I’m not really the biggest fan of role-playing games; to me, they’re really boring and drag on for too long, but for some reason I’m a huge fan of the spin-off series called “Mario and Luigi.” In case you’ve never heard of these games before, they are role-playing games developed by Alphadream and published by Nintendo that have been released for handheld consoles like the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo 3DS. They take the typical RPG formula and mix it with elements from the “Super Mario” platforming games in very creative ways, combining platforming mechanics with a top-down approach and showing us the Mario cast in the most bizarre locations you could possibly imagine.

I’ve been getting back into these games recently due to the newest installment, which at the time of writing this is “Mario and Luigi: Brothership.” I also recently obtained a bunch of Nintendo 3DS games, so I basically have the whole collection now.

I’ll be reviewing all of the games in the series so far. I haven’t had a chance to complete every single one of them, but I’ve played the majority and have a very good understanding of how all of them look and play, since I’ve watched a lot of “let’s plays” and reviews on my own.

• “Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga”

Usually a game or a show will peak after the first installment, since the people behind the media are still trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work, but somehow Alphadream was able to make one of the best games in the franchise on the first try. The plot of the game is that Mario and Luigi are on a journey to get Princess Peach’s voice back after it was stolen by the evil Cackletta and her servant Fawful. At first Mario and Luigi are working together with Bowser, but then his ship is destroyed by the antagonists and they land on Bean Bean Kingdom where they travel through different parts of the island, collecting beans and fighting bosses with the help of Prince Peasley. The game’s plot is very original and wacky, for example, in the Bean Bean kingdom there is a popular soda called Chuckola Cola, and you enter the place that produces the soda and fight a monster made out of the Chuckola Cola. You can also use some strange abilities, like getting Mario to chug a lot of water to get him fat and then be able to jump on his head to discharge a bunch of water. The gameplay of this game is also amazing; you can jump around like in a platformer game and there are enemies in the area that you can jump on to initiate attacks. Mario and Luigi have abilities that are called “Bro Attacks,” in which they summersault off each other and perform tricks to do high amounts of damage to enemies. I would recommend this game to anyone because it’s a really good introduction to role-playing games, it’s only eleven hours long and if you don’t have a Gameboy Advance there also exists a remake on the Nintendo 3DS which fixes small issues with performance and overhauls the graphics.          

• “Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time”

Sometime after the success of the previous installment and the release of the Nintendo DS, we got the second installment in the series, “Partners in Time.” Mario and Luigi go back in time and partner up with the baby version of themselves to stop an alien invasion trying to take over the Mushroom Kingdom and siphon the essence of the toads. This game  probably has one of the darkest plots in a Mario game, and some people consider this the worst game in the franchise because It does have some problems. I think they had a good concept but the gamemakers definitely missed its potential. The interactions between  Mario, Luigi, and the babies are really cute, but during gameplay usually the babies just work as a way to access secret areas and their gameplay feels somewhat like an afterthought. The gameplay is mostly the same as “Superstar Saga”, but now you control four characters, and each one uses their own button, it worked the same way in “Superstar Saga”, Mario uses “A”, Luigi uses “B”, the babies use “X” and “Y” so using all four buttons can be kind of complicated but most of the time it’s manageable to control. Overall, I think this is a very solid entry in the Mario and Luigifranchise; not the best game but it’s not terrible.

• “Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story”

Heads up, this is the weirdest entry in the series, Mario and Luigi now find themselves traveling through…the insides of Bowser. This happens after Bowser was tricked into eating a mushroom that gave him the ability to suck in anything in his path by none other than Fawful, the returning bad guy from Super Star Saga. This game is filled with so many weird plot points; Bowser gets really fat at one point, his castle gets stolen and turned into a theater, he eats a giant carrot and there is a new special attack in which Luigi gets really fat and shakes the ground…why are there so many characters getting fat in this series? I know it sounds like I’m critiquing this game a little bit but this is genuinely the best game in the entire franchise; the plot is super interesting and the gameplay is also really great too. This time they switch it up so you now play as Bowser and spend most of the story in his point of view. The Mario brothers are still controllable inside his body but from a flat, 2D perspective instead of the typical top down gameplay. They help Bowser out whenever he’s experiencing some kind of problem, fighting enemies and fixing up parts of his body that are malfunctioning. You can also use Bowser to unlock certain areas inside his body, like making Bowser chug water to open up gates that Mario and Luigi can swim through, or turning him into a giant whenever he’s in a life-or-death situation. Whenever that happens, you have to flip the Nintendo DS system horizontally and it becomes a cinematic touchscreen fight that is really epic to experience in person, just talking about it doesn’t do it justice. The game does really innovative things with it’s wacky concept and feels like they squeezed out every ounce of potential that the story had, I would definitely recommend this game to any Mario fan. And that’s the neat part about these games, only a small amount of them have some sort of continuity, so if you play them out of order you can still understand what is happening without having played the previous ones.

• “Mario and Luigi: Dream Team”

Before I review this game, I just wanted to mention that sadly this is where things start going downhill. Dream Team is not a bad game by any means, it’s just that it’s incredibly long and makes some odd choices with its game design. The plot of this game is that the Mario brothers, Princess Peach, Toadstool and many other toads are taking a vacation to “Pi’illo Island,” and Luigi discovers a magic pillow which opens up portals to the inside of his dreams. Eventually, an evil dream ghost called King Antasma works together with Bowser to obtain the power from the Dark Stone, and rule the world alongside Bowser. The Mario brothers explore the island together and Mario will travel inside of Luigi’s dreams. You can control what happens in the dreams by messing with Luigi on the touchscreen, you can stretch his mustache out, make him sneeze, and mess with his big ol’ nose, truly the most heinous things you can do to a sleeping man. I like the game’s concept but just like Partners in Time I don’t think the concept was executed to its full potential, since the dream sections just end up being 2D watercolor sections of areas you’ve already explored, however, inside the dreams there are many clones of Luigi called “Dreamy Luigis”, which you can use to perform “Luiginary Attacks.” You can pile a bunch of Dreamy Luigis together to make a giant Luigi hammer, roll on Dreamy Luigis in the shape of a giant ball, and the giant battles from Bowser’s inside story even come back! And this time they feel so much cooler thanks to the game being on newer hardware at the time and the fights having cool motion-control sections. One of the game’s terrible and upsetting qualities is that the game babies the player a lot. I know these games are made for a younger audience but there is no reason why the game should assume that the player is stupid and can’t figure things out on their own, because it’s really annoying to get tutorials even on the final section of the game. Other than that, I would say that this is one of those games that isn’t for everyone unlike the previous installments; you can definitely enjoy it if you have a lot of free time and don’t mind insane hand holding, but if you can’t then I wouldn’t recommend this game to you.

• “Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam”

I really didn’t like this one, it was probably just not for me but it’s still a shame that just like some of the other games, it has a really cool plot that is underbaked and not fleshed-out enough. The plot of the game is that Luigi opens a magic book which releases all of the characters from the Paper Mario franchise, turning into a crossover game between Paper Jam and the normal Mario cast. They had a really great recipe for an awesome game but ended up burning the pie somehow, since the plot of the game is that Bowser and Paper Bowser kidnap Peach and paper Peach, which is the normal formula that the normal Mario games have been having for about 30-something years. And the most shocking thing is that there is no Paper Luigi, so you can only play as Mario, Luigi and Paper Mario. The game also introduces no new characters, using only the normal Mario cast, and you go through the most boring and generic locations like grass, desert, snow; it’s just really boring. The cool thing is that sometimes you can use Paper Mario as a sail, or a bridge, and even a paper airplane. The game is also the exact opposite of Dream Team, instead of being a 40-hour-long adventure, it’s a short 13-hour or so game that ends before you know it. I think this is the worst game in the franchise, but to clarify, I don’t think any of these games are objectively bad, I just think that some of them are really great while others are just okay.

• “Mario and Luigi: Brothership”

Before I review this game, I want to give some context on why I thought that getting a new Mario and Luigi game would be impossible. After Paper Jam sold a respectable one million copies, Alphadream made the remake for Superstar Saga that I mentioned earlier. It made a lot of sense because you could not play gameboy games on the 3DS, and it was cool that all of the games at the time were now available on a single console, however, the game did not sell well, only selling about 500,000 copies. After this, I thought that they would try again with the money they got from the remake and Paper Jam to make a new original game for the Nintendo Switch, but for some reason they decided to remake “Bowser’s Inside Story,” which not only was already a near-perfect game, but it was also playable on a 3DS, and no one knew why the remake existed. The remake of “Bowser’s Inside Story” ended up being one of the worst-selling Mario games of all time, only selling about 20,000 copies, sending Alphadream right into bankruptcy, and ending the studio as we knew it. So, for a long time I thought that getting a new game would be impossible because the original studio shut down and while yes, Nintendo still owned the rights to the characters, these games weren’t very popular, and it didn’t seem like anyone cared about them anymore. So, I was surprised to hear that Nintendo was making another one for the switch, and I was really excited for it! And my expectations were met. The game looks absolutely gorgeous and the gameplay is good, the only problems I really had with it were weak performance at times and for some reason making Luigi have to press “A” when selecting his combat move instead of “B” which really messed with my muscle memory. The plot of this game is that the Mario brothers now find themselves in the world of Concordia, and they have to connect islands that were once an Archipelago. They travel on the Brothership, launching themselves from island to island. I would say that this game is a very good installment of the series. It was made by a different studio, called Acquire, and I think they did a good job in capturing the essence of Alphadream’s work. I would also say that sometimes it slaps me in the face that a different studio made this, so I kind of had to go in the mindset that this game is very different from the rest, and I couldn’t compare it to something like “Bowser’s Inside Story.” I would recommend this game to any Mario fan; however it does have some pacing issues at the start, with many tutorials, but they slowly begin to decrease, which is good. If you are going to get this game, I would recommend you wait until the Nintendo Switch 2 releases due to the performance issues. 

I’ve been playing this series of games since I was 6 to 7 years old, I don’t think I really understood how to read so I never really got that far until now. But I hold these games very close to my heart and I’m glad that they have been revived, and a new generation can experience these games.