Mario & Luigi: Brothership Preview: A Fresh Revival

The Mario & Luigi series first began in 2003 on the Game Boy Advance and became a handheld staple by offering a fun role-playing game twist from traditional Mario games. Turn-based fighting systems, upgrades, and puzzle solving were all core tenets of the series, which produced five games, the last of which was 2015’s Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam. Although the series was brought back in the form of two remakes, the main series had remained dormant until this year, when Nintendo announced that a new console Mario & Luigi game was in development for the Nintendo Switch. Last week, Nintendo held a brief preview session for the upcoming game, titled Mario & Luigi: Brothership, where I was able to get some time with the latest entry.

Although my time with the game was brief, it’s pretty clear that the developers of the game — just what studio is producing it specifically is unknown, but Nintendo has said members of the series’ original developers, AlphaDream, are involved — have an affinity for the series, as Brothership looks, feels, and plays just like the classic handheld series.

The first thing players might notice about Mario & Luigi: Brothership is that the game takes players away from the world of the Mushroom Kingdom. Like other recently released games featuring Mario, Brothership takes place in its own dedicated land, this time on the sea world known as Concordia. In typical Mario fashion, the world of Concordia is a fractured one, with many larger islands disconnected from one another, each with their own problems to solve and people to meet.

To get around the world of Concordia, Mario and Luigi will travel on Shipshape Island, a boat that doubles as its own island and is technically the main hub of the entire game. Throughout the game, players will be able to add characters to the island depending on what they do on other islands. Things like item shops, upgrade stations, and characters simply walking around and waiting to chat will make their way to the island the more you explore the game.

Because Concordia is such a fractured place, it’s up to Mario and Luigi to reconnect it, which means creating literal links from the islands to Shipshape Island. This is done by reaching an individual island’s main tower and opening it up, which sends out a long wire (that looks funnily enough like an actual plug) flying to your boat and bringing the world closer together.

When it comes to exploration, Shipshape Island also serves as the catalyst for finding new places to go. The boat travels on a fixed route on the game’s map. Players can tweak this route to get closer to certain islands and even speed up to make traversal a bit faster. Once you’re near an island, you’ll then hop into a cannon and fly off to the next place to explore.

As far as gameplay goes, Mario & Luigi: Brothership doesn’t change up the formula too much from past entries. players will still walk together as both brothers, and be able to control either brother’s jumps via the “A” or “B” buttons on the Nintendo Switch’s Joycons, respectively. One new mechanic to Brothership is the ability to let Luigi go off on his own at times. Throughout each area, there will be moments when a green exclamation point with Luigi’s face on it appears.

Pressing the corresponding button will free Luigi from Mario’s hip and see him go off to collect whatever object the game is presenting you. For the most part, this seemed to just be a useful tool to let you collect items without having to actually go and do it all individually, but it is still nice to see the game give Luigi something to do.

Much like past Mario & Luigi games, each world features different paths to explore, as well as enemies looking to attack. The game’s RPG elements really pop here, as enemies will simply be hanging around the world and beeline it to you when they first see you. You can avoid them or run away, but knocking into them (or jumping on them for a bit of surprise damage) will immediately instigate a battle, which players of past Mario & Luigi games will feel right at home with.

Combat in Mario & Luigi: Brothership is similar to past Mario & Luigi games for those familiar. Battles are turn-based, and you’ll also have the ability to counter enemy attacks by timing jumps to coincide with their attacks. While some of the dodging opportunities are as simple as timing a quick jump to land on an enemy, they can actually get pretty challenging. At a later stage in the preview, some of the enemies would do false attacks, coming in just to back out immediately before dishing out a real attack. While the timing wasn’t exactly the hardest to figure out, having to track attacks for both Mario and Luigi adds some difficult yet rewarding moments.

Dealing out attacks in Brothership is also time-based. You can choose from a variety of attacks and then must complete a quick-time event of sorts in order to execute it properly. Because this is a game about Mario and Luigi, attacks are often paired, meaning you’ll have to chain together button presses in order to land big hits. These were easy enough on the more basic attacks, but similar to dodging, the game introduces special brotherly moves that can be done in tandem and are a bit trickier. Perhaps the best part of Brothership’s combat, however, comes in the form of the new Plugs system.

Playing off the theme of the entire game, Plugs are different abilities that can be purchased the more you progress throughout the game. On their own, they might reward players for landing “excellent” rated attacks or give players a quick health boost after a certain threshold is reached. However, the interesting part of Plugs is that they can be combined to create unique effects and moments in combat.

Pairing together the “Kaboom Attack” (which creates a large area of effect attack on enemies) and “Surprise Iron Ball” (which drops iron spikes on enemies when you land an “excellent” attack) plugs together will create the “Iron Ka-Ball” plug. This makes it so every enemy in the Kaboom Attack’s area of effect will also be hit with a surprise iron ball, making for an incredibly effective attack against more powerful enemies.

The introduction of Plugs into Mario & Luigi: Brothership makes for an interesting addition and does make combat much more when you can tweak exactly how you want to play. It also brings in a small element of “build crafting,” found in more complex RPGs, which is also present in the way the game handles upgrades.

Much like other traditional RPGs, Brothership allows players to level up and upgrade their base stats as they go. Despite being brothers, though, both Mario and Luigi will have independently upgradeable stats. This means if you want to build out Mario to be a bruising brawler while making Luigi full of HP and stamina, you can. The only downside here is that upgrades are permanent, with no ability to “respec” and redo your choices.

Still, the addition is another great element of RPG mechanics into the game, and combined with the Plugs system, makes for a surprisingly deep experience for those who have experience with these gameplay elements.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership Preview: Final Thoughts

Although my time with Mario & Luigi: Brothership was brief, it’s pretty clear that a lot of care was put into this one. The world feels every bit as lively and fun as past iterations, and even outside of combat, there are plenty of side activities to get into, puzzles to complete, and characters (both new and old) to find. At its heart, though, Brothership manages to take what was so fun about the original games’ RPG elements and add to them in ways that don’t push away newcomers but also reward those looking for a deeper experience.

The game feels just like an entry in the Mario & Luigi series, and it had me nearly hooked right away after just a few simple battles. Fans of the original handheld series are going to be right at home here, and even though the game isn’t exactly the type of Mario RPG that some diehard fans may want, it was simply a ton of fun to play and looks to be a worthwhile newcomer to the franchise.

Disclosure: Nintendo invited the author to a preview event so we could conduct our Mario & Luigi: Brothership preview.