Mario & Luigi: Brothership looks weird, which makes sense, given that it sounds weird, as well.
What on earth is a Brothership? Don’t get me wrong, the fixtures are in place: dungarees, soft caps, kid gloves. But the colours are extra vivid, as though someone had cranked up the saturation so that it borders on the sucrose. And what’s going on with the moustaches? They have gone from the usual shade of dark brown to full-on black. Are the brothers fearing the onset of age, brushing their whiskers with shoe polish? The exact same thing happened to the ovoid fellow you see on Pringles cans. Maybe Mario sensed a brothership with this other mascot – himself no stranger to the transportive power of pipes. Mario’s first game was in 1981, and he has appeared in well over two hundred. But he can’t be allowed to retire. Once you pop, you can’t stop.
The new game is developed by Acquire, a Japanese studio that had a long-running link to Sony, starting on the PlayStation with the exquisite Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. I wish I could report that we see Mario sidle up to an unaware Goomba and gash its throat under silvery moonlight – but, alas, this is family stuff. Instead we get the usual gravity-busting jumps, plus a good heavy hammer. Combat is turn-based but ticks along with quick-time events: you jump onto an enemy, press the button again the moment you land on them, and then trampoline even higher for a second hit. Both Mario and Luigi wade in, and each is pinned to a button – Mario on A, Luigi on B, naturally. There is a rhythm to each clash, as you learn enemy movements the better to evade and counter. It’s fun at first and dull at second, third, fourth, and fifty-seventh.
The trouble here is that a decent game is stretched into a dull one. When this series began, on the Game Boy Advance, with Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, it took under twenty hours to finish. The same was true of the sequel, Partners in Time, on the DS. In other words, these were meant to be hopped, skipped, jumped, and scrunched into a pocket, on your way to work. Now, courtesy of the Switch, anything in your pocket must also unscrunch onto the television screen; thus, we get an adventure closer to the forty-hour mark, which could really do with folding down. Not that Acquire, or indeed the Switch, are solely to blame. The previous developer, AlphaDream, was tending in this direction already. The last original game in the series, from 2015, inched under thirty hours and was already starting to stall. Its title, appropriately, was Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam.
The plot of Brothership revolves around a ship made of shrubbery, on which the two brothers sail. It’s called Shipshape Island, and it is an island, but it’s also a ship. Got it? At the centre of this vessel is the Uni-Tree, which functions as mast and sail. Mario and Luigi are enlisted by Connie, who resembles a rejected Pokémon design – a plug-shaped head, replete with dangling prongs and socket eyes – and who describes herself as a “Wattanist.” The pair must cruise the seas, reconnecting disparate places to the main grid on Shipshape Island. It’s Death Stranding all over again!
Is it just me, or does the overriding theme of wires and water seem off? The game has a thrown-together feel, as though the developers hoped that these ideas would hook up and crackle away. What we’re left with is a bunch of islands that you land on, solve a local problem, thump some foes, and leave. Fine. That worked for Link, in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, but that world was borne aloft and lashed together on the currents of strife and myth; you felt that on whichever port you alighted, they were all flooded with a shared history. There’s no sense of cohesion here. One island has you locate a pot of hair wax for a musician, who cannot ply his trade without sufficient follicular verticality. Another sees you morph into a flying saucer in order to hover over gulping lava.
Nobody can match the relaxation of Nintendo’s publishing schedule. Games are no sooner revealed in some showcase than they arrive, six months later, like shiny presents. As such, you feel churlish for chewing them out. Then again, the company seems more willing than ever to deliver games that don’t have the lacquer you would once have expected. Brothership often founders under a crummy frame rate, and even cutscenes cause the Switch to sweat. This would be understandable if the boundaries were being pushed – if this were a late-in-the-life-cycle release that squeezed every drop of juice from the hardware – but it has the look of a game that could have launched with the Switch, in 2017. What gives?
These things aren’t deal breakers, but they do make Brothership much less than a pleasure to play, and they evince an attitude of churn. We’ve already had two Mario RPGs this year, both of them remakes, and you wonder if this one could have done with a little longer in production. The brothers, of course, will bounce back, and perhaps this will run more smoothly when plugged into the next Nintendo console. But who wants to hope for consolation, like the island-dwellers itching for things to turn shipshape?
Game: Mario & Luigi: Brothership
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Developer: Nintendo Switch
Publisher: Acquire/Nintendo
Release Date: Out now
