Mario & Luigi: Brothership – Review

A hot take here – Mario and Luigi: Bowsers Inside Story may in fact be one of the greatest games Nintendo has ever put their name to, yet ever since the Mario and Luigi series has failed to reach its heights. Enter Brothership the latest installment in the super star saga, Whats the inside story? Does it finally topple the greats that preceed it? Lets find out as we answer: Is it a ten though?

Brothers in arms

At its core, Brothership’s gameplay is utterly faithful to its predecessors. As soon as I entered my first combat encounter I knew exactly what I was doing, as someone who isn’t the most seasoned and biggest fan of turn based RPG’s generally, it was comforting knowing that the game wasn’t going to give me anything too daunting to have to pick up and learn.

I’ve always appreciated how involved the combat is in the Mario and Luigi series. Its not just about simply selecting a move and seeing it play out, its all about button presses and how accurate timing can boost the damage output of your attack, and sure this is by no means a new concept but I find Brothership like the rest of its series uses this to make its combat encounters utterly infectious.

Some may find combat gets repetative fairly quick, but for me the gameplay loop of learning new Brother attacks (the special attacks in the game) and mastering their timing never truely gets old, In particular the timing of Mario’s Bomb Derby attack had me stumped for ages, yet finally being able to get it perfect and secure myself an excellent rating everytime is a gratification of skill that a lot of other games fail to reach.

To give further experimentation to how you approach combat, battle plugs can be equipped for a range of different effects that last for a certain amount of turns, anything from your standard defence boosts and attack increases to more fun ones like a giant bomb that can surprise drop on an enemy to give devestating damage. Whilst the perks these give in battle are fairly standard, theres enough combinations and fun effects to make it a worthwhile addition. You’ll unlock plugs as you progress through the game and find spark plugs hidden across all the games environments, it provided a good incentive to return to previous locations as I found myself actively wanting to see what plug effect I’d unlock next.

What is perhaps the final addition to Brotherships combat is Luigi’s uncanny skill to be able to manifest an idea that will usually weaken the opponent significantly, aptly named Luigi logic. Its mostly something that appears within boss encounters across the game, and will involve Luigi interacting with the environment to disable an enemys attack for a short amount of time. Each boss encounter has their own and they all play differently, I found this was a fun way of creating diversity amongst the various bosses across the game and they aren’t always easy to pull off. My favourite being stealing a remote in an arenas background to change the environments temperature to create critical damage against your opponent.

The game keeps you on your toes mostly and keeps finding new ways to introduce new mechanics and attacks to your combat arsenal all the way to the third act (the only point where I felt combat started to reach a lull but more on that later), If there was only one thing Brothership successfully achieved, its core gameplay is every bit of a Mario and Luigi game you’d come to expect.

A Sea of Green

Whilst I found myself enjoying the battling instantly what gave an air of too much familiarity was the first few hours of exploring which led to very similar looking environments akin to world 1-1 of most Super Mario Bros games, but the lucious green valleys and rolling hilIs far exceed their welcome here. Thankfully by the time you chart your course to the second world immediately the variety in environments seems to open up, you’ll find sprawling deserts, tropical villages, castle ruins and bustling metropolis citys, all featuring their own storys, characters and in some cases unique enemies to uncover, but even then you’ll stumble across alot of these themes multipletimes.

Sail, Jump, Whack and Roll

This is somewhere where I felt Brothership really does set itself apart, I found the game was a blast to traverse across. Across your adventure your main form of transport for exploration is the Brothership itself, you’ll set course across the ocean to reveal the games islands across a fast ocean akin to exploration in Zelda Phantom hourglass or Sonic Rush Adventure if you’ve had the pleasure of playing those DS classics. Playing in Handheld mode I found myself naturally wanting to draw a course with the touch screen similar to these games but alas this feature wasn’t there. It’s still pretty darn fun though with plenty of hidden islands with their own challenges and puzzles to uncover and even rock formations to find that your Brothership gets decorated with across your adventure.

Speaking of those hidden islands, the challenges can actually be varied thanks to unlocking brother abilities, where you’ll find yourself turning in to a UFO to hover over big gaps, or my favourite rolling in to a ball to traverse across narrow pathways or through small pipes. You’ll use all of these abilities to get to otherwise unreachable areas across the main story islands as well as finding hidden chests and other rewards.

Some of the hidden islands feature challenges that use these abilities exclusively, one of my favourites being an obstacle course where you have to navigate up a maze of narrow pathways with the roll ability to collect musical notes in the correct sequence. The rewards for completing these hidden island challenges are usually rare equipment that can really give you a big advantage in battles.

Theres alot of unique ways of traversal making for some great platforming and I won’t spoil those moments here.

I have to give the team credit as some of the narriative within the islands once again captures the quirky tone that I remembered from pervious entries. It just doesn’t seem to provide any set piece or memorable moments that are as impactful as the likes of Superstar Saga or Inside story, and sure most of Inside story you’re traversing through Bowsers body exclusively, but theres constant interactions with bowsers outside world that creates unique effects inside bowser and the magic of “Whats Bowsers heart looklike?” is a feeling that Brothership fails to replicate.

Partners take time

As an eagle eyed reader, you may have realised that I sank 55 hours in to Mario and Luigi, its not uncommon for adventures within the RPG genre to have a pretty lengthy run time, but I felt with Brothership it was an obligatory tick box to check as oppose to organically reaching that level of play time. Towards the end of the game, I found myself getting burned out; put it this way if the Brothership boat was the Titanic, I found myself somewhat willing to crash in to an iceberg just to see the credits roll, but wow this game maintains a persistant need to keep going. Numerous times the game feels like its drawing to an end only for you to find out that encounter you thought was the last boss, isn’t and oh by the way, can you go and revisit multiple locations to gain access to the true end game.

Now I realise that complaining about the game giving you more feels a little over critical, I mean in a literal sea of modern games that can take a few hours to get through, its impressive that you can get so much playtime out of Brothership, but for me the game had already ran its course, it had effectively introduced me to all of the special moves, upgrades, gear, all of the characters and locations, hours and hours before I reached the ending; therefore the adventure that was fairly paced to the final act as an exciting conflict to conquer, ultimately became a hurdle needing to be stumbled over.

This was equally not helped by the game never quitting on giving you side quests that throughout the whole adventure resort to nothing but go here and talk to this guy and come back for a modest reward. Sure these are entirely optional but the game will alert you when new side quests are available and even allows you to access the side mission list by pressing the R button anytime out of combat, which makes them feel more integral.

I honestly feel this game could have cut 20% of the content and felt more consistent and polished as a result, I forsee most will quit before the adventures completion.

Is it a Ten though?

Its a matter of inconsistency really, there are parts where this game feels like it could reach to be a masterpiece, yet it doesn’t quite get there. For every part of the game that feels new and fresh there are equally acts where you’ll find the gameplay becoming stagnent and repetative, yet it would be futile to deny that the game is utterly charming and that the core gameplay is every bit the Mario and Luigi title it should be. Sometimes less is more, and this is a game that really could have used this lesson to its advantage, though fans of the series should find enough to make a playthrough worth their while.

It’s a 7/10

• Instantly familiar combat
• Fun exploration with lots of rewards
• Some charming characters and unique environments
• Great traversal skills to master
• inconsistent pacing, takes too long to start and too long to finish
• Side quests mostly become nothing but fetch quests
• Not as memorable compared to previous entrys