Brothership’ is a good RPG buried under too much nonsense

For a cute RPG, Mario & Luigi: Brotherhood (from November 7) there is a lot of pressure. It is the first new entry in the Mario & Luigi subseries since original developer AlphaDream filed for bankruptcy in 2019. It also steps into the role of Nintendo’s flagship Mario RPG, now their other major role-playing series, Paper Mariohas completely abandoned the genre.

Happy, Brotherhood takes up the challenge. It’s one of Nintendo’s best attempts at a Mario RPG yet, thanks to clever evolutions in the series’ storytelling and combat.

But players will have to work to see its genius unfold, like Brotherhood withholds most of its best aspects during opening hours. Critics and fans alike have panned the 2013s Mario & Luigi: Dream Team because of the boring prologue, filled with tutorials that lasted way too long. Brotherhood There are few tutorials that clog up the first phase of the adventure, but otherwise little of note happens.

Getting things in order

The story begins with Mario and Luigi going about their day, when Luigi provokes a swarm of bees. Mario saves his brother, and the two share a warm embrace. It’s a cute and touching scene, and a welcome new direction for a series that often relies on snide or cruel comments toward Luigi for its humor. The power of their connection causes an unexpected reaction in the air that pulls the duo into another world called Concordia.

However, all is far from good in Concordia. A mysterious force attacked the Uni-Tree, a plant that physically held every part of the land together, and now everyone lives on isolated islands, cut off from expanding their horizons and meeting new people. Mario and Luigi’s job is to reconnect each island and restore the Great Lighthouses, beacons that bring people together across the land.

It’s a fun setup, but it takes five to eight hours to complete Brotherhood finally opens up and starts doing something with it. Characters with the potential to be interesting appear briefly on stage and are quickly forgotten as the brothers move on to another task. Enemy variety is sparse on the first few islands, and Mario and Luigi have a limited number of abilities to use in battle. Combat quickly becomes repetitive, and exploration feels stilted and unrewarding.

Brotherhood even know there are pacing issues. Initially, Shipshape Island, the team’s floating headquarters, sails the seas at a painfully slow pace. If you miss an island or point of interest, you’ll have to wait a full minute or more for Shipshape to bypass the current and bring it back into view. Just before tackling the first Great Lighthouse – about eight hours into the game – a Toad duo devises a way to make the ship move so fast that it even completes a lengthy circuit in less than 10 seconds.

There is no achievement or milestone that unlocks accelerated travel or other major new abilities that impact the game’s quality of life; Brotherhood hands them out randomly after making players suffer for a while.

After the first big boss fight, Brotherhood evens himself out and begins to convey his ideas more effectively. In a world where everyone is shaped like a plug and where the word ‘connection’ is played around everywhere, it is not surprising that unity BrotherhoodThe big idea of ​​the game, but the directions the game takes to advance that theme are surprising.

A strange cast

In an early instance, an angry, lonely bully decides to destroy works of art out of impotent rage. An aunt who used to care for him tells him that if he wants people to like him, he should try to make them happy – before sending him into orbit with a ‘tough love attack’. Questionable parenting methods aside, the point here and everywhere Brotherhood is that harmony takes work. Feeling happy and whole involves thinking about the needs of others as well as your own, and in an ideal society there is no room for entitled bullies.

The idea is not new, but the remarkable thing is that a Mario game actually has something to say something. Most Mario RPGs – even story-heavy ones like Super paper Mario – are self-contained and superficial, with no attempt at thought and few ideas you can apply outside of the game. And that’s fine! In a time when anything even approaching harmony in real life feels like a distant memory, it’s just refreshing to see a recognizable pop culture icon step outside the bounds of their imagination for a change.

The strange characters Mario and Luigi meet and the roles they play help BrotherhoodThe game’s message feels more personal, thanks to one of the game’s biggest changes Mario & Luigi series. Previously, supporting characters played only minor roles, and NPCs usually only existed to make funny jokes and fade back into obscurity. Brotherhood adopts a new style where characters have their own stories that grow and evolve over time.

Some stories are fools, like an urban middle manager who must find a new purpose in life – daily spa visits – after his boss replaces him. Many are more profound, however, including one that follows a young sailor who tries to save his father and learns to stand on his own two feet without him. Of course, some are just plain weird, like the Grampy Turnips, little old vegetable men planted in the ground who chatter on with unsolicited advice that is occasionally helpful and usually moot.

A lack of worldly variety

Whatever the nature of their stories, undertaking quests for these characters sends Mario and Luigi back to islands they’ve already visited, to explore new areas, find hidden treasures or defeat specific enemies. Brotherhood needs that incentive to engage with each location, as the actual level design is one of its weakest points.

Last Mario & Luigi games built elaborate puzzles into each location that relied on splitting up the duo and using Bros. Moves – actions that Mario and Luigi can only complete together – in creative ways to overcome obstacles. Brotherhood handles this differently, but feels limited by having to follow some of the series’ traditions. The movements of Bros. this time involve throwing fireballs or spinning so fast that the two can float in the air for a moment, and they are rarely used in inventive ways.

Instead of, Brotherhood relies on location-specific puzzles, such as manipulating vines in a rainforest to reach enclosed areas, completing a memory puzzle to make flowers bloom, or, in one case, putting Luigi in a barrel and using him as cover during a stealth mission .

How Brotherhood implements these ideas is often inconsistent. For every island with a creative design, Brotherhood adds one with simple jumping challenges or a series of holes to spin over. The visual variety of most islands ensures that exploring doesn’t get too boring, especially afterwards Brotherhood takes Mario and Luigi into new seas, breaking away from the usual Nintendo world designs – ice, desert, lava – with glitzy entertainment centers and busy tourist destinations. But compared to the highlights of previous entries such as Partners over time (2005) and Bowser’s inside story (2009), the overall puzzle design is still a disappointment.

Even if performing actions themselves can be boring, Brotherhood still retains a sense of fun with its appearance. The first fully 3D Mario & Luigi game, it has larger scale character models that are more expressive than ever before. The result is some of the most vibrant animation in a Nintendo game, even by the high standards of recent games like Super Mario. Brothers Wonder (2023).

A surprisingly complex strategic core

For one of their moves, Mario and Luigi hug each other and walk around as if they are about to dance a tango. Standard attacks in combat require multiple button presses, with each input accompanied by a dramatic action. When Mario raises his hammer, Luigi can strike it from below, sending Mario somersaulting into an enemy to deal extra damage with slapstick glee. It’s occasionally worth messing up attack cues just to see the couple’s shocked reactions when it all goes wrong.

That the brothers can botch an attack and suffer little consequence in most fights might indicate that Brotherhood is too simple. Fighting standard enemies often presents little challenge compared to something like this Metaphor: ReFantazio‘s battles, but fight in them Brotherhood Prioritize good timing over brute force: press the right buttons at the right time to deal extra damage, protect yourself from an enemy attack, or launch a counter.

Most enemies have unique and varied attack patterns that require more attention than previous games in the series to defeat. Learning their ways and landing a perfect counter is essential, especially in boss battles, where dangerous enemies often get multiple consecutive turns and can interrupt the team’s turn order.

At their best, many of the encounters are in Brotherhood are the most memorable in the series. Luigi Logic – moments where Luigi comes up with unorthodox solutions independently of Mario – occurs in some of these battles, where Luigi can spend a turn on a daring attack that, with the right timing, stuns the enemy and causes them to take heavier damage. then a full turn.

Choosing these moves seems like the obvious choice in theory, but boss fights require careful assessment before choosing a strategy. Skipping healing or support in favor of an aggressive approach can quickly end an encounter or completely ruin it if you miss a button prompt – not ideal, considering how long and complex these battles often are.

With the many refinements that have been made to the Mario & Luigi series with Brotherhood‘s combat, the result is one of the more entertaining (albeit wacky) combat systems in the genre – once it finally gets going. The game as a whole has some wonderful themes, sequences, and mechanics to showcase, but it takes way too long to get there.

But for players willing to stick it out by spending several hours spinning wheels, Brotherhood ends up being one of the best Mario RPGs so far.

Mario & Luigi: Brotherhood launches on November 7 for the Nintendo Switch.