Mario and Luigi: Brothership Review
Initially, Mario and Luigi: Brothership pushes back against the player with high levels of difficulty, too much exposition and plenty of frustration with low levels of freedom, choice and innovation. However, once Brothership begins to set sail on the open seas, literally and figuratively, it becomes a fantastic Mario RPG full of engaging combat, plenty of customization and a fantastic world to explore.
CONCORDIA
In Mario and Luigi: Brothership, the worlds most famous plumber brothers get sucked into a portal and must help the people of Concordia as their world has become fractured. Brothership has a surprisingly relevant motif about reestablishing connection in a world that has become fractured and broken apart. The parallels are obvious. The enemy is manufacturing gloom and your job is to sail around and connect the lost islands one at a time, and help rebuild the Uni-Tree. It’s a classic tale of light versus dark.
What immediately caught my eye with Mario and Luigi: Brothership was the unique, albeit polarizing art direction. Concordia is filled with extremely vibrant colors and clever designs. The animations are incredible, feature a plethora of variety and feature a meticulous attention to detail. Little things like how you revive your downed brother in battle with a 1-UP mushroom, his mouth opens slightly or when you blast onto each island, Luigi lands different almost every time, which had my interest from start to end to see how he would land. Brothership might not be as graphically demanding and polished as other Mario titles, but I loved the Art Direction with the exception of the friendly NPC’s.
Concordia is filled with islets to find, islands to explore and dungeons to scour. The exploration of the worlds are filled with puzzles that find the sweet spot between being too easy, which can feel like a waste of time and being too difficult, which can become frustrating. It also doesn’t become stale and repetitive as one dungeon will have you searching for number combinations to unlock a door and the next dungeon you are doing stealth.
COMBAT
What made Mario and Luigi unique was how the brothers worked together in combat and in exploration, which is great to see the core element of the series still remain intact and fresh. The series uses an active turn based battle system that is much more involved that traditional Mario RPG’s.
There is active turn based combat and defense and then there is Mario and Luigi Brothership which demands concentration at all times. Windows to execute proper attack moves and counters are razor thin. The timing of the enemy attacks is the hardest skill to achieve. It can be done, but they keep you on your toes by doing a variety of moves, from a variety of positions and try to bait you into to countering early.
I liked that after losing big battle a few times, Brothership offers three ways to proceed. The standard retry, a slightly easier way, and a cakewalk. Although providing the options is a nice way to make the game more accessible to more players, I never caved to lowering the difficulty and eventually mastered the enemy patterns, not only emerged victorious, but felt a sense of accomplishment for sticking with it, similar to how I feel when playing souls and souls-likes.
Brothership features a more streamlined and traditional levelling system that upgrades all stat categories upon reaching a new skill level. I would have liked a little more customization with character attributes. It does provide a little bit of tailoring every milestone level which happens every 7-8 levels and this allows you to add a unique perk to each brother. The one I found most helpful was to add faster experience gain to each brother. The other way you can slightly customize each brother is with their equipment, but ideally you want each brother to have the best item, so most of the time they were using the same equipment.
When distilling Brothership, the most unique and noteworthy features were the Battle Plugs, Bros Moves and Luigi Logic with the latter being an essential element of exploration and combat.
In terms of exploration, Luigi has ideas around the world where he will start to glow green and this is the indication that he needs to do something to further the adventure of the brothers. As the game progresses you will unlock different Bros Moves that gives Brothership an almost Metrodvania experience. For starters one of the Bros Moves is basically a morph ball, but returning to previously visited islands, these Bros Moves allow you reach previously inaccessible areas.
These items were fun in exploration but they truly blossomed into their full potential in the combat arena. On bosses, Luigi Logic would appear at around the halfway point and would allow Luigi to interact with the environment using a special move that had the potential to deal immense damage if the timing was right.
Finally, there was Battle Plugs, an equipable and expandable system of abilities and perks that allows you to create some game altering combinations. One their own each Battle Plug has basic function like the ability to automatically use a mushroom for health or automatically use a 1-UP Mushroom on a fallen brother without using a turn. A unique combination that we loved was combing the auto 1-UP with the plug that gives you items back after using essentially giving me free 1_ups
The system is balanced as each plug can only be used a certain amount of times before it needs to be recharged and changing the plugs during battle is a breeze. Factor in the ability to expand this system with new plugs and outlets, there is a lot of unique combinations to be discovered.
disconnects
As much as I enjoyed the story and theme, I didnt connect with the character design of the world. Characters didn’t feel emotive, which is ironic because this might be the most emotive that I have ever seen Mario and Luigi. While I appreciate doubling down on the theme and making the characters some form of plug or outlet, I just wasn’t able to make a connection. Pun not intended. There is also too much dialogue and when combined with uninteresting characters this exacerbates the problem.
Mario and Luigi: Brothership also faces a slight identity problem. Just by name association alone, Mario and Luigi convey the idea that a game is for all, especially when combined with a whimsical world like Concordia. However, Brothership is extremely heavy on exposition, which would alienate a more youthful and casual audience. But then the combat is also extremely challenging and you are thrown into the deep end immediately with some boss fights taking 20 minutes and multiple attempts.
On a technical level, the slow loading times were prevalent. Obviously, the core issue is the Nintendo Switch is from 2017, but there are a lot of battles that happen in Brothership with each one having a load-in screen and a upgrade screen to load-out back to the exploration. These serve as a constant reminder of the systems age. It’s not unbearable, it’s just a nuisance.
However, the most egregious problem of Brothership is that it hides the best parts of the game during the first quarter or so. Faster boat travel, equipable perks, Bros Moves for exploration, Bros Power for combat, and the Plug System. Instead of feeling rewarding when you are finally given these things, it’s more a sense of relief from the frustration the system has been causing.
VERDICT
Mario and Luigi: Brothership isn’t perfect as there are plenty of pain points including forgettable allies, performance issues due to the age of the Switch, and a terribly slow start. Once you get over the initial plateau, the 40 hour adventure flew by, thanks to some great new features, high level of challenge and plenty of variety.
Even though it might not be the best new Mario RPG on the Switch, as that title still belongs to Paper Mario: The Origami King, fans of the plumbers role playing adventures should not skip this adventure. Brothership isn’t for the faint of heart, but for those willing to withstand the initial resistance, there is a very rewarding experience to find.