[Game Information] A disappointing revival that
misunderstands what made the Mario & Luigi series great.If you’ve been living under a rock for
the last year and are craving a Mario RPG, then I’ve got good news and bad news.
The good news is that Nintendo has put out three of them in the last 12 months, including
fantastic remakes of Super
Mario RPG and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. The bad news is that Mario & Luigi:
Brothership – the only fully
original adventure so far in this plumber roleplaying renaissance – is easily the worst of the
bunch, and an incredibly
frustrating return for a series I hold dear. Apart from its action-packed, turn-based battles,
it fails in almost every
way to recapture the magic of the best Mario & Luigi games while also clinging to their bad
habits like ridiculously
chatty dialogue, overbearing hand-holding, and boring, runtime-padding fetch quests. Couple that
with shockingly bad
performance issues that distract at nearly every turn, and the nearly 10-year wait for a brand
new Mario & Luigi game
hardly felt worth it by the time the credits rolled.