not only do we suddenly get a new villain, the allegory just doesn’t line up with anything from before. Previously the victims wanted to be alone and hated other people, but now suddenly the victims all want fame, love, and admiration according to their dream world dialogue. I actually think it would have been more interesting if the entire game was like this section, and we got to explore other characters’ dream worlds. That would have scratched that dual-world itch… but maybe it was considered too similar to Dream Team?
Also, I am 100% certain the villain’s design is based on Omega Flowey from Undertale, and about 50% sure it’s also inspired by Jevil. Which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just cool to see Undertale has reached this level of cultural relevance.
…Anyway. The big new gameplay gimmick this time is that you can plug magic plugs into magic outlets to confer additional effects in battle, usually adding special effects to your attacks like AoE or status ailments. I liked this for the added customization potential, and there are a number of cool combos and synergies with them too. The game is never hard enough to require them, though, so I rarely put a much thought into my loadout. I would have really appreciated something like them in Dream Team, but here they often feel like overkill.
Another significant change is that Luigi is now much more autonomous. You can still make him jump manually, but he’ll now jump automatically to follow Mario up slopes and over gaps. I’m of two minds about this — on the one hand it makes movement easier and more streamlined, but on the other hand, I kind of enjoyed the added challenge of keeping Luigi in sync when platforming. The platforming is, honestly, a bit too easy without that. You can also now direct Luigi to perform menial tasks like smashing crates instead of having to do everything yourself, which I more unreservedly appreciate; having to manually grab every single bean and such did get tedious. I think they also paced it well enough to keep the player engaged even when using auto-Luigi, as he’s only as fast as Mario, so for large tasks you still have reason to help out yourself.
However, I can’t help but feel the Luigi automation is a symptom of the railroading and handholding that’s been looming ever-larger in Nintendo games. I don’t recall this problem in the previous games, except maybe TTYD? But yeesh it’s bad here. Most islands genuinely do have fairly open environments with branching paths, but you’re not allowed to enjoy it because any attempt to wander off the railroad gets you aggressively shoved back on track. Every time you advance an inch there has to be a cutscene reminding you of what you’re doing followed by camera pans highlighting the next place to go. Do the developers really think so little of their audience? Let us piece a few things together on our own, geez!
Overall, I just don’t know what to make of this one. There are some genuinely good bits, but you have to slog through so much filler to get there, only to end on “Video games are the Devil, go outside and touch grass you nerd.” I’d really like to see the meeting notes for that pitch. Is this some sort of covert attempt to sabotage Nintendo from within? Or just the frustrations of burnt-out developers who have come to hate what they do? Maybe the new studio just needs time to find its footing, but this still felt like a huge step down from Dream Team — and even Superstar Saga, frankly.