If there was ever a series that reminds me of being on holiday, it was the Mario and Luigi role-playing games. I fondly remember squinting at the Game Boy Advance’s screen in 2003, commanding my plumbers through thrillingly dynamic battles from a sun lounger. Brothership is the first new game in the series in almost a decade, and it brings a jaunty, seafaring adventure to the mercifully better lit screen of the Nintendo Switch.
In a classic Mario plot device, our heroes are whisked away from the Mushroom Kingdom via a giant portal, and groggily awaken marooned in the oceanic world of Concordia. This place is utterly gorgeous. As you leap around the first of many vibrant, cel-shaded islands, you can practically taste the sea breeze. A stunning Wind Waker HD-esque bloom lighting effect lends this bright and breezy adventure a washed-out, sun-kissed feel.
Before you can put your feet up, however, the bros discover that Concordia’s once great archipelago has fractured, and it falls to the ever charitable plumbers to take the helm of the floating Shipshape Island and sail around reconnecting the islands. So much for a holiday.
Brothership’s combat is a breezy joy, making the simple timed-button-presses of attacks, jumps, hammer blows and counters feel far more engaging than they have any right to be. Where turn-based battling can often grow tiresome in other games, Brothership’s is an engaging dance, chucking new ideas, abilities and unexpectedly flashy attack modifiers at you with joyous abandon.
Getting to the best of the battling, however, takes patience. At the start of the game Mario and Luigi have none of these wonderful tools, and the only thing that you’ll be hammering is the skip button. This series is infamous for bombarding players with walls of texts, but the opening hours of Brothership feel particularly egregious. Before the moustachioed siblings can really get the lay of the land, they are harangued by an endless array of Concordians – a race of conversation-starved anthropomorphic acorns. Where the Paper Mario games delight in dishing out clever puns, the jokes here feel half-baked, and there’s no voice-acting to liven up the script.
Thankfully, Brothership soon gets some wind in its sails, as you unite a warring nation of ice and flame, triumph in an island-wide dance-off, solve a gloomy detective noir mystery, and even join a ragtag crew of teenage pirates. The inhabitants of each island you save flock gratefully to your ship-cum-island home, bringing new tech and equipment with them, and as the hours went by, I even started to feel some affection for these annoying acorns. The phenomenal score definitely helps: an infectiously upbeat, nautical soundtrack full of the pompous parp of horns and swelling sea-shanty accordions.
As I sailed the seas, I also discovered a slew of optional puzzle-filled islets, from Middle Eastern-inspired market towns to dusty dunes full of the snapping jaws of sand sharks. Boss fights are another highlight, taking place in dimly lit dungeons that provide a welcome change in tone from the sun-drenched locales above. And Luigi is finally shown more of the respect that he sorely deserves: he can use his Luigi logic to find collectibles, solve puzzles and devise clever boss-beating strategies. All of this is delivered with grin-inducing comic gusto: Brothership is a very silly RPG that offers up some serious fun.
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In a year that has given us not one but three Mario-themed RPGs, I was ready to be underwhelmed by Brothership. Yet thanks to captivating combat, varied platforming and well-judged difficulty, Brothership not only lives up to my childhood nostalgia for this series, but improves upon it. It is an inviting serving of sun-soaked delight at the beginning of a gloomy November.