Mario's last big Switch adventure?

Mario & Luigi Brothership, Nintendo's third Mario role-playing game in a year makes a good first impression

Mario & Luigi: Brothership, the upcoming Switch game with a marquee November release date, is a sailing adventure with more strategic combat than is typical for the series, I learned after playing the game for about an hour during a Nintendo preview event last week.

It is not quite a Super Mario: Wind Waker, to reference the great 2002 Zelda adventure that allowed players to sail as Link across an open ocean. 

It’s a more methodically-traveled affair. 

In Brothership, brothers Mario and Luigi have a boat—technically a mobile landmass called Shipshape Island—and a mission to reconnect the fractured islands that were once part of a grand continent. 

Players are given access to an ocean map filled with looping routes. Pick a route and Shipshape will sail through it in real-time. As it travels, you can explore the island base and chat with an expanding cast of characters. 

The main work on the island is to march the brothers to Shipshape’s bow so they can peer—in a first-person view—out to the horizon, looking to spot islands, reefs and other landmarks. 

Find a big enough landmass and the brothers can hop into a cannon and launch themselves over to explore it.

The island destinations constitute mini-adventures for Mario & Luigi, each culminating in a goal to climb a lighthouse and send a jolt of electricity back to Shipshape to link the broken lands. Players can then warp the brothers to each connected island to continue the adventure.

A promotional video we were shown during the demo promised a diverse set of island themes, including forests and cities.

For the on-foot sections, Brothership plays much like prior Mario & Luigis, with a single player controlling both brothers at once as they chat with locals, run and jump through each island and enter into lots (lots!) of battles. Luigi can be dispatched with the tap of a button to do a lot of the busy-work, like collecting nearby loot. 

The game’s battles, as before, are turn-based, with the brothers teaming up for more powerful moves. 

A new twist comes in the form of craftable “plugs” (note the game’s electricity theme) that provide effects that last across multiple fights. Plugs trigger perks that add extra oomph to attacks–splash damage, dizzying, etc–or that auto-activate healing items and other assists when the brothers are in trouble. The catch is that the plugs, while active for many turns, need to then recharge across many more. Players are therefore incentivized to use them in battle but to be prepared to frequently switch them out.

Brothership is the first new Mario & Luigi game since 2015, and the first since series development studio AlphaDream went out of business in 2019. Nintendo, as is their secret style these days, hasn’t said exactly who is making this one, though did tell Game File a few months back that “some of the original developers who worked on the franchise are involved in the development of Mario & Luigi: Brothership.”

The development team on this game seems plenty skilled. The game is beautifully animated, and both the sailing and combat made good first impressions. The old Mario & Luigi games also had some of Nintendo’s funnier scripts, though I hammered through Brothership’s demo dialogue too quickly during my preview session to compare. 

Nintendo games typically preview well, though lengthy role-playing games are among the hardest to assess from even an hour-long demo. Brothership seemed good, I’ll say, but do factor in that I’m also a sucker for entries in the tiniest subgenre: Video game with mobile bases. Give me a Zelda with Link exploring Hyrule via a gradually upgraded locomotive. Give me an Assassin’s Creed whose twin protagonists hang out on a train that loops through Victorian London. Sure, I’m down for a Mario & Luigi role-playing cruise.