Review – Mario and Luigi: Brothership

The setup feels exceptionally flimsy on its own: Mario and Luigi are just chilling and they get sucked into a portal. While this is very much a time honored approach, it’s so threadbare by today’s standards that it could have been written by a child. They find themselves on an island in another world, where all the different countries have now become severed islands. You find out there’s this tree that used to connect everything, but then the tree got destroyed, so you’ll fire yourselves out of a cannon to reach the other islands and then magically reconnect them since no one else figured out how. But also, after a couple hours, you come to learn of Great Lighthouses which are also important, but they’re now being controlled by unknown beings that are definitely Evil, and now suddenly the plot appears. It works, but its arrival is tardy at best.

Now, to be fair, Mario and Luigi titles have never been called hardcore or complex within the RPG community. From the start, there’s been an irreverence that keeps the games fun, light and enjoyable without going completely cartoonish. From time traveling with baby versions of themselves to literally being inside the body of Bowser for most of the game, we’ve become accustomed to something positively silly as the backdrop for why the brothers are setting own on a turn based, item gathering, gear center adventure. So the story being more simple isn’t necessarily a demerit unto itself. There’s even a decent twist that introduces itself before the eight hour mark. But the setup isn’t at the level of oddity that I’ve come to expect, which is a bummer from the drop.

Mario and Luigi: Brothership ticks all the boxes you might expect from the series as well. There’s a fair amount of interaction when it comes to exploring the landscape in terms of needing to double back, sometimes much further down the road, in order to find all the nooks and crannies. Once reconnected, the islands you discover will expose new paths to walk, so revisiting is always an important task for completionists.  Mario and Luigi will gain abilities as they progress, starting with obtaining the iconic hammer and expanding further with Bros. Moves, which are learned traversal techniques that strike the pair with oddly perfect times of inspiration. The islands themselves are rather small, but many, and so you’ll have plenty of chances to land once, twice, three times in the same place with new things to find.

Behold, the twirling T pose! The most humiliating in aerial travel activities!

For what it’s worth, there are elements of Mario and Luigi: Brothership that I really enjoy. The art styling looks wonderful on the Switch, leaning into a static, almost dated appearance that fits the thematic of the game itself. Coming from the handheld era originally, it’s a positive choice to have our heroes be upgraded but still in a familiar realm with the previous titles. There’s a roundness to the different characters, from the old hat Mushroom Kingdom folk and foes to the newcomers of the Concordian landscape. With each island representing some kind of separate biome, you also get an excellent overview of a world with many different themes that all have a good throughline. It’s a fantastic exercise in visual craftsmanship by having many pieces of the whole each be their own thing.

Additionally, the combat, which is the most important part for me of a Mario and Luigi game, merges seamlessly onto the Switch. The alternation between buttons has always been a fun approach, and the formula persists with pristine accuracy and reflexive dexterity. Though it ultimately is simple, being able to focus on the primary style and then improve it as the Brothers add new gear and variants makes for an enjoyable learning curve in the fighting. There’s a lot of merit to the learned attacks that you gain from leveling, though I was most fond of Luigi’s ballistic Yoo Who Cannon. Making clones that form a crushing, giant Mario and Luigi ball? This is the inventiveness I was looking forward to from the start.

Mario gettting a piece of the Luigi pitch, this one’s heading to the bleachers.

Granted, the combat is a double edged blade in terms of the excitement of Brothership. While it’s easy to learn and sometimes difficult to fully pin down (particularly with counters during boss battles), it also can get very repetitive. When you’re out in the field, the number of encounters with visible enemies is high, and, like all great RPGs, grinding out EXP through fights is key to an easier endgame. But it also feels odd to have a fight be easy because you’re clearly capable of winning without taking damage, yet needing to focus because you can’t just autopilot through yet another round of hammering Piranha Plants. It gets tiresome, even towards the beginning, to need to  “focus” long enough to execute a chain of jumps to pick up a handful of points.

Moreover, I wasn’t a big fan of the Battle Plugs. This new combat system in Brothership asks the players to capture a bunch of Sprite Bulbs that are around the island to craft a sort of extra effect modifier for combat that last a certain number of turns. These range from helpful and simple (automatically use certain items when necessary) to fundamentally broken (Luigi gets free extra actions, items return to your inventory instead of being used). It’s a nifty thing, but it felt like an unnecessary extra aspect created to justify the collect-a-thon background of the game’s overall theme. Yes, I know we need to have some kind of additional reason to keep revisiting islands , but the Sprite Bulbs are a bit of a chore to ferret out and, ultimately, aren’t totally necessary.

This brings me to perhaps my biggest gripe with Brothership: the unnecessary amount of additional flair peppered throughout. It’s a decent title at the core with a basis that could become a winning title. Instead, you quickly start bogging down players with a ton of extra that doesn’t come across as optional. You have side quests that often contain the developmental stories of the NPCS, including some that are timed and require your immediate attention, lest they be lost forever (which feels decidedly not “optional”). You’re tasked with spending time to spot coral out in the ocean to help another character document the growths and patterns out in the wild. Most of the time, you’re seeing just how many coins you can get through non-combat actions, like breaking blocks or pulling plants, in order to buy very incrementally better gear to make you slightly stronger for the next battle.

The 15% experience bonus from this item is wild, especially how early you get it in the game.

While I’m not expecting a game to constantly be leaping ahead by leaps and bounds, I felt caught in a cycle of gameplay that was indescribably boring, especially for a storied franchise like Mario and Luigi. If I did all the little chores that I kept coming across, I would get slightly better than I was twenty minutes ago and then be a bit more prepared for the next time I did something. If I skipped over these side missions and additional worldbuilding moments, I would still be okay in the next fight or even boss battle, but it would take longer because I would just keep doing the same attacks again and again with a lower damage ceiling. It was like working a part time job to afford a calculator so I wouldn’t have to use an abacus to do my calculus test.

Also, I get that Luigi is the comic foil of the entire Mario universe (with the exception of Luigi’s Mansion), but the inclusion of Luigi Logic somehow felt demeaning to the point of removing Luigi’s agency.  Throughout the game, you can trigger Luigi Logic when a moment presents itself to “enlighten” Luigi to perform actions. Some of these are specifically story progressing, like discovering how to climb somewhere, how to trigger a panel or uncover a hidden passage. But a lot of them are just Luigi doing menial tasks, like smashing blocks or pulling up plants. Part of me was glad to delegate them to the computer to do and part of me was a bit put off by relegating the second brother to little more than a fetch pet. Despite the fact that he has arguably cooler moves and funnier moments, he was second banana in a fraternal act.

I figured out how to tie my shoes! Now I won’t trip and die on the escalator!

As a very pithy final note, I firmly feel that Brothership has the weakest of the soundtracks of all the Mario and Luigi games. Yes, I get that we’re in a tropical setting, complete with ships, palm trees, an entire island that’s a rainforest and multiple other “we’re on a boat!” type moments and vibes. Yet I felt myself getting so tired of hearing the same music again and again with this Chuck Mangione style horn section slotted in here and there. It was too on the nose, if that makes any sense: it was like someone yelled “play tropical Mario music!” and an improv band came together to show what they came up with. It’s not grating, it’s not terrible, it’s just expected and frankly bland compared to the more diverse soundscape that Mario titles are able to bring.

My take on the entirety of Mario and Luigi: Brothership is that this was the right game released at the wrong time. Had Brothership been able to launch two, maybe three years ago in the Switch’s life cycle, I would have been over the moon with the whole package, particularly what I already enjoy (comic elements, combat, design). But Switch owners have very recently been treated to the one-two punch of the greatest of Mario RPGs being remastered and re-released on the Switch. While they are from a different branch of the Mario universe, they still merit comparison, and that makes Brothership come out on the losing end. Why would I recommend a game that can feel noncommittal to puzzle elements due to Luigi doing all the auto-lifting when I could more easily recommend a return to Thousand Year Door or the original Mario RPG?

Making Luigi mostly autonomous also removes the pressure of these types of puzzles.

Being one of the lowest of the Mario and Luigi games is still like scoring a C+ in sushi quality in the heart of Tokyo. It’s not that your product is bad, it’s that other products are far, far better. Brothership is decent and has some really fun concepts, but there are others, already in place in other games, that I like far more and detract from my interest in continuing to explore Brothership beyond the end game. I celebrate the return of the series, and home that the sales and the acclaim from others foster another chance at bat for wherever Nintendo steers its ship next.

Mario and Luigi: Brothership is available now on Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

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