The Mario & Luigi RPG series started on the Game Boy Advance, and even many years and a few iterations later, it has always reflected a connection to those roots. The two-button Game Boy Advance was the impetus for the series’ central hook: Each brother is assigned to a face button and you control them both at once. Even as the series has progressed to platforms with more face buttons, the core concept has remained defined by its initial limitations. Now brought to the Switch, Mario & Luigi: Brothership feels like a conscious effort to escape those limitations, resulting in a lengthy RPG that can’t quite sustain its own weight.
In Brothership, several denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom are magically swept into the new setting of Concordia–a vast sea dotted with islands that used to be part of one contiguous land mass. A world tree of sorts, the Uni-Tree served as the tether that held all of the islands together, but it suddenly wilted and the islands drifted apart. With the help of a young researcher, you pilot a ship that houses a new Uni-Tree sapling, connecting islands and the Great Lighthouses that amplify its power to bring them all back together. So your ship comes to resemble a tugboat, with several islands tethered and pulled behind it.
It’s a concept that allows for lots of different kinds of environments and stories on self-contained little islands. One might be modeled like a desert, while another is a multi-story corporate headquarters. The Great Lighthouses serve as major dungeons, so each of the acts consists of the smaller stories on each island, the larger story arc of the region, and then the Great Lighthouse dungeon as its resolution.