YoIf there was ever a series that reminds me of being on vacation, it was the Mario and Luigi role-playing games. I fondly remember squinting at the Game Boy Advance screen in 2003, commanding my plumbers through fast-paced dynamic battles from a lounge chair. Brothership is the first new game in the series in almost a decade, bringing a light-hearted seafaring adventure to the Nintendo Switch’s thankfully better-lit screen.
In a classic Mario plot, our heroes are taken out of the Mushroom Kingdom through a giant portal and, dazed, wake up stranded on the ocean world of Concordia. This place is absolutely beautiful. As you hop around the first of many vibrant, cell-lined islands, you can practically taste the sea breeze. A stunning Wind Waker HD-style floral lighting effect gives this bright, breezy adventure a faded, sun-kissed feel.
However, before you can get up, the brothers discover that the once-great Concordia archipelago has fractured, and it is up to the ever-charitable plumbers to take the helm of the floating island Shipshape and set sail reconnecting the islands. So much for a vacation.
Brothership’s combat is a joyful joy, making the simple timed button presses of attacks, jumps, hammer blows, and counterattacks feel much more engaging than they should be. While turn-based battles can often get boring in other games, Brothership’s is an engaging dance, offering you unexpectedly flashy new ideas, abilities, and attack modifiers with joyful abandon.
However, getting to the top of the battle requires patience. At the beginning of the game, Mario and Luigi don’t have any of these wonderful tools, and the only thing you’ll have to press is the jump button. This series is famous for bombarding players with walls of text, but the first few hours of Brothership seem particularly egregious. Before the mustachioed brothers can really get the hang of it, they are harangued by an endless array of Concordians, a race of anthropomorphic acorns hungry for conversation. While the Paper Mario games delight in clever puns, here the jokes seem half-conceived and there’s no voice acting to liven up the script.
Fortunately, Brothership soon gains some wind as you unite a warring nation of ice and flame, triumph in an island-wide dance contest, solve a grim noir detective mystery, and even join a ragtag group of teenage pirates. . The inhabitants of each island you save gratefully flock to your ship-island-home, bringing with them new technology and equipment, and as the hours passed, I even began to develop some affection for these pesky acorns. The phenomenal score definitely helps: an infectiously upbeat nautical soundtrack, full of pompous trumpet instruments and swollen sea-shanty accordions.
While sailing the seas, I also discovered a host of optional puzzle-filled islets, from Middle Eastern-inspired trading towns to dusty dunes filled with the jaws of sand sharks. The boss fights are another highlight, as they take place in dimly lit dungeons that provide a welcome change of tone from the sun-drenched locales above. and luigi is finally showed more respect that he so richly deserves: he can use his Luigi logic to find collectibles, solve puzzles, and come up with clever strategies to beat bosses. All of this is delivered with smile-inducing comedic gusto: Brothership is a very silly role-playing game that offers a lot of fun.
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In a year that has given us not one but three Mario-themed RPGs, I was ready to be disappointed by Brothership. However, thanks to engaging combat, varied platforming, and well-calculated difficulty, Brothership not only lives up to my childhood nostalgia for this series, it improves on it. It’s a tempting helping of sun-kissed delight at the beginning of a gloomy November.