Mario & Luigi: Brothership review: Nintendo’s new Switch RPG is fine

Nintendo’s Mario & Luigi series has long been home to clever innovations that simultaneously give players control of the Super Mario Bros. and adventures that often take advantage of the hardware they were designed for. Previous games have incorporated time travel, Luigi’s strange dreams, and exploring the contents of Bowser’s guts as inspiration.

Mario & Luigi: Brotherhoodthe first new Mario & Luigi game in nearly a decade, seems content to repeat previous ideas from the franchise. brotherhood brings a handful of new ideas to the Mario & Luigi formula, but few of them give the 20-year-old franchise a fresh feel.

brotherhood begins with Mario and Luigi slipping through a portal that transports them from the Mushroom Kingdom to a new destination called Concordia. Their arrival is good news for the residents of Concordia, whose sacred Uni Tree was recently destroyed and whose vast continent has splintered into a series of floating islands. It’s the bad guys’ fault. With the help of Mario and Luigi and a seaworthy ship/landmass called Shipshape Island, the Concordians hope to put their home back together.

Supporting Mario and Luigi with theirs brotherhood Journey is a long list of NPCs, almost all of whom deal with electrical plugs. There is the pig-like snout, who serves as guide and interpreter throughout the story; Connie, a courageous Wattanist who tends to a budding new growth of the Uni-Tree on Shipshape; and Arc, an experienced sea navigator from Concordia.

As the story progresses and Mario and Luigi bring more scattered pieces of Concordia back together, Shipshape fills with dozens more characters: vendors, craftsmen, and quest givers. These people are full of busy work and side missions for Mario and Luigi, and you will always have a pile of excess things to do brotherhood‘s story.

Reuniting the Concordia Islands requires traveling across different seas and finding new places. Mario and Luigi launch to each island with a cannon, searching for a lighthouse with a plug that can restore the flow of the Uni Tree’s natural resource, Connectar. Each island has a series of puzzles, obstacles and quirky, needy characters that separate the brothers from their lighthouse. There are also new and familiar enemies, some native to Concordia and some sucked in from the Mushroom Kingdom.

Mario and Luigi fight these monsters in turn-based battles that build on the Mario and Luigi combat formula. Each brother takes a turn, controlled with brother-specific buttons, by either stomping on bad guys’ heads or pummeling them with a series of hammer blows. Each attack requires a series of carefully timed button presses that last brotherhoodis combative. The Bros can also team up for complex Bros. Attacks, which require a long series of rapid-fire attacks. They’re amusing, sometimes annoying, and they get thinner over time. Fights take a long time thanks to Bros. Attacks’ long and rubbery animations, but the game introduces new moves and gadgets over time to spice things up.

Luckily, many battles can be avoided. Running away from a fight is always an option (and always successful). You’ll simply miss out on XP and coins that buff Mario and Luigi, so it almost seems necessary to participate in as many battles as possible.

The input-intensive combat and flashy Bros. attacks will feel very familiar to long-time Mario and Luigi fans. To mess things up, brotherhood introduces a new system called Battle Plugs, items that give Mario and Luigi additional attack and defense powers in battle. Battle Plugs add special effects to the brothers’ attacks, unleashing explosive shockwaves or a storm of spiked balls on enemies. You can even automate some moves, with certain combinations unlocking other effects in combat. Choosing the right battle plugs for each combat situation will help make the fight feel exciting. You are forced to experiment with multiple chargers as they lose energy over time and need to be recharged.

As Mario and Luigi level up and acquire new types of equipment, such as super-powered jumpsuits and special gloves, you’ll have the opportunity to customize them to suit your play style. During my playthrough, I made Mario my favorite jumping attacker – him Was After all, Jumpman – and Luigi focuses on hammer skills. While neither of them play completely differently, it was fun to keep each brother down to a minimum to suit my idea of ​​how their personality affects their play.

On the islands of Concordia, Mario and Luigi must complete tasks and solve puzzles for various characters. In these moments, players often have to take advantage of another new feature brotherhood: Luigi Logic. At certain points in the game, Luigi has a brilliant idea about how to get around obstacles or move through the environment in new ways. With Luigi Logic, players learn to transform Mario and Luigi into new forms. you transform them from a tango duo into a spinning UFO; Another turns them into a rolling ball so they can solve pipe puzzles, similar to Samus Aran using morph balls to move through the Metroid games. Luigi Logic also leaves everyday tasks to Luigi; He smashes boxes and grabs coins so Mario can focus on the task at hand.

Luigi Logic finally makes his way into the battles. During the game’s biggest boss fights, Luigi often notices a unique feature of a boss battle arena and then performs a situationally unique Bros. attack. This helps break up some of the game’s more tedious combat, which can quickly feel repetitive.

Repetition is Mario & Luigi: Brotherhood‘s biggest sin. Whether it’s the game’s turn-based battles, which always just feel like… a little bit Too long, numerous fetch quests that require excessive travel, or a few unnecessary dialogues bothered me brotherhoodThe lack of brevity. Every time the fast-forward prompt popped up at the bottom right of the screen, I pressed it angrily.

It doesn’t help that the story of Mario & Luigi: Brotherhood is not particularly convincing. A group of villains known as Zokket and the Extension Corps – a very good name, mind you – are responsible for almost everything bad that has happened to Concordia, and you spend the majority of it brotherhoodThe turgid story hunts them. There are a handful of side stories about the NPCs you befriend and some familiar allies from the Mushroom Kingdom, but none of them are particularly interesting. More serious, however, is the humor of brotherhood. The RPG spinoffs of Mario and Luigi are often wonderfully absurd and full of jokes, but brotherhoodHis attempts to show humor often fail. Oddly enough, the game seems to realize that it’s relying on bad puns and dad jokes; There are several moments of dead silence that punctuate a joke and characters moaning about the game’s bloopers.

The action and leveling up of Mario and Luigi are the better parts of brotherhood. There’s a long, long list of Bros. attacks, unlockable items and gear, battle plugs, and craftable things to use in battle. There’s even a fishing mini-game, highlighting Mario and Luigi’s real RPG experience.

So it’s been a long wait for a new Mario & Luigi game brotherhood is welcome to at least bring the franchise back. But Nintendo’s new game takes fewer and far less interesting risks when it comes to reimagining Mario & Luigi action-RPG gameplay compared to its predecessors. Instead, Mario & Luigi: Brotherhoodwith its roughly 30-35 hour story and an endless list of things to check off, it seems to have learned an unfortunate lesson from other RPGs and prefers bloat to reinvention.

Mario & Luigi: Brotherhood will be released on November 7th on Nintendo Switch. The game was tested on Switch using a pre-download code provided by Nintendo. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These have no influence on the editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. More information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.