Mario & Luigi: Brothership Thoughts

Brothership is a strange game. Everything good about it is new, and everything disappointing about it is old.

Virtually every new feature added to Brothership, lands. Battle Plugs, the dinky little fishing minigame, the Combination Attacks, Concordia, Sailing, the greater emphasis on NPCs and their stories, all of the new Bros. Attacks, the new villains, all of it is absolutely killer.

Simultaneously, almost every single tiny little disappointment is a Returning Feature. The slow opening, the frequent interruptions and tutorials, the little pacebreaker minigames that the game over-explains, these are all old hat. But there’s also a bunch of returning or series staples that are either missing, or are weirdly botched or changed in ways that make them worse.

Take, for instance, Control Parity. The Mario & Luigi RPGs have always had an incredibly cohesive control scheme: No matter what, if Mario is doing it, it uses the A button; and Luigi always uses the B button. It doesn’t matter if it’s jumps, hammers, selecting options in combat, each brother gets their own button ALL to themselves. I’ll say this up front: You could put the hammers or overworld Bros. Moves on X and Y and literally call it a day, dusting off your hands satisfied you’d made the best M&L control scheme imaginable. This is not what Acquire did. Instead: Mario, depending on context uses the A, X, and Y buttons, and Luigi uses the B, A, X, Y and L buttons. Most mindboggling is that Luigi uses A to pick menu options in combat. They still jump to hit the block to select stuff, but the diegetic element of you pressing the button to make the corresponding brother jump no longer makes sense, since Luigi now uses A to pick options in combat.

They did this for the very simple reason that Luigi has been surgically de-attached from the hip from Mario. He no longer follows immediately behind, and you no longer have to make him jump to avoid falling in pits – he does his own thing, and outside of specific contexts which demand it of you, there is no reason to press B to make Luigi jump in the overworld. He does his own platforming. This is a baffling change. Luigi still uses B by default for most things, but now it’s inconsistent. Don’t get me wrong, there is IMMENSE merit in this new style. In a modern game, this may in fact be a more valid approach than attempting to mimic the GBA/DS style. I love that style, and think there’s more to do with it (especially in the Superstar Saga vein), but this new style is untapped fertile ground. Its implementation in Brothership exists as a sort of half-step between the old way and the new way, and I would have preferred either. In fact, I maybe would have preferred a wholesale commitment to the new way. I believe I would have forgiven the game almost entirely abandoning control parity if it meant they explored this concept to greater depth.

Other returning features that are mishandled or missing: Rank Ups work like in Dream Team but have less interesting build options; Level Ups no longer offer a bonus roulette to let players gamble on their own personalized builds; Mario and Luigi no longer separate from each other for their own micro-adventures (this was also true in Bowser’s Inside Story and effectively true of both Dream Team and Paper Jam; Partners in Time had the babies and adults separate for micro-adventures instead); Many Bros attacks return, making the limited (10) pool of them seem even more narrow by comparison; It takes ages to get the Hammers and Bros. Attacks; The Map has gotten a noticeable downgrade from essentially every single game except Superstar Saga (and even then, Superstar Saga only had room maps for complicated dungeons); Gear builds are…balanced but boring (I believe I’ve only ever swapped Mario’s accessories once the whole game) and the game lacks risk-reward difficulties (such as the Mush badges/Great Force or Daredevil Boots/Challenge Medal); and Mushroom Kingdom NPCs seem still to be living under the Mario IP control mandates (Koopas are forbidden from wearing sunglasses, there is nary a named Toad in sight, not even Toadsworth, and the only Mushroom Kingdom characters that have any sort of arc or noticeable characterization are Bowser, Bowser Jr., and Peach.) This is frankly confusing given just how GOOD the Concordian NPCs are. Also, nobody except the Mario Bros. has any actual voice acting. It is still just “Bwah!” when a dialogue box opens and little blorby noises while text appears and nothing else.

I can appreciate just how much about Brothership is different, and I firmly believe most of what is holding it back is stuff that felt like it “had” to be grandfathered in.

Let’s back up a little bit now to talk about more universal things. Starting with performance, the game REALLY doesn’t seem like the sort of game that should be struggling to run on Switch, and yet sometimes it does struggle. The game runs at 30, but I spot dropped frames pretty easily. The load times exist, happen at the start of and end of every battle or area transition, and they’re short, but just long enough to make me take notice. I do not attribute this to “please give us Switch 2 already Nintendo” syndrome; the game just…I dunno, feels like it could be running better than it is.

Next, combat. It is Slower than normal, but this is not unique to Brothership; every game has become slower with each passing entry. In Superstar Saga, a jump attack took one second, in Bowser’s Inside Story it took three seconds, in Brothership it takes fully 5 to 8 seconds to do a normal jump or hammer attack with both bros in the party. The animations are excellent, fluid where they need to be and cartoony – these are the best the brothers have looked. They knew this slower pace was an issue, but instead of changing the animations, they instead corrected for it by increasing damage output – Mario and Luigi do more damage by Level 15 than they do at endgame levels in previous games. Once you get Battle Plugs, things feel dynamic and spicy enough to keep one’s interest in most any scenario, but until that point, I was almost constantly asking myself: “When will I get the hammers?” or “When will I get the Bros. Attacks?” or “Ok, I have the Hammers and Bros. Attacks, but is this enough? Can I maybe have Hand Powers?” (There are no Hand Powers in fights in this game.) It’s…lethargic, and Acquire have traded the quick and snappy pace out for a weightier, heavier one. It’s not bad, just different. It evidently doesn’t feel good to some people, though. I think the masses crave faster and snappier animations.

The story is…different. Mario and Luigi games have always been the Silly Ones. The Looney Tunes tone has been traded out for a more Pixar-y tone, and it’s led folks to say stuff like that the Story sucks or the game isn’t as funny. There were several EXTREMELY good gags that I can remember off the top of my head (Snoutlet getting further away or Luigi’s hat on the cactus) but joke moments are simply less frequent now. The new tone requires more time to build up characters to give them a bit more emotional depth. And well, some people aren’t going to buy into it. I think this game’s story, while tropey, is extremely well-executed and easily in the top 5 for Mario RPGs.

I don’t think anything has necessarily changed about the game itself to spur the mixed reception – the sum total of all of the various changes have made Brothership more closely resemble its fellow Switch RPG contemporaries, and frankly, some people don’t have the patience for that style. In the Fully Ramblomatic review, Yahtzee Croshaw called Brothership “Really boring”, but he’s the sort of guy that hates having to constantly look at the screen while playing his games, listening to podcasts or multitasking while playing, so it makes sense that he’d be more into Paper Mario games.

Alright, real talk time. Plenty of people have gotten it twisted over the years, including Nintendo themselves, so here’s the answer to the mystery of “Why are there Two Mario RPG series, anyway?”

In Super Mario RPG, Action Commands are superfluous. The game would be almost entirely the same without them, but they satisfy an animal desire to Continue Pressing Buttons after you’ve done the actual strategy part of the turn-based game.

Paper Mario expanded on this idea by turning Action Commands into a more tangible part of the process; a successful AC is the execution of the good plan you came up with. A shoddy execution is not a failure, but a half-step; you still receive most of your due reward for your strategy. This has continued to be the case even in the supposedly “Adventure” game Paper Marios.

Mario and Luigi are NOT that way. Broadly speaking, strategy is less important in the M&L RPGs, and instead your button timing and execution IS the challenge. If you fail to block attacks in Paper Mario, it’s typically not a big deal; but if you consistently fail to dodge in M&L games, you just straight up lose the fight and have to retry. You are judged on your execution with your Bros. Attacks and ability to read the enemy; it doesn’t matter what option you select NEARLY as much as it matters that WHAT you select you can do well. Paper Mario Badges determine what strategies are available to you. Mario and Luigi badges modify your preexisting strategies.

To this end, Battle Plugs. All of these come in one of three flavors: “Give us a call when you’d like to not die to this really hard enemy”, “How would you like us to make clearing out these enemies faster”, and “How can we make Using Items more convenient for you so you don’t have to waste your brain power on the menus, handsome?”. What all these have in common is that they shove “strategizing” all into one block. You’re no longer Hm-ing and Haw-ing over what attack to pick for the enemy’s formation or dipping into the Items menu and debating what to use. You visit the Battle Plugs menu, tell it what you want, and you are serviced. It’s awesome!! Now I can spend almost all of my focus on the part of the game that matters – doing the cool attacks and dodging freaky little enemy attack patterns.

You have to be watching the screen in Brothership all the time or you lose. If you look away in Paper Mario, it’s virtually never a crisis, but if you look away to take a sip of water or something during the enemy turn in Brothership, you’ll look back to 2/3rds of your HP being gone. Some people won’t vibe with that style. I for one am glad someone at Acquire gets it, even despite all the weirdness.

So that’s…all. Over all, being halfway through the final Bond Quest Roundup, I’d rank Brothership is my second favorite M&L game, right behind Superstar Saga.

It’s like, an 8 or 9 for me.

That’s not to say I don’t have wishes for the next game.

1. It’s hard to tell what sidequests are worth doing and which are filler. There are plenty of good ones here, but they’re shuffled in with absolute crap like “go to a place and talk to a guy”. I hope the next game Tiers its sidequests into Mini-Adventures and Requests similar to how Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom does it. Give us a tab for “stuff you wanna see”, and another tab for “stuff to do when you’re bored”. Previous M&L games got away with not even having a sidequest menu at all, but if you’re going to go for this “super-modern” philosophy, it can’t resemble a Ubisoft-sandbox gameplay loop.

2. Either fix the Control Parity or kill it entirely. Either let Luigi pick options with B in battle or don’t let me superfluously make him do a goofy little jump in the overworld when he’s not going to use it to do any platforming. One or the other.

3. Faster, snappier combat, with more bosses, more bros. attacks, and less time to get series essentials. The people have spoken, and they seem to be saying that they crave higher quantity of content rather than the “maximize quality of a small handful of things” approach Brothership goes for. I think I can live with the jump being less gorgeous if the attack concludes in under four seconds.

4. For god’s sake? Let Toads be fat or have weird haircuts, and let Goombas have names and be their own weird people and factions. Seeing all the different and cool varieties of Concordians only reminded me MORE of how much I hate what happened to Sticker Star. Show us E. Gadd and Toadsworth and Toadbert and all of the other weird little side characters.

5. Do AWAY with the little Kingdom Hearts-style pop-up tutorials and just let go of the player’s hand sometimes. The old tutorials were FUNNY and silly, and going “we’re SOWWY our tutorials SUCK we put all them in a MENU so you only have to read it if you WANNA” is not better. Just ease off the brakes for once and let players trip and fumble sometimes. We’ll live.

6. The stat boosting items are still Beans, which the Mario Bros are devouring raw, and this has not by any stretch of the imagination made any sense since BIS. Give me Starbeans Café or give me Fawful’s Bean ‘n Badge or Give ME DEATH!!!

7. Don’t reinvent the snowboard for the next game: Please just do the Battle Plug system again, even if you feel obliged to rename it. Thanks.

8. I’m no longer mad about Starlow, as long as she ISN’T the assistant character, but please. For God’s Sake. Stop pretending Stuffwell doesn’t exist. I’ll hit whoever keeps putting Starlow in these games over the head with a suitcase if I go another game that puts Starlow in it without hide nor hair of any other assistant character.

9. There’s a bit in Brothership where the Bros get a Fire & Ice overworld Bros. Move. I FULLY expected to get into a battle and to have silently and secretly received the Fire/Ice Flowers as a Bros. Attack. This didn’t happen and it made me incredibly sad. The Superstar Saga way of “If you can do it in the overworld you can do it in battle” reigns supreme, and should be expanded upon. Its absence in Brothership is easily the most confusing misstep. Like. They give you Fire & Ice Battle Plugs. They give you Fire & Ice Flowers. They give you a upgraded versions of overworld Bros. Moves. But you have to wait until the last three hours of the videogame before they give you a Fire/Ice Bros. Attack. Who did this to me?

10. Last but not least: I hope they actually give Acquire a second shot at it. Much of this game reads as a clumsy first step from a team that now, with the benefit of one of this style of game behind them, knows what they’re doing. I hope Sony doesn’t acquire Kadokawa and fuck the whole thing up right as soon as my dearest RPG subseries returned to me after much hardship.

Also:

Superstar Saga > Brothership > Super Paper Mario > Partners in Time > Super Mario RPG > Dream Team > Bowser’s Inside Story > The Thousand Year Door >= Origami King > Paper Mario 64 > Paper Jam > Color Splash > Sticker Star

This is my personal ranking, fight me dead about it.