Brothership' Is a Good RPG Buried Under Too Much Crap

For a cutesy RPG, Mario & Luigi: Brotherhood (out Nov. 7) has a lot of pressure riding on it. It's the first new entry in the Mario & Luigi sub-series since its original developer AlphaDream filed for bankruptcy in 2019. It's also stepping into the role as Nintendo's flagship Mario RPG, now their other big role-playing series, Paper Mariohas abandoned the genre entirely.

Thankfully, Brotherhood is up to the challenge. It's one of Nintendo's best efforts at making a Mario RPG yet, thanks to smart evolutions of the series' storytelling and combat.

But players will have to work to see its genius unfold, as Brotherhood holds back most of its best aspects during the opening hours. Critics and fans alike panned 2013's Mario & Luigi: Dream Team for its tedious prologue, filled with tutorials that stretched on far too long. Brotherhood has few tutorials clogging up the adventure's first phase, but it has little else of note happening, either.

Getting things in shipshape

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 remarks toward Luigi for its humor. The power of their connection triggers an unexpected reaction in the sky that pulls the duo into another world named Concordia.

Everything is far from good in Concordia, though. A mysterious force attacked its Uni-Tree, a plant that kept every part of the country physically together, and now, everyone lives on isolated islands of their own, cut off from broadening 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 cute setup, but it takes five to eight hours before Brotherhood finally opens up and starts doing anything with it. Characters with the potential to be interesting sweep onto the scene for a few moments and are quickly forgotten as the brothers move on to another task. Enemy variety is scattered on the first few islands, and Mario and Luigi have a limited number of abilities to use in battle. Combat gets repetitive quickly as a result, and exploration feels stilted and unrewarding.

Brotherhood even knows it has pacing problems. Initially, Shipshape Island, the team's floating headquarters, sails the seas at an achingly slow pace. Missing an island or point of interest means waiting a full minute or longer for Shipshape to loop around the currents and bring it back into view again. Just before tackling the first Great Lighthouse — about eight hours after the game starts — a Toad duo comes up with a way to make the ship move so fast that it completes even a lengthy current circuit in under 10 seconds.

There's no achievement or milestone that unlocks expedited travel or any other major new ability that affects the game's quality of life; Brotherhood just arbitrarily doles them out after making players suffer for a while.

After the first major boss battle, Brotherhood evens itself out and starts conveying its ideas more effectively. In a world where everyone is shaped like an electrical plug and plays on the word “connection” are everywhere, it's unsurprising that unity is Brotherhood's big idea, but the directions the game takes to drive that theme home are surprising.

An oddball cast

In one early instance, an angry, lonely bully decides to start busting up artwork as an impotent rage. An auntie who used to look after him tells him if he wants people to like him, he should try making them happy — before punching him into orbit with a “tough love attack.” Questionable child-rearing methods aside, the point here and throughout Brotherhood is that harmony takes work. Feeling happy and whole involves thinking about the needs of others as well as your own, and there's no room for entitled bullies in an ideal society.

The idea isn't novel, but what's remarkable is that a Mario game actually has something to say about anything. Most Mario RPGs — even story-heavy ones such as Super Paper Mario — are self-contained and superficial, with no attempt to provoke thought and few ideas one can apply outside the game. And that's the end! 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 boundaries of their fantasy for a change.

The oddball characters Mario and Luigi meet and the roles they play help Brotherhood's message feel more personal, thanks to one of the game's biggest changes to the Mario & Luigi series. Previously, supporting characters only played minor roles, and NPCs existed mostly just to make witty quips and fade back into obscurity. Brotherhood adopts a new style where characters have stories of their own that grow and evolve over time.

Some of the stories they are silly, such as a middle manager from the city who has to find a new purpose in life — daily spa visits — after his boss replaces him. Many are more in-depth, though, including one that follows a young sailor trying to rescue their father and learning to stand on their own feet without him. Of course, some are just weird, like the Grampy Turnips, little old vegetable men planted in the soil who prattle on with unsolicited advice that's occasionally useful and mostly waffle about.

A lack of worldly variety

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

Previous Mario & Luigi games built extensive puzzles into each location that relied on splitting the duo up and using Bros. Moves — actions Mario and Luigi can only complete together — in creative ways to overcome obstacles. Brotherhood handles these differently, but feels restricted by having to follow some of the series' traditions. Bros. Moves this time include throwing fireballs or spinning so fast that the two can briefly hover in mid-air, and they're rarely used in inventive ways.

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

How Brotherhood implements these ideas is frequently inconsistent. For every island with a creative setup, Brotherhood adds one with simple jumping challenges or a series of gaps to spin across. The visual variety of most islands keeps exploring from feeling too tedious, especially after Brotherhood lets Mario and Luigi enter new seas and breaks up the usual Nintendo world designs — ice, desert, lava — with glitzy amusement centers and crowded tourist destinations. Yet compared to the highs of earlier entries like Partners in Time (2005) and Bowser's Inside Story (2009), the overall puzzle design is still a disappointment.

Even if performing actions themselves can be dull, Brotherhood still retains a sense of fun with its look. 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 lively animation in a Nintendo game, even by the high standards of recent games like Super Mario. Bros Wonder (2023).

A surprisingly complex strategic core

For one of their moves, Mario and Luigi embrace each other and walk around as if they're about to dance a tango. Standard strikes in combat require multiple button presses, with a dramatic action accompanying each input. When Mario raises his hammer, Luigi can whack it from below and send Mario somersaulting into a foe to deal extra damage with slapstick glee. It's occasionally worth messing up attack prompts just to see the pair's horrified reactions when it all goes wrong.

That the bros can ruin an attack and face little consequence in most battles might suggest Brotherhood it's too simple. Fights with standard foes often involve little challenge compared to something like Metaphor: ReFantazio's fights, but battles in Brotherhood prioritize good timing over brute force — pressing the right buttons at the right time to deal extra damage, guard against an enemy's attack, or launch a counter.

Most enemies have unique and varied attack patterns that demand 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 in Brotherhood they are the most memorable in the series. Luigi Logic — moments where Luigi reasons out unorthodox solutions independently of Mario — show up in some of these fights, where Luigi can spend a turn on a daring attack that, with the right timing, dazes the foe and makes them take heavier damage for a full turn afterward.

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

With the many refinements made to the Mario & Luigi series with Brotherhood's combat, the result is one of the most entertaining (if goofy) battle systems in the genre — once it finally gets going. The game as a whole has some wonderful themes, sequences, and mechanics to show, but it takes far too long to get there.

But for players willing to stick it out through multiple hours of wheel spinning, Brotherhood ends up being one of the best Mario RPGs to date.

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