Review – Mario & Luigi: Brothership

The Mario & Luigi series of RPG video games has had a cult following since its first appearance on the GameBoy Advance back in 2003. Having its roots in the Mario RPG classic on the SNES, Mario & Luigi: Brothership is the sixth game in the series, and the first original game in the series in almost ten years. At this point, many fans had given up hope for the series, thinking it abandoned by Nintendo. Today we see if the wait was worth it.

I’ll be honest up front. Unlike many others who have probably reviewed Mario & Luigi: Brothership, I have never played a Mario & Luigi game. As a kid, I missed that ship, and I have never had the chance in my adult life to go back and check them out. I was thrilled to receive a review copy of the latest M&L game, and to see what I was missing. Read on to find out what I thought!

Content Guide

Mario & Luigi: Brothership is a very clean, family-friendly game. We would normally break the content guide into discreet topics, but there aren’t enough content issues in the game to warrant it. The violence is very cartoony and slapstick, and the worst that happens is enemies puff into a cloud and vanish. Some of the enemies might be a bit too dark or spooky for younger kids. There is some light toilet humor in the game, but it’s sparse. Other than that, Brothership is a great family game, perfect for kids and teens.

On the positive side, Brothership has a very pronounced theme involving connection. Throughout the game, connection—both societal and personal—is stressed to be the most important thing you can achieve, and something that is vital for happiness and peace. Through both gameplay and story, Brothership says things that connect people are to be sought, and things that isolate them are to be avoided.

Story

Are you ready for another game of “Mario and the gang get isekai’d into another dimension and have to find a way home?” Yes? Good, because otherwise this monologue is going to be awkward.

Another beautiful day dawns in the Mushroom Kingdom, and Mario, Luigi, and all their friends are going about their day, living their best lives. Until the sky splits open and ominous portals start pulling people in. Mondays, am I right? Out titular heroes awake to find themselves in a world torn asunder, needing a hero to save the day. Good thing we brought two of those!

The world of Concordia, where Mario and Luigi find themselves, was once a prosperous kingdom unified by the Uni-Tree. The land was connected by a force called Connectar, which flowed from many Lighthouses in the kingdom. One day, a mysterious cataclysm destroyed the Uni-Tree and disrupted the Connectar flowing from the Lighthouses, causing the kingdom to split into many small islands, set adrift on the vast ocean of Concordia.

In typical Mario fashion, Brothership has a quirky theme that flows through the entire game. The world of Concordia is a fusion of organic plant themes and electronics. There are a LOT of punny names and terms.

Shortly after landing, the M&L Brothers are rescued by Connie, an acolyte Wattanist (the puns begin) sailing on Shipshape Island. Connie’s mentor, who disappeared during the cataclysm that split the world, was one of the main caretakers of the Uni-Tree. Connie has been nurturing a Uni-Tree sappling on Shipshape Island, hoping it can re-unite the world. Shortly into the game, you meet a gang of bad guys who seem to know why the Uni-Tree was destroyed and who have an evil plan to create a corrupted version of Connectar to control the world.

Your mission? To sail the vast oceans of Concordia, re-unite the islands, and to figure out the devious plans of Zokket and his Extension Corps.

Oh, and find your way home somehow. That too.

Gameplay

In Mario & Luigi: Brothership, you spend your time sailing Shipshape Island around the ocean, finding new islands, and completing various challenges to connect the islands back to Shipshape and its budding Uni-Tree. Along the way, you meet a colorful, varied cast of people who you help recover from the Uni-Tree’s destruction and all the associated fallout. Over the game, Shipshape Island becomes the center of a massive flotilla of islands as you unite the world back together and foil Zokket’s plans.

Shipshape Island acts as both transportation and as a hub world in Brothership. Over the course of the game, the Island expands and new people arrive to offer various forms of assistance to the brothers.

Exploring each new island and connecting it back to Shipshape Island can involve any number of activities, but they normally involve two main things: combat and puzzles.

If you’ve played a M&L game or the Mario RPG, the combat will be very familiar. In the overworld, enemies are visible as you traverse islands, and you initiate combat by bumping into them, jumping on them, or bopping them over the head with a hammer. Initiating combat before an enemy sees you gives you an advantage in the first turn, but it works the other way around as well. Some enemies will sneak up on you and get the advantage instead.

The combat in Brothership is turn-based with real-time input to determine how successful an attack is. If you’re trying to smash an enemy with a hammer, you have to press a button within a certain window in order to do maximum damage. If you’re performing a special ability, you have to time multiple button presses successfully in order to bring the pain to your foes. And the interaction continues when you’re on defense. Timing actions correctly can let you dodge enemies’ attacks altogether, or even deal damage back in a counter-attack!  Combat can end up feeling more like a rhythm game at times, which I found pretty fun and engaging. I normally hate quick-time events tainting my pure turn-based games, but Brothership made it work very well.

In boss battles, Luigi always adds an extra element with “Luigi Logic” moves or attacks. Normally half-way through a fight, Luigi will find a way to use some element of the environment to create an off-the-wall attack that can do massive damage to a boss. Some of these Luigi Logic sequences are just glorified QTEs, while others become whole minigames in themselves.

The combat in Brothership was enjoyable for the most part, but I did have one main issue that presented itself in multiple ways in combat: clarity. When an enemy is attacking and you’re on the defensive, an enemy will either attack Mario or Luigi, and you have to react quickly enough to decide both which brother is being attacked and how to dodge. The game tells you that each enemy’s attacks are clearly telegraphed and that if you watch closely enough, you’ll always be able to tell which brother is being attacked by what move. In practice, many enemies’ attacks are terribly telegraphed and it’s extremely hard to tell what attack is happening, much less which brother is being attacked. With time and a bit of patience, I could discover most enemies’ attack patterns and their “tells,” but there were some enemies that, no matter how many times I fought them, it was still a complete mystery what was happening when they attacked. The clarity in combat was sometimes severely lacking, and I often felt like I got lucky as opposed to getting good, which is not the experience you want your players to have.

This problem with clarity was exacerbated in boss fights. At a certain point, I gave up trying to dodge boss attacks and just out-healed them. Boss fights are just short enough that you never saw an attack more than two or three times, and most boss attacks happen faster than regular enemies’ attacks, so dodging them came down completely to luck.

The Luigi Logic attacks in boss fights also had clarity problems many times. A Luigi Logic attack would set you up to do a certain thing, but many times it would not explain clearly what you were supposed to do in the moment, so you again had to just guess and hope you got lucky. Luigi Logic attacks are the main way you deal damage to bosses, so failing one was a major blow every time. The concept of the Luigi Logic attacks were novel and well-thought-out, but in practice they were poorly implemented and sometimes very confusing.

Despite all of this, I enjoyed the combat, because the puzzle aspect of combat appealed to me, and when you did get it right, the interaction in combat was extremely gratifying. I just wish the combat hadn’t been so annoyingly obtuse at times.

 Speaking of puzzles, whoever designed the puzzles in Mario & Luigi: Brothership deserves a raise. Puzzles are the other thing that you will spend most of your time in Brothership doing as you traverse the various islands of Concordia. Environmental puzzles, platforming puzzles, logic puzzles, and even some word puzzles will keep you both busy and guessing. The puzzles vary in difficulty, and on the hard end of the scale, the puzzles were hard. The beauty and genius in Brothership’s puzzles is, no matter how hard the puzzle was, they never felt impossible, or obtuse, or arbitrary. As someone who has dabbled in game and puzzle design, striking that balance of difficulty and achievability is not an easy feat, and I want to give credit where it is due. Brothership has some of the best puzzle design I’ve seen all year.

The amount of variety in the gameplay of Mario & Luigi: Brothership is commendable. There are enough different things to do that you never get truly bored of one activity. The story breaks up the activities very well and paces the player so that they get a taste of everything, without getting overwhelmed. From combat, to puzzles, to fetch quests, to shopping and upgrading, to exploring, to fishing, to little rhythm minigames, Brothership has plenty to keep the player having fun.

Misc. Thoughts

I loved the art style in Brothership. The game has a lovely cell-shaded, cartoony look that works very well on a small handheld like the Switch. It’s an art style that is forgiving on the hardware, yet still has room for lots of creativity and variety.

However, my love of the art style was kind of ruined by the game’s performance. The game should be light-weight and easy to run, yet my Switch had to chug through certain portions of the game, and I’d often get performance drops seemingly out of the blue. Brothership is poorly optimized, and for a first-party game this far into the Switch’s lifecycle, Nintendo should be ashamed.

Another point of consternation for me was that I’m not sure who the target audience for this game is supposed to be. The writing and tone of the game is solidly aimed at kids and teenagers, but some of the gameplay and many of the puzzles are a bit too advanced for that age group. I had trouble with some of the puzzles in the game as an adult! It seems to me that the developers tried to cater to both kids and to the Nintendo adults who were slavering for another M&L game. Unfortunately, it ended up being less of a “balance” and more of a “two completely different, conflicting halves of the same game.”

The writing and dialogue in Brothership is…well, it’s the kind of writing you’d expect from a Mario game aimed at kids. It’s light-hearted, upbeat, and sometimes corny, with a dash of whimsy. If that’s not your style, then go re-play The Last of Us.

If there’s anything you can expect to be quality in a Mario game, it’s the music, and Mario & Luigi: Brothership is no exception. Brothership’s music is lively, quirky, and fun, and sets the mood for the game beautifully. It’s the kind of Mario music that you can hear a thousand times and still somehow not get annoyed with, because it’s so stinking good.

Conclusion

As someone who has never played a Mario & Luigi game before, I went in with zero expectations of this game. What I found was a game with a surprising amount of depth in gameplay and story, and one that, despite having definite problems, I enjoyed my time with.

However, to me the game ended up feeling like a used car in a parking lot of brand new cars. It would be great for some people, but it was not great for me. As an adult with so many other options afforded to me, Mario & Luigi: Brothership did not manage to hold my attention and keep me interested. The gameplay, while engaging and (mostly) well-designed, got repetitive if I played for too long, and the story was fairly predictable. It’s a good game, but not a great game. Going back to the used car analogy: if I had this game as a teen, I would have absolutely loved it. In fact, this might become my recommendation for “baby’s first RPG,” because it’s turn-based combat and RPG elements are very well done. For kids and younger teens, I highly recommend this game; for older teens and adults, your mileage may vary.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership. It’s a good, fun game, as long as you don’t have better options.

Product code was generously provided by Nintendo.