Mario & Luigi: Brothership Review Roundup

2024 might end up being the last year of the Nintendo Switch’s lifespan before it’s replaced by something else. Yet looking at the console’s constant stream of new releases you wouldn’t realize that. In a year that already saw wonderfully charming titles like The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Princess Peach: Showtime! Nintendo is now here with the return of the Mario & Luigi series of RPGs. But does Mario & Luigi: Brothership live up to the expectations? The answer is a bit complicated.

Ahead of Brothership’s November 7 release date, reviews are wildly divided. As the first original entry in nearly a decade, the last being Paper Jam for the 3DS in 2015, there has been a lot of excitement for Brothership. While the current Metacritic score for the game is sitting at a respectable 80, when you dig into reviews you’ll find a lot of similar criticisms pop up even in the most glowing articles.

There is a lot of praise for Brothership’s beautiful animation and sailing mechanic, with Digital Trends’ Giovanni Colantonio calling the former “a revelation.” Other critics, such as IGN’s Logan Plant, bemoan the game’s bloated runtime. While Brothership’s writing and length seems hit or miss, every review agrees that the game is plagued by performance issues, a clear sign that the Switch is at its limits.

Here’s a roundup of what others are saying about Mario & Luigi: Brothership:

Despite a few lurches here and there and some so-so exploration, Mario & Luigi Brothership offers an enjoyable voyage with smooth sailing, and a punderful script that brings the laughs. It has a new developer and an extra dimension, but the same dedication to humor and brotherly love.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership is an incredibly disappointing return for an RPG series I’ve always loved. Apart from the combat, it fundamentally misunderstands its own past success, and completely fumbles Luigi’s role in puzzle-solving and exploration by making him more of a pain than a partner. The story is simplistic and unoriginal, its attempts at humor fall flat, and the overly chatty writing holds your hand to a ridiculous degree. It’s not a total disaster, as the excellent, flashy turn-based battles are some of the best this series has ever had – but even those somehow manage to wear thin as the repetitive final act crawls across the finish line of this roughly 34-hour campaign, which suffers from surprisingly bad performance issues nearly the entire time. The Switch has been home to many triumphant revivals for Nintendo, but the Mario & Luigi series has sadly missed the boat.

It’s been a long wait for a new Mario & Luigi game, so Brothership is welcome in at least bringing the franchise back. But Nintendo’s new game takes fewer, far less interesting risks at reimagining the Mario & Luigi brand of action-RPG gameplay compared to its predecessors. Instead, Mario & Luigi: Brothership, with its roughly 30-to-35-hour story and an endless list of things to check off, seems to have learned an unfortunate lesson from other RPGs, favoring bloat over reinvention.

I’ve really enjoyed Brothership, but I have caveats. For one thing, and this is maybe just my patience fraying slightly as I get older and meaner, I find the stop-startiness of it increasingly awkward. I’ll be setting off to do something and then there will be a cut-scene to dismiss or a dialogue section that I can speed up but not skip. It’s not just that it tangles the flow, it’s that it doesn’t really feel like Mario, which is commonly so rare to interrupt players. That said, I don’t know if it’s the shift in developer to a team that’s less succinct, or if it’s actually any worse here than it has been before, so maybe chalk this one up to my gathering decrepitude.

Brothership is a sleek product that’s designed to be entertaining. You can never really be disappointed, but nor are you really surprised too often. For those who do decide to delve in and grind to the end, Brothership has a message about how we’re all in this together. And watching the classic brothers get up to all sorts of creative hijinks is always a fun nostalgia trip, providing just enough cuteness to see this journey through.

This is the first Mario & Luigi on Switch and it very much feels like the series’ first big-budget home console entry. It’s so much bigger than any of the older games, not just in terms of play time, but in terms of ideas too. The only bad thing about Brothership is that it sets the bar so high there’s no going back to the originals now.

I wouldn’t label Mario & Luigi: Broithership as a bad game, but what’s cruelly ironic is that it’s a middle of the road effort that’s sure to sow the very division its story aims to combat. Some fans will love it, praising its cheery visuals and deep combat system. Others will hate it, feeling like it’s another part of a long series downslide. The overly simplistic score I’ve put on this review will inevitably end up in a social media thread aggregating reviews, and the comments will be filled with people personally insulting me or this publication before playing the game themselves or even reading this critique. Rather than talking to one another and trading our perspectives in good faith, bitter arguments will flare up across technology that once united us, but now incentivizes people to become the most bitter, isolated versions of themselves.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership launches on November 7, 2024 exclusively for Nintendo Switch.

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