Playing Mario & Luigi: Brotherhood has made me realize how mediocre the Mario & Luigi franchise is. As a kid I loved Superstar Saga. Its chunky sprites and afternoon-drawn art style made it one of the best-looking games of the GBA era, and its humor and storytelling outclassed both Mario RPG and Paper Mario. This is going to be controversial, but Pokemon had convinced me that turn-based RPGs were boring and repetitive; Superstar Saga's platforming infused battles proved that turn-based battles can actually be fun.
I stuck with the series until it seemingly ended with Paper Jam in 2015, and while some titles (Bowser's Inside Story) were stronger than others (everyone else), I enjoyed revisiting its winning formula with each new entry – as stale as that formula may have been in retrospect. I lamented AlphaDream's closure in 2019 and tried to make peace with the idea that the series was over. When Brotherhood was announced earlier this year (with an unnamed developer, as Nintendo tends to do), I had some reservations.
Would it live up to my childhood memories? Would developer X really get What made Mario & Luigi so special? After 54 hours, the answer is a definite “yes”. Not only is Brotherhood a faithful and worthy sequel, it's such a step up that it makes the old games look weak in comparison.
A bigger, better Mario & Luigi
If that playtime made you cringe, you're not alone. I skipped a dozen of the less rewarding side quests and it still took me over 50 hours to score. That makes Brotherhood the longest game in the series at around 14 hours, but unlike some of its more meandering predecessors, Brotherhood never drags. Its clever island-hopping structure sets a fast pace for the story and ensures you're never stuck in one place for too long. It's a long game, but it never is feels too long.
That's largely thanks to the variety it offers. Brotherhood uses its archipelago of worlds to explore not only different biomes, but also different genres and tones. You will still get the lava world and the ice world (and the lava and ice world!) but you also get a murder mystery style detective sequence in a sleepy little village. There is a heist section filled with surprisingly complex puzzles. One of the islands is just a big hedge maze that you have to constantly reorientate by turning the wall around. Near the end, there's an honest-to-God psychological horror sequence unlike anything I've ever seen in a Mario game. It has good platforming and good RPG, and it knows when to mix things up to keep it from getting stale.
The length also benefits the story, which is surprisingly mature and punchy for a Mario game. Concordia, the oceanic world the Brotherhood is on, and its inhabitants, a civilization of goofy goobers, didn't grab me immediately. But the game's commitment to the theme of connections, both stylistically and narratively, won me over in the end. Despite myself, I became invested in the plight of the boarders and the reunion of Concordian society under the Uni tree. It's certainly not Game of Thrones – the brothers are aided by a flying porcupine called Soutlet who speaks in pig-headed puns – but I'm impressed by how elaborate this world is. There's a sense of its themes that are so well executed that it makes the traditional theme park approach of other Mario games feel half-baked.
The most engaging turn-based battles
More than that, I'm impressed by the depth of its combat. The active nature of the turn-based battles has always been the series' greatest strength, and Brotherhood has tons of flashy new Bros. attacks to play with and countless enemy attack patterns to learn, but what really elevates combat is the battle plug system.
It takes about ten hours to unlock your first battle plug, which is unfortunate. But once you do, the strategic complexity of the game becomes wide open. Plugs are ability buffs you equip that improve the brothers in a variety of ways, such as adding fire damage to attacks or making dodging easier, but how each plug works changes depending on the combination of all the plugs you have equipped. So a plug that adds AoE damage to an attack will be combined with a plug that applies a status effect to apply that status to every enemy. Plugs have limited use until cooldown, so you're constantly mixing and matching them to achieve the most potent effects for a given situation.
Bros. attacks, while cinematic, struggle to distinguish themselves from each other. By the end of the game, each Bro will have a variety of attacks that all do a ton of damage to each enemy, with no real distinguishing factor that will make you choose one attack over another.
Battle Plugs shine in longer boss fights with multiple phases, as you are not only rewarded for how you combine your plugs, but when you equip them. You can replace your plugs at the start of each turn, and you're strongly incentivized to micromanage your plugs to improve your attacks at the right time and protect yourself from repost when needed. Over 50+ hours of turn-based combat, combat never gets boring because there are so many different techniques and combos to discover, and each new plug you unlock adds exponential complexity to the entire system.
Not all smooth sailing
Not all aspects of Brotherhood are as fully realized as battle plugins are. The hub island, Shipshape Island, is a literal ship that you'll use to travel along currents in the ocean in search of other islands that you'll eventually reconnect to Shipshape to create a roving armada of islands.
It's a great concept and the way it narratively justifies Mario and Luigi's ability to instantly return to previous islands (which you have to do often) is neat, but the sailing mechanic is weird and often frustrating. I don't know why Shipshape is constantly moving, or why a mini-map of the ocean has to be glued to the corner of the screen all the time, or why it needs to announce when you're approaching a nearby island every 20 seconds if you find yourself sailing in a small circular current, but I could do without pretty much everything.
The final part of the game introduces a mechanic that eliminates sailing. I wish I had known that before I wasted a lot of time sailing back and forth across the world.
It has a real-time aspect that makes progress difficult. Apparently you're supposed to knock out some side quest while you wait to reach a faraway destination, but after repeatedly bypassing my objective while doing off-island side quests, I eventually resorted to just staring at the map and watching my little ship sails. You can make Shipshape sail faster, but it still feels like an unnecessary obstacle to getting where you want to go.
However, it is a small frustration in a large sea of fantastic experiences. Brotherhood is a wonderful reintroduction to Bros., made even sweeter by the fact that I never expected a new entry. It's nostalgic in all the right ways and does more than it needs to to honor the games that came before, but most impressive of all is how much of an evolution it is for the series.
This is the first Mario & Luigi on Switch and it feels very much like the series' first entry to a big budget home console. It's so much bigger than any of the older games, not only in terms of playing time, but also in terms of ideas. The only bad thing about Brotherhood is that it sets the bar so high that there's no going back to the original now.

- A mature and engaging story in a constructed world.
- Deep and engaging combat thanks to battle plugins.
- Lots of gameplay and stylistic variety.
- It takes 10 hours to reach its step.
- Attacks are not very differentiated.
- Sail system is weird and boring.