[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.
