Mario & Luigi: Brothership Review

If you’ve been living under a rock for the last year and are craving a Mario RPG, then I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that Nintendo has put out three of them in the last 12 months, including fantastic remakes of Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. The bad news is that Mario & Luigi: Brothership – the only fully original adventure so far in this plumber roleplaying renaissance – is easily the worst of the bunch, and an incredibly frustrating return for a series I hold dear. Apart from its action-packed, turn-based battles, it fails in almost every way to recapture the magic of the best Mario & Luigi games while also clinging to their bad habits like ridiculously chatty dialogue, overbearing hand-holding, and boring, runtime-padding fetch quests. Couple that with shockingly bad performance issues that distract at nearly every turn, and the nearly 10-year wait for a brand new Mario & Luigi game hardly felt worth it by the time the credits rolled.

Having the Mario Bros. sail a giant island-ship hybrid to uncover and explore new islands is a great idea on paper, but in practice, navigation boils down to a pretty unspectacular ocean map where you pick the next destination you want to sail to and wait as you inch your way there, and the results are ultimately meaningless. I never felt any sense of discovery remotely approaching that of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, or even of the small open-ocean segment of Paper Mario: The Origami King. I instead felt like a kid in the backseat on a road trip, just wondering if we were there yet.

Speaking of kids, several choices in Brothership make it feel like Baby’s First RPG. It probably will be for plenty of kids out there, so that isn’t inherently a bad thing, but this is the rare game starring Mario that feels designed specifically for ages six to 12 rather than ages six to 66. The tutorials and dialogue are constantly holding your hand – for example, almost anytime you enter a new area, the camera slowly pans over to your objective and slowly pans back, followed by an excruciatingly long explanation from new assistant named Snoutlet, who basically spells out exactly what you need to do. The dialogue repeatedly reminds you of the overarching story and objective, and Brothership spends far too much of its already bloated 34-hour runtime rehashing the same tired notes. I lost count of how many times new characters were shocked to learn Mario and Luigi were on a mission to reconnect all of Concordia’s islands. Plus, the large font size means only roughly a dozen words tops can fit in a single dialogue bubble, so you’re always mashing the A button to get to the next line in these insufferably long scenes.

I would be more forgiving of the overwhelming amount of text if the humor and story were on point, but unfortunately the writing just doesn’t land. The Mario RPGs all attempt to strike a humorous and whimsical tone to varying degrees of success, but Brothership’s comedy mostly lies in repetitive bits and intentionally unfunny puns and dad jokes where the punchline is watching Mario and Luigi stare blankly in awkward silence. Snoutlet’s primary joke is telling everyone he meets that he’s definitely not a pig, while the main villain’s bit is not remembering anyone’s name, which is another unfunny joke that’s beaten into the ground well before Brothership stops returning to it. Again, this game lasts for dozens of hours and those jokes never evolve or get any better.

Brothership makes an admirable attempt at telling a story about the importance of friendship and connections and the dangers of isolation, but it’s another area where the idea is better than the execution. The writing is just so unoriginal, and I didn’t get attached to any of Brothership’s large cast in the same way I have with so many characters and partners from past Mario RPGs. Some of that may come down to character design: I love how Mario and Luigi look in this cartoony art style, and many of the enemies look great, too, but the friendly power outlet-shaped residents of Concordia just didn’t resonate with me. Granted, it’s nice to see original characters back in a Mario & Luigi game after Paper Jam Toad-ified everything, but these designs are just a bit too rudimentary for my taste and their blocky look clashes with the style of Mario, Luigi, and other characters and enemies from the Mushroom Kingdom that show up.

All the islands you visit are very generic, too, with familiar fire, ice, and desert settings you’ve seen dozens of times before, each backed by music that’s solid but honestly forgettable and probably won’t be topping the charts in Nintendo’s new music app. For a series that once had microscopic versions of Mario and Luigi roaming around Bowser’s internal organs, Brothership’s areas feel disappointingly safe and hardly worth exploring.

The whole adventure would probably pop more if it didn’t run so, so badly. This is easily one of the worst-performing Nintendo games on Switch – worse than Link’s Awakening but not quite to the level of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet – with incessant framerate issues while exploring the overworld. Brothership chugs and stutters basically anytime there’s some sort of environmental element present, whether it’s moving water, lava, sand, wind, or fog. That’s a pretty major problem for a quest set entirely on the ocean.

It’s not only unpleasant to look at, it can cause issues during some platforming segments that require precisely timed jumps. Performance is more reliable during the smaller amount of time when you’re inside a dungeon or building, and I noticed the framerate wasn’t quite as bad when playing in handheld mode, but if you were looking forward to the Mario & Luigi series finally making the jump to a home console, I’m sorry to report that I simply didn’t enjoy playing Brothership on my television, and I don’t recommend it.

Luigi Takes the L

As a longtime fan of this series, though, I would’ve been able to tolerate a lot of technical roughness if it meant I was getting what I came for. Brothership isn’t outright bad in a vacuum, but it’s particularly disappointing because it fundamentally misunderstands the best elements of its own series, specifically in how it completely mishandles Luigi. In past Mario & Luigi adventures, Luigi follows right behind his older brother, and you platform and solve puzzles with the two of them as a unit: A to jump as Mario and B to leap as Luigi. When they split up, you seamlessly swap back and forth between the two. In Brothership’s overworld, though, Luigi feels more like an NPC ally than a second protagonist. He follows Mario at a disconnected, awkward distance, he can jump on his own without the press of a button, and many puzzles revolve around simply ordering Luigi to automatically do something for you. This approach is no worse than follower characters in other RPGs, but it loses the unique style of previous games and feels so watered down as a result.

The odd thing is that certain areas seem like they were designed for the old style and are now rendered completely pointless. The worst instances are platforming segments where Mario needs to jump on the red platforms and Luigi follows suit on green ones. Once you’ve moved Mario where he needs to go, you just twiddle your thumbs as Luigi does his part automatically. There’s no fun in watching half of the puzzle get solved by a computer, especially when this series was traditionally built on gameplay that made the most of having two equal characters at your disposal. There are even segments where he will actively work against you, like when you need to step on numbered panels in order but Luigi, bafflingly, doesn’t wait to step on his number before you’ve stepped on yours. This leads to completely contrived, unbelievable sequences where you need to beat out your own partner so he doesn’t fail the puzzle for you both.

One of Brothership’s main new mechanics is called Luigi Logic, but it’s essentially just a lengthy animation where Luigi has an epiphany that I had to sit through a double-digit number of times across the campaign. Generally it results in Luigi just telling you how to progress – often by using Bros. Moves like turning into a UFO or rolling into a ball – or worse, he just does it for you. Brothership feels stuck between adhering to the old style and trying something new, and it fails at both by landing uncomfortably in the middle. There are some classic-feeling puzzles where the brothers actually work together, but they’re generally very simple, boring setups revolving around basic objectives like “carry this here” and “hit that button.” It goes back to basics and never moves beyond that.

The one place Luigi Logic excels is in Brothership’s great boss battles. The combat as a whole is awesome, and the ideas Luigi comes up with during these big encounters – like using a nearby fountain to knock down one of the earliest bosses – make the most important fights feel appropriately grand. Unlike the mindless puzzle-solving and exploration, there are surprisingly some really challenging fights, including one or two I had to retry after carelessly choosing not to heal, which was a welcome obstacle. If you don’t want a challenge there’s an Easy Mode, though it’s confusingly gate kept behind failing a fight two times in a row before you’re able to lower the difficulty. Then, after that specific battle, the difficulty returns to normal, and if you run into another boss that gives you trouble, you have to lose twice again before it lets you change to Easy Mode. I played on standard difficulty the whole time except for the purposes of testing out Easy Mode, so it didn’t really bug me, but it’s a bizarre choice that feels at odds with Brothership’s apparent obsession with making sure you otherwise never feel stuck.

Turn-based combat is Brothership’s one consistent bright spot, and while it’s more akin to Superstar Saga’s basic approach than the crazy, screen-stealing Luiginary Attacks in Dream Team, it’s honestly everything I wanted from a revival of this series. Mario and Luigi fight with their signature jump attacks, hammers, and a combination of new and returning Bros. Attacks, which are flashy special moves that can deal big damage if you properly time all the right button presses. The battle animations are fantastic and feel like an ideal translation of Superstar Saga’s 21-year-old sprite work into 3D, and combat is mercifully the place where performance issues are the least noticeable, as battles rarely suffer from framerate dips.

Learning enemy patterns from Brothership’s large roster of dangerous foes is always satisfying, as you have to memorize their tells to figure out when to hit the dodge button during their attack animations. One of my favorite enemies is the Snaptor, a bird that picks up one of the brothers before flying at the other. You have to listen for Mario or Luigi’s scream to know if you need to jump to counterattack the Snaptor or if it’s going to try and bowl you over with your rolled-up brother. Each enemy has its own patterns like this, and it’s exciting whenever you run into a new bad guy for the first time. And, to its credit, Brothership’s leveling is nicely paced, where I was always at an appropriate level to take on the bosses as long as I was clearing out enemies on the main path.

Of course, the battles are also guilty of fumbling Luigi’s role, albeit not nearly to the same extent as the exploration. He still performs all combat actions with the B button, but now you inexplicably select his moves with the A button. This may sound like a nitpick, but trust me when I say that, as someone who’s been playing Mario & Luigi RPGs for over 20 years, it legitimately took me hours to rewire my brain to select Luigi’s attack with A and then swap over to the B button to actually do it. It’s a confounding decision that tries to solve a problem that didn’t exist, while also going against how every prior Mario & Luigi has played.

Plug It In

The smartest new wrinkle in Brothership’s combat are Battle Plugs: equipable modifiers that impact Mario and Luigi’s power, defense, and more, comparable to if Paper Mario let you swap out which badges you were wearing at the start of each turn. Want to attack a whole group of enemies at once? Equip the Kaboom Attack Battle Plug to deal minor damage to every enemy adjacent to your main target. Or, if you want to deal some extra damage to one target, the Surprise Iron Ball Battle Plug lets you drop a spiked iron ball on the enemy you attacked. To make things even better, some bonuses chain together: If you have both of those Battle Plugs equipped at the same time, you’ll drop an iron ball on every enemy impacted by the shock wave of damage.

Many Battle Plugs work together in smart, surprising ways, and it’s one of the only areas of Brothership that doesn’t spell everything out to you and allows you to piece together these powerful combinations using your own logic. My main annoyance with Battle Plugs, however, is that they each have a limited number of uses before they need to recharge, and the only consistent way to kick off the recharge process is to exhaust them to zero. It can lead to awkward scenarios where you only have two or three uses on a Battle Plug left and no way to spend it before going into a major battle. It’s as if you needed to let your iPhone completely die before you could plug it in, and it feels a little clunky. Still, this mechanic makes the battles themselves some of the best in the series, and it’s a shame you have to sit through the rest of Brothership to play them.

And even though combat is the best part of Brothership, it still wears thin before the end of the adventure. Without going into spoilery specifics, the final third of the campaign is a complete slog that adds nothing of substance beyond retreading the mediocre exploration and puzzle-solving of the first 20-plus hours. Brothership kept stringing me along and running in circles to the point where I felt like it was disrespecting my time. I would probably have been left with a much more positive impression as a whole if it ended at the 25-hour mark, because even the combat started to feel tired and repetitive as I was going through the motions trying to reach the conclusion.