Mario & Luigi Brothership Review - A Touching Tale of Bonds and Connections

Like the best of the Mario & Luigi series, Mario & Luigi Brothership is a marriage of opposing core ideas that strikes a careful balance. It’s turn-based, but action-packed. It’s filled with humor, but never at the expense of its beating heart. It’s an epic seafaring odyssey, but plays out at the pace of a slice-of-life anime. And best of all, it’s the type of cozy, rainy day RPG that’s easy to put on and play at your own pace, as long as your reflexes are sharp.

This will be music to the ears of kids who grew up on the series, but for the uninitiated, there’s nothing quite like the Mario & Luigi games. The formerly handheld-only series developed by AlphaDream delivered fantastic writing, gameplay, and fresh RPG ideas. When the developer shut down in 2019 after Paper Jam combined Mario & Luigi with Paper Mario, fans were left to wonder whether there was only room for one Mario RPG franchise.

But last year’s Super Mario RPG remake sparked hope. Then the trailer for Mario & Luigi Brothership ignited a fireball in fans’ hearts. Brothership would be an epic set in an entirely new universe, in a land called Concordia. It all sounded too ambitious to be good. Would this Brothership’s maiden voyage sail towards the heavens, or get grounded and shipwrecked?

A Tale of the Ties That Bind Us… and How To Live With Others

The game begins similarly to the recent Super Mario Bros. movie, with the two brothers getting sucked into another world and separated mid-portal, but thankfully Mario and Luigi quickly find one another, and then discover that the world they’re in has recently suffered a major cataclysm. The Uni-Tree, a massive Yggdrasil substitute which really held the land together, was recently destroyed. This breaking split the continent of Concordia into over 15 major islands, with various islets and reefs all over. Families are split up, tourists are displaced, and all connections between islands have been severed. The brothers befriend Connie, a cute rock-shaped individual with an electrical plug on her head. She’s a Wattanist in charge of the Uni-tree, who vows to use the new Uni-tree she’s planted on a motile island to rebind the disparate lands, connecting them together via lighthouses, lassoing them with energy tethers, and dragging them along dozens of sea currents.

Thus begins a 45-60+ hour odyssey across five seas and many islands. Mario and Luigi will be mending family relationships, fostering new ones, clearing up misunderstandings, playing hide-and-seek, saving little rock folks from monsters, making a wedding happen, procuring hair gel for breakdancers, solving sliding ice-block puzzles, escaping prison, and all of the trappings that come with your typical JRPG. Some of these tales go on and on, but all of them have some merit, and I smiled at many catharses at the uplifting ending

Smooth Sailing, Not-So-Smooth Performance

In addition to its many islands, this game boasts over a dozen main characters, and the narrative does flesh out many of them rather well. Princess Peach becomes a mainstay, and even Bowser and his minions show up in the game’s back half. There’s a strong theme of ties and bonds, whether between families, friends, mentors and students, and even rivals. These ‘Bonds’, as the game calls them, are thoroughly expressed by the characters, who are all related to various plugs, connectors, cords, and assorted devices. Some are blocky, others stretchy, but their facial expressions complement the dialogue. My favorites are the Grampy Turnips that offer unsolicited but often funny life advice. 

But the writing, or perhaps the translation, is hit and miss. Jokes sometimes seem repetitive, as if the humorous part was lost in translation, and some of the puns and poetry needed a second pass. Given that this game seems to have been rushed to market without thorough performance optimizations, I’ll grant the writers and translators the benefit of the doubt. It’s still better than your average video game script, just not up to the lofty standards set by past entries.

And yes, I’m sad to say it, but Mario & Luigi Brothership does have technical hiccups. Often and even in major thoroughfares, your framerate will drop below 30. If your eyes are sensitive, this can make it hard to look at the screen at times, especially in the game’s final chapters, where the pace drags and you’re shuffled every which way while the world is covered in a dark red mist that’s seemingly intentionally rough on the eyes. One hopes that Nintendo will release the successor to the Nintendo Switch soon, so that we can play these recent games more smoothly.

Clever combat is among the best in the series

The signature element of the Mario & Luigi games is their unique real-time, dual-brothers battle system, where your inputs determine how much damage you do (or don’t) deal and take. It’s not an easy game to play perfectly, as most crucial timings are strict - you’ve got to be paying attention to little details, and may miss cues entirely for one reason or another. Boss battles are intense and require maximum effort, especially if you aren’t fighting everyone you see. (For a quicker and easier game experience, I recommend getting the permanent buff to experience gained when you hit level 8.) You’re encouraged to use the visually-fancy Bros. Moves, where Mario and Luigi team up to deliver brotherly beatdowns.

The only complaint I have about Mario & Luigi Brothership’s combat is that it’s slow-paced by nature. You’ll be waiting for a lot of foes to make their moves, and at times that feels like dead time as they fake you out, mix up their patterns, or transition the view so you’re facing them head-on, etc. But it’s also fair to say that the game makes excellent use of its seemingly endless enemy varieties and attack animations. There are loads of foes in this game, and each one has patterns and timings that you’ll need to memorize. Some people enjoy the challenge, while others find it tedious, especially because it’s easy to get roped into fights, and there are a lot of fast enemies that can take their turns ahead of you, delaying escape.

It’s a shame it takes Brothership ten hours to introduce Battle Plugs, which are equippable plug-in modifiers that act like Artifact cards in Magic: The Gathering. Switchable any time it’s your turn, these buffs can be offensive or defensive, deplete after a certain amount of uses, and must be recharged. Many plugs can combine effects and turn the tide of a battle. You’ll start with the ability to equip two plugs simultaneously, and gain more slots as you progress. The Battle Plug system is one of the more novel ways I’ve seen a JRPG deal with player-controllable advantage/disadvantage states, and I was eager to scour these islands for Sprite Bulbs and make as many Battle Plugs as possible.

There are basic plugs to reduce or boost damage, automatically use Mushrooms, and add oomph to your signature Bros. Attacks, but there are over two dozen of them, and by the end of the game you’ll be able to equip up to five at once. Many of their effects can also be combined for added offensive or defensive boosts. Some of my favorites included Countdown to Cure, which is a plug that counts down 15 turns and then full-heals your party. You can keep charged and swap it in when you need it. Boomerang Items lets you return used items to your inventory - an excellent option if you’re always trying to save coins while progressing at the lowest possible levels for the added challenge, like me. Charge Bank can give you extra Plug uses in a pinch. By the endgame, I was min-maxing my Battle Plugs, which was satisfying. 

A Little Luigi Logic Goes A Long Way

Between the brothers, they’ll find dozens of gloves, accessories, hammers, boots, and wear that can be equipped, and they can mercifully share equipment. After every eight level-ups, you’ll be able to pick one out of a list of permanent buffs, some of which can improve the rate of certain stats’ growth. If you want to, you can make one brother specialize in Health (HP), Bros Points (BP), Pow (Strength), Def (Defense), Speed, or Stache (Critical Hits), or keep them both well-rounded.

There are myriad little moments in the game where Luigi gets his time to shine. He’ll poke at his head until he comes up with a zany idea or two, and sometimes this extends to tide-tuning moves in boss battles, or devising Bros Forms, where the Mario brothers will transform while traversing terrain. They can inexplicably spin around like a UFO, turn into a ball and roll around like Sonic, or shoot out fire and ice balls for gaining the initiative in fights and puzzle-solving. 

Truly A Big Bang For Your Buck

Unusually for me, I spent the time to find every island and do every side-quest in Mario & Luigi Brothership, a task that left me with a playtime of over 60 hours. Most side-quests are over rather quickly, though there are a few enemy challenges and boss runs that provide some decent challenges. Aside from the seemingly endless random battles, for Brothership’s first 75%, I rarely felt like the game was wasting my time or withholding ‘the good stuff’, as all of the major story and character beats do pay off at the end, whether through late-game side-quests, the main narrative, or the epilogue.

With that said, I was really feeling the game’s length in the home stretch. Just when I thought it was over, it hit me with a final act that seems to go on and on, but I was thankful that it at least got to fully flesh out the game’s core themes of connection VS isolation, the dangers of endless fantasy and solipsism, and the importance of maintaining strong bonds with others.

Presentation-wise, aside from the framerate issues, I have no complaints. The graphics are vibrant and Mario and Luigi are very expressive and funny to watch. You won’t even mind that their speech isn’t translated, because you can usually tell exactly what they are thinking. What’s more, the game’s soundtrack is aces. Each island has its own theme, and some of them are real head-boppers. I did wish that they mixed up the battle theme for different acts and in different regions, but the overall theme is solid enough to get stuck in your head and even after 60 hours, I still find myself humming it. 

Time Will Be Kind to Mario & Luigi Brothership

While I found a ton to love in Mario & Luigi Brothership, I can understand that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Many gamers out there may find reading dialogue bubbles to be boring, but I mostly prefer them over the alternative, which are typically long cut-scenes where you must simply wait for cinematics to play out. Other players may also long for more options to bypass random battles, whereas to me, dodging foes is a fun part of the challenge. This is a decidedly old-school JRPG in its design philosophy, and I have no qualms with that.

Mario & Luigi Brothership does its best to appeal to a wide range of players with charming presentation and a strong new Battle Plug system, but not everyone will be enamored with its reflex-testing gameplay. Most will love the universal, all-ages story about deep Bonds and connections between folks of all ages and backgrounds, even if the script goes light on innuendo and hard on puns. It’s cheesy and sappy, but younger players (and young-at-heart ones) will no doubt fall in love with Mario and Luigi themselves. It’s wise that the eponymous brothers are made a core part of the game’s theme, even if it stretches their role as silent protagonists. I’m very glad Nintendo released this game. I’m also happy they haven’t given up on the Mario & Luigi series. Honestly, if it weren’t for the technical issues, I would consider giving this one the highest marks.

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Verdict: 4.5 / 5 (Fantastic)

PROS

• Moving story with a good message of connection, empathy, and heroism

• Excellent Battle Plug system keeps combat feeling fresh

• Hilarious animations, beautiful backgrounds, and relaxing soundtrack

CONS

• Lots of framerate drops, especially when there are particle effects onscreen

• Somewhat lengthy runtime exacerbated by uneven translation

What I’ve Played 

• 100%ed the game - finished all side quests and challenges, discovered all reefs

• Rolled credits at 60 hours

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