Nintendo’s Mario & Luigi series has long been home to clever innovations, giving players control of the Super Mario Bros. simultaneously for comical adventures that oftentimes take advantage of the hardware they were designed for. Past games have integrated time travel, Luigi’s weird dreams, and exploring the contents of Bowser’s guts as inspiration.
Mario & Luigi: Brothership, the first new Mario & Luigi game in nearly a decade, seems content to iterate on past ideas from the franchise. Brothership brings a handful of new ideas to the Mario & Luigi formula, but only a few of them make the 20-year-old franchise feel fresh.
Brothership begins with Mario and Luigi slipping through a portal that transports them from the Mushroom Kingdom to a new destination known as Concordia. Their arrival is good news for the residents of Concordia, who have recently had their sacred Uni-Tree destroyed and seen their vast continent splintered into a series of floating islands. Bad guys are to blame. With Mario and Luigi’s help, and a seaworthy ship/landmass known as Shipshape Island, the Concordians hope to piece their home back together.
Aiding Mario and Luigi on their Brothership journey is a long list of NPCs, almost all of whom are themed around electrical plugs. There’s the piglike Snoutlet, who serves as a guide and interpreter throughout the story; Connie, a plucky Wattanist who tends to a budding new growth of the Uni-Tree on Shipshape; and Arc, an expert navigator of Concordia’s high seas.
As the story progresses, and Mario and Luigi bring more scattered bits of Concordia back together, Shipshape becomes filled with dozens more characters: vendors, craftspeople, and quest givers. These folks are full of busywork and side missions for Mario and Luigi, and you’ll always have a stack of surplus things to do through Brothership’s story.
Reunifying the islands of Concordia requires traveling across various seas and tracking down new locations. Mario and Luigi launch from a cannon to each island, searching for a lighthouse with a plug that will restore the flow of the Uni-Tree’s natural resource, Connectar. Every island has some sequence of puzzles, obstacles, and quirky characters in need of help that separates the bros from its lighthouse. There are also new and familiar enemies, some of which are indigenous to Concordia and some of which have been sucked in from the Mushroom Kingdom.
Mario and Luigi battle these monsters in turn-based battles that build upon the Mario & Luigi combat formula. Mario and Luigi each get a turn and are controlled with bro-specific buttons, either stomping on the heads of baddies or whacking them with a flurry of hammer swings. Each attack requires a careful series of timed button presses that keeps Brothership’s combat engaging. The bros can also team up for complex Bros. Attacks, which involve a lengthy series of rapid-fire inputs to pull off. They are engaging, sometimes vexing, and eventually start to wear thin. Battles take a long time, thanks to Bros. Attacks’ lengthy and rubbery animations, but the game introduces new moves and gadgets over time to help spice things up.
Thankfully, many battles can be avoided. Fleeing a fight is always an option (and always successful). You’re just going to miss out on XP and coins that power up Mario and Luigi, so taking part in as many battles as possible feels all but required.
The input-heavy combat and flashy Bros. Attacks will feel very familiar to longtime Mario & Luigi fans. To mix things up, Brothership introduces a new system called Battle Plugs, items that give Mario and Luigi extra offensive and defensive powers in battle. Battle Plugs add special effects to the bros’ attacks, unleashing explosive shockwaves or a storm of spiked balls on foes. They can even automate some moves, with certain combinations unlocking other effects in battle. Selecting which Battle Plugs fit each combat situation helps keep combat feeling engaging. You’re forced to experiment with multiple plug loadouts, as they lose juice over time and need to be recharged.
As Mario and Luigi level up and acquire new types of gear, like superpowered overalls and special gloves, you’ll have the option to customize them to fit your play style. In my playthrough, I steered Mario to be my go-to jump attacker — he was Jumpman, after all — and Luigi to focus on hammer skills. While neither plays radically differently, it was fun to try to min-max each brother to fit my fantasy of how their personalities factor into how they play.
Across Concordia’s islands, Mario and Luigi are asked to complete tasks and solve puzzles for various characters. These moments often require players to use another new feature in Brothership: Luigi Logic. At certain points in the game, Luigi will have a bright idea about how to bypass obstacles or move through the environment in a new way. Luigi Logic is how players learn to transform Mario and Luigi into new forms; one turns them from a tangoing duo into a spinning UFO; another turns them into a rolling ball, so they can navigate pipe puzzles, not unlike Samus Aran morph-balling through the Metroid games. Luigi Logic also offloads mundane tasks to Luigi; he’ll smash boxes and grab coins so Mario can stay focused on the task at hand.
Luigi Logic eventually works its way into battles. The game’s biggest boss fights often involve Luigi noticing some unique feature of a boss fight arena, then performing a situationally unique Bros. Attack. That helps break up some of the game’s more laborious battles, which can start to feel repetitive pretty quickly.
Repetitiveness is Mario & Luigi: Brothership’s greatest sin. Whether it’s the game’s turn-based battles, which always feel just a little bit too long, numerous fetch quests that require excess travel, or some bit of superfluous dialogue, I found myself bothered by Brothership’s lack of brevity. Every time the fast-forward prompt popped up in the bottom right of the screen, I furiously pressed it.
It doesn’t help that the story of Mario & Luigi: Brothership isn’t particularly compelling. A group of bad guys known as Zokket and the Extension Corps — a very good name, mind you — are responsible for nearly every bad thing that’s befallen Concordia, and you spend most of Brothership’s swollen story chasing them. There are a handful of side stories involving the NPCs you pal around with and some familiar allies from the Mushroom Kingdom, but none of them are especially interesting. More grave, however, is the humor of Brothership. Mario and Luigi’s RPG spinoffs are often delightfully absurd and packed with jokes, but Brothership’s attempts at humor often fall flat. Strangely, the game seems to recognize its reliance on bad puns and dad jokes; there are multiple moments of dead silence to punctuate a joke and characters groaning at the game’s goofs.
The action and leveling up of Mario and Luigi are the better parts of Brothership. There is a long, long list of Bros. Attacks, unlockable items and gear, Battle Plugs, and craftable things to employ in battle. There’s even a fishing minigame, reaffirming Mario and Luigi’s RPG bona fides.
It’s been a long wait for a new Mario & Luigi game, so Brothership is welcome in at least bringing the franchise back. But Nintendo’s new game takes fewer, far less interesting risks at reimagining the Mario & Luigi brand of action-RPG gameplay compared to its predecessors. Instead, Mario & Luigi: Brothership, with its roughly 25-hour story and an endless list of things to check off, seems to have learned an unfortunate lesson from other RPGs, favoring bloat over reinvention.
Mario & Luigi: Brothership will be released Nov. 7 on Nintendo Switch. The game was reviewed on Switch using a pre-release download code provided by Nintendo. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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