November 2024 marked the comeback of the Mario & Luigi series after almost ten entire years without new game. As a person who finished the game 100% (and spent much more than 60 hours doing it), it is an incredibly polarizing RPG. On the one hand, the visual style is excellent – the characters are expressive, the basic gameplay of the series remains mainly intact, and the story, although nothing revolutionary, is solid. On the other hand, the brothers are retained by its horrible rhythm, its disappointing technical performance and a large amount of filling content between its main beats.
Fifteen years later, I am not sure that Nintendo can really solve one of Mario & Luigi: the biggest problems of Brothership via a traditional remake. Many of his greatest problems are cooked in his history and his presentation in such a way that it would require a significant remutillage of the points of the plot and the gameplay. But today, we are going to review a list of changes that would help cement Mario & Luigi: Brothership as the best entry in the series. We must not implement these changes being implemented, but it is still fun. Keep in mind that we will discuss spoilers, so you may want to put this post as a bookmark and come back later if you always try to avoid them.
Before entering all the negative things and how to repair them, I want to clarify that I like Mario & Luigi: Brothership. This is probably my second favorite game in the series, but it’s a title with incredible potential. As I mentioned earlier, the artistic style is excellent. The characters are super expressive and the animations correspond very well to their personalities. It is a faithful 3D adaptation of the traditional artistic style of Mario & Luigi, and it helps to give its characters a striking and unique look. Without forgetting that the end of the game is excellent in theory – in practice, it is retained by too long sections which feel like never ends, no longer a four -hour side quest just when you think the game is finished. Mario and Luigi are assimilated in a world version of virtual reality of the mushroom kingdom where Bowser is friendly and everything is perfect is a surprisingly mature plot for a Mario game, and the main antagonist, reclusa, almost feels like an antagonist as soon as the persona series is released. Despite the gaps of Brothership, his villain and his last section are very memorable.
The main problems with Mario & Luigi: the brothers are its length and its rhythm. Its story goes to around 40 hours if you rush, which has roughly the same length as Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. That being said, Dream’s team has many more points of the plot and spaces much better than the brothers. Most of the nice history of Brothership are in the last ten hours of the game, and they only last for about thirty minutes each. Most of the game has gone to jump from one island to another and connect them to Shipipshape Island, but few things tend to happen on each island. Several of the islands, such as Bulbfish Island and Merrygo Island, feel particularly repetitive and frankly rather boring. This is a problem that cannot be resolved with a simple remake at the bottom of the line – the story of Brothership seems to be twenty hours, not forty hours. Nintendo should reduce the filling dialogue and perhaps even delete many scenes, and at this stage, the game would be considerably modified.
Rhythm is also a huge problem throughout the game. It takes a lot more time than normal to obtain hammers and especially Bros attacks, which are distributed over the execution time of forty hours. Especially at the start of the game, you still have to attack with other than jumps. Another problem linked to the pace is the secondary quests – if you plan to play the brothers but I haven’t done it yet, I would really recommend jumping most of the secondary quests. There is just so much Among them, and almost all are filling quests which add very little to the construction of the world of Concordia. For each secondary quest you finish, it seems that at least three new ones appear. If you go 100%, it is very easy to go out and lose motivation to continue playing. Some secondary quests are only available for a limited time, so if you advance the story too far, they disappear for good.
One of Brothership’s most unexpected problems is his performance. At the start of the game, it’s not great, but it’s not too bad. The brothers target 30 images per second, and there are sometimes hollows, especially in the world. This is particularly problematic for games like the Hammer rally, which forces you to hit a ball in both directions with a perfect timing 100 times in a row. Most hammer rally locations are found in areas with lots of NPCs visible on the screen, which means that you will often get 90 strokes, feel a random frame and spoil the timing. That being said, Hammer Rally is completely optional, so it would be at least excusable – however, towards the end of the game, the main antagonist takes over and creates a red fog that drags on each area of the game for the rest of this backup file. This fog causes an absolutely unreal offset – the game can even drop below 20 frames per second at certain times. And this fog remains until you beat the game, which means that after a certain point in history, the performance takes a huge blow from this moment. The drop in image frequency makes the game cheap – the graphic style is impressive, but it does not seem that it would be particularly impressive. Mario games normally work quite well on Nintendo Switch, even if they are 30 coherent images per second rather than 60. However, the brothers often manage to reach 30 images per second, especially at the end of the game, and this is something that could be easily corrected by a remake or an update Nintendo Switch. Brothership’s performance has been strongly criticized.
Some players are also frustrated by the way Luigi is treated in the game. In the previous titles of the series, you could jump independently with Mario and Luigi, but this time, Luigi is a character controlled by AI who somehow does his own thing in the world. In battles, you also control Luigi’s attacks with button A instead of button B, but this could easily be corrected with a parameter. Personally, I don’t think these two problems are huge, but I can see how some players would find them slightly boring. Some players also complain about dry writing and too many tutorials, which definitely plays in the game that is too long and having a bad rhythm.
Mario & Luigi: Brothership is a game with a lot of potential, but it is considerably retained because it exceeds its welcome and bombard the player with filling content. Personally, I do not know anyone else who beat the game, and it’s a shame – all the coolest moments of Brothership are heavy spoilers, and they all occur at the very end. I find that these are some of the most memorable moments in the Mario & Luigi series as a whole – in fact, I would even say that the Bouthership’s final boss is the second best in the series (second behind the interior history of Bowser). Not all the problems of Brothership could not be resolved by a remake, but if Nintendo never decides to make a Switch 2 edition, a big boost and perhaps an adjustment to control the attack entries of Luigi would go very far.
However, there are a little good news here: Brothership has sold well, and the acquisition will almost certainly make another Mario & Luigi game a few years later. Nintendo is quite receptive to comments within their games, so there is a very real chance that the next title has much better rhythm and performance.
If you played the brothers, what have you thought of the game? Have you managed to beat him, or did his long execution time finally made you lose interest? Let us know in the comments below.
Related
