Review: Mario & Luigi: Brothership

The Mario & Luigi series wasn’t in the best state following AlphaDream’s closure. The last actually new title was Paper Jam in 2015, followed by two remakes. It was a rough final chapter in the studio’s life.

Paper Jam was the worst reviewed in the series (to be fair, Laura Kate Dale, writing for Destructoid, gave it an 8 out of 10). The second remake, Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story + Bowser Jr.’s Journey, was the worst-selling to the point where it was a possible contributing factor to Alphadream’s bankruptcy.

Thankfully, the series lives on with Mario & Luigi: Brothership. Being one of the successor series to Super Mario RPG with a unique focus on the two title characters, I feel it has a lot of merit. Brothership demonstrates that but falls way short of its potential.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership (Switch)
Developer: Acquire
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: November 7, 2024
MSRP: $59.99

Brothership is one of the more mundane premises in the series. Following digestion, dreams, and a crossover, this one simply has the two brothers transported to another world in need of saving. The central hook is that they find themselves in command of a ship-like floating island and need to travel the expansive ocean to visit other islands and link them together. It’s a mix of unique and trite.

The hapless world is Concordia. It was once a continent held together by the Uni-Tree, but someone came along and destroyed their unifying flora. The continent broke apart, with the pieces cast in all directions. The once united populace now struggles in isolation, and it’s up to Mario and Luigi to bring everyone back together. In a way, it’s the most obnoxiously overt allegory, but it still manages to hit narrative paydirt occasionally.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Mario & Luigi series, they’re RPGs that focus on the eponymous duo. Alongside Paper Mario, it’s a follow-up to Super Mario RPG on the SNES, which is to say it’s something of a JRPG-lite. It’s turn-based, like what you’d expect, but it ties in reflex-based actions wherein you can press a button at the right time during an animation to defend yourself or make your attacks stronger. This was first featured in Mario RPG, and Mario & Luigi extrapolates on this to the extreme.

Battles generally involve the two brothers assisting each other in combat, with even basic attacks having them help each other. Hammer and jump attacks are pretty straightforward, but then you get to Bros. Attacks, which have much more variety. In order to get the most out of a Bros. Attack, you have to master their associated mini-games which often challenge reflex, perception, and your ability to remember which brother is assigned to which button.

As for new features, a big one is “Luigi Logic.” This has Luigi thinking really hard about a situation and coming up with a solution. This is really funny because sometimes the solutions are just impulsive and rely on nothing more than brute force and determination, which suggests that Mario is just not capable of thought. But mostly, it’s just the pride on Luigi’s face when he figures something out that really drills in the charm. Dude’s just so damned pleased with himself, it’s infectious.

The Luigi Logic moments often show up in boss battles, giving you a chance to do a lot of damage and sometimes stun the boss. They allow for some setpiece moments to crop up that really affect the battle, and some of them are pretty cool, even if they are usually cropped up at the worst times for me.

The dynamic battle system makes the Mario & Luigi games feel distinct next to their more typical genre kin, but it does have the downside of forcing you through the same mini-games repeatedly as you proceed through battle after battle. The repetition could be mitigated by keeping gameplay brief and offering palate-cleansing sections between more battle-heavy dungeons; it’s just too bad Brothership doesn’t do that.

No, not at all. When I finally wrapped up Brothership, it was around the 42-hour mark, and at that point, I was just done with it, which isn’t totally uncommon for me with longer RPGs, to be fair. But Brothership not only suffers from the repetition of its battles but also from an inconsistent and bloated pace.

There are five sections to the game, and it starts off well enough. You hop from island to island, and they stay rather small affairs, giving you a taste of variety without getting bogged down. Then, Brothership sags through the second and third areas. It’s a protracted stretch that could have been significantly abbreviated. Nothing much happens narratively. Nothing that couldn’t have just been wrapped in as a sub-plot to another section. Honestly, I probably would have puttered out and lost interest in this part of Brothership if I wasn’t playing it for review.

Things pick up in the fourth part of the game and continue into the fifth, with some of the best moments happening during this time, but then it doesn’t know when to stop. You can’t maintain a climax for, like, 10 hours. Excitement doesn’t last that long. A narrative shouldn’t peak and then plateau, because then it becomes dull. The punch loses impact. If I had managed to survive the previous lull, I most likely wouldn’t have made it through the denouement, but I had to power through it.

Brothership is such an inconsistent game. It can be extremely witty one moment, then clueless the next. At some points, it skirts with something profound in its narrative, then refuses to deliver. There are so many places in this game that could have been cut down or abbreviated, but a lot of it feels there just as a way of extending the game. It doesn’t feel rushed or unpolished; there’s just too much of it, and it gets in its own way.

And it’s a shame, because there’s a lot of charm that does a lot to keep the experience. It’s focus on connections and bonds works well with Luigi and his brother. There is so much fraternal devotion on display in every moment, it’s almost enviable. They are presented in such a way that their coordinated outfits begin to make sense. 

It’s expressed so well with its art style and lavish animations. Brothership is a great-looking game, even without a lot of graphical horsepower and trickery. It bursts with personality and gives so much depth to a pair of mute palette swaps. It’s just too bad that so much of the rest of the cast feels trite. The villains are villainous, the henchmen hench well, and, as usual, the support character evokes my visceral rage. On the bright side, it means the brothers shine brighter.

When all is said and done, Mario & Luigi: Brothership isn’t a bad game; it’s just too much of a decent thing. If it had restraint and its pacing was planned better, it could have been the best in the series. Its transition from a strictly handheld platform to consoles is a great one, putting the additional horsepower to good use.

But because it was allowed to grow so long, what would have been easily overlooked inconsistencies become major annoyances. Eventually, all of its problems start to overshadow its successes and they begin to fester. What would be a joyful experience gets washed away in a sea of grey leaving nothing to connect with.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}