Mario & Luigi: Brothership Is A Trip on Rough Waters (2025)

Table of Contents

Return of the Superstars A Journey Across the Seven Seas Finally, Calm Waters and Smooth Sailing (Kinda)

After the surprising success of Super Mario RPG, Nintendo made room for the Mario franchise to enter the heavily-populated space of role-playing games. Back then, most Nintendo series were split into two categories: Console and Handheld. Paper Mario arrived on Nintendo 64 as the Mario RPG series for console, while the Mario & Luigi series was the handheld alternative. Decades later, Nintendo released the Nintendo Switch, combining handheld and console gaming into one entity and giving handheld franchises the chance to be re-imagined on a grander scale. This is how we end up with Mario and Luigi: Brothership, the latest installment in the Mario & Luigi series that (just barely) manages to capture the vibe and fun of the handheld saga, while also replicating the era’s tedious hand-holding and monotonous design flaws.

Return of the Superstars

Mario & Luigi: Brothership gets the key elements of a Mario & Luigi game right, infusing satisfying quick-time events into turn-based combat in battles and allowing the player to pilot Mario and Luigi simultaneously everywhere else. Fans of the series won't be thrown off by a lack of loyalty to the original games, as Brothership emulates the original games with such loyalty that it almost becomes annoying at times (if you like reading dialogue lines one-at-a-time, this is the game for you). The key mechanics and systems in place for combat, exploration and customization are basically untouched, and are largely added to with new features and items.

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The standout change in this new installment of Mario and Luigi is the change over to 3D, implementing a new art style and gameplay elements for its console debut. Everything is now illustrated in a cartoonish cell-shaded art style, which unfortunately fails to deliver and comes off more as cheap, rather than creative (such as the redesigns in Super Mario Bros. Wonder for example). The graphics look watered down and undemanding, making the appearance of dropped frames and lag in cutscenes and gameplay that much more surprising. Super Mario Odyssey, a year-one title for the Switch that managed to look and run better than Brothership, costs the same amount, which makes us wonder where the value of this new game is supposed to be found in comparison.

The standout change in this new installment of Mario and Luigi is the change over to 3D, implementing a new art style and gameplay elements for its console debut.

The addition of the three-dimensional perspective (the camera is fixed in place, so it doesn't feel too different) is accompanied by new kinds of puzzles and platforming sections to be introduced. Unfortunately, these puzzles are linear and don't require much puzzle-solving skill at all, and the lack of freedom in platforming segments makes them easily forgettable. The saving grace is the set of new combat moves, which rotate and move the camera into interesting new positions for dynamic attacks, such as the soccer-like shell moves.

A Journey Across the Seven Seas

Mario & Luigi: Brothership Is A Trip on Rough Waters (2)

Brothership takes place in a strange land far away from the Mushroom Kingdom, in which the world has been separated into drifting islands that Mario and Luigi must help reunite into one continent. The hub world is a small island with a large tree that can connect the islands back together, which the game constantly reminds you is integral to the plot, taking every opportunity to let you read through the same lines of expository dialogue whenever it's mentioned. The tree also serves as a huge set of sails, moving your island across the water along currents surrounded by small islands for you to explore. It's not quite an open-world game, since the islands themselves are so linear, but there's some amount of freedom in which islands you choose to visit and where you choose to sail.

These may be the only two instances of "freedom" that it actually gives players, as the campaign kicks off with an hour-long tutorial featuring more hand-holding and exposition than an episode of Dora the Explorer. Pre-rendered cutscenes (which are rare) can be skipped, but the majority of in-engine cutscenes feature excessive amounts of dialogue, which is made more frustrating by the sloppy fast-forward system. Anybody who has tried to return to Game Boy-era RPGs will know the kind of dialogue that we're referring to here, the kind that forces the player to read through paragraphs of boring explanations and shallow attempts at character development half a sentence at a time, waiting for the words to appear on screen letter-by-letter.

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Some of the hand-holding is actually helpful, such as the "Luigi Logic" mechanic, which allows Luigi to journey off on his own to help with puzzles and platforming sections without having to control his every move. But for the most part, it's a mind-numbing and nearly-unbearable first hour or two as you read through text intended for five-year-olds (in a game that is marketed to ten-year-olds and probably only being played by twenty-to-thirty-year-olds). How Nintendo hasn't moved past this kind of monotonous and dull presentation by now, in the face of so many other turn-based RPGs that get it right, is beyond me.

Finally, Calm Waters and Smooth Sailing (Kinda)

Thankfully, once you're past the abysmal first act, you're given some room to breathe and the real fun begins. There's still a ton of hand-holding and tedious dialogue, but they only show up half as often in the middle-to-late stages. New ideas are finally shown off to the player, with new mechanics and environmental obstacles providing gameplay that's remarkably fresh for the series. These still aren't enough to make up for the negatives that plague the game (which become more and more glaring as it goes well past the thirty-hour mark to complete).

It takes a while, but the hub world (the titular Brothership) can be outfitted with shops and stalls to purchase and upgrade new gear. As you start visiting more islands, more and more travelers from said locations will make their way on to the ship to explore. Side quests allow players to get better gear and XP while also finding fun stories to experience on their own time. It's not a groundbreaking or genre-defining RPG by any means (and the story never gets any better), but it is a solid turn-based strategy game aimed at the family market.

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