Mario & Luigi: Brothership

In Mario & Luigi: Brothership, the iconic duo embarks on a nautical adventure in the new setting of Concordia, a vast sea dotted with islands that were once part of a single landmass. The Uni-Tree, which held the islands together, has wilted, causing them to drift apart. Mario and Luigi, along with a young researcher, pilot a ship housing a new Uni-Tree sapling. Their mission is to reconnect the islands by linking them to the Great Lighthouses that amplify the sapling’s power.

The Good:

• The artwork is beautiful.

The Bad:

• The gameplay is mind-numbingly repetitive
• The combat controls don’t feel as responsive as they should
• The story is barely existent (kind of an issue with an RPG)
• Puzzles are overly simplistic and practically solve themselves.

The Ugly:

• None

Mario & Luigi: Brothership Review

Brothership possesses all of the requisite RPG accoutrement – character leveling, side quests, gear, and item acquisition. Unfortunately, it’s all very rudimentary and unimpressive. The character leveling system shows Mario and Luigi’s advancement but only allows players to manually modify one special aspect of each character every seven levels, which wouldn’t be such a big deal if the combat weren’t so tedious.

                   

In fact, everything in Mario & Luigi: Brothership seems designed to make players lament that there’s more to do. One of the major reasons for this is the way in which most puzzles are solved. Anyone who’s played an RPG in the last forty years knows that puzzles are the key ingredient to maintaining player interest. Unfortunately, Brothership goes out of its way to suck the fun out of most of them by all but solving them for you. In fact, Luigi has an “inspiration” mode in which he literally alights with a leap in logic, which results in either a cut screen requiring you to do nothing more than hit a button to initiate his actions or, at best, highlights the obstacles, switches, etc needed to move forward, often accompanied by a bit of dialogue to direct you to the puzzle’s solution perfectly. The result is that the player is left feeling as though they are doing little more than steering on a track with limited turns.

While everything in Mario & Luigi: Brothership is repetitive, the combat is the worst offender. Turn-based and very reminiscent of early RPGs in which the heroes enter the combat screen on one side and the various monsters on the right, the combat options are limited, and most are only slight variations of one another, as are the monsters.

Ultimately, adults will feel their brains seeping out of their heads very early into the game, and even kids (if they are anything like my 10-year-old son) will eventually grow bored. If you’re looking for a good Mario game, get yourself Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury.

WOKE REPORT

Girls, Girls, Girls

• Every positively aligned NPC of consequence is a female. Conversely, all of the villains are male.

Chivalry Taken Out Back, Shot, and Drowned

• A foundational component of all core Mario games, the exception being Super Mario 2, which was narratively a dream and, therefore moot, is that Mario and, to an extent, Luigi love Princess Peach to the point that they continually put their lives on the line to repeatedly rescue her from the evil clutches of Bowser et al. However, in a complete 180° turn, Brothership gives players the option to either place her or Luigi in mortal danger. Choose Luigi, and you have to complete the next section of the game without his help in the never-ending slog of repetitive monster encounters, but you get better intel on what awaits you. Choose Peach, and you will keep Luigi fighting by your side. From a purely tactical POV, it’s a no-brainer choice. The game is incredibly simplistic, and to get it over with as quickly as possible, I’ve chosen to stick with Luigi. However, it shouldn’t be an option. Should the game developers want to show that Peach is brave, fine. Let her volunteer to be kidnapped, only to have Luigi or Mario immediately jump in and say that there’s no way that they are letting her be taken. It makes me sick that my 10-year-old son got to this point before I did. However, I made the rookie mistake of playing a few hours of it and deeming it ok. Thank God, I’m playing the game, too, and can now have a conversation with him about men’s God-given roles as protectors.
  • Neither Mario nor Luigi hesitate about the possibility of her going. Everyone accepts that it is Mario’s choice and all of the broad NPC’s cheer on her bravery.
  • There is a lot more game after this (like 75%), and since this is the only instance of this, strictly by the numbers, it’s not enough to justify moving the Woke-O-Meter more than I have, but it’s enough for me to dissuade you from buying it.