How Nintendo could fix Mario & Luigi: Brothership

November 2024 marked the grand return of the Mario & Luigi series after almost ten whole years without a new game. As someone who’s 100 percent completed the game (and spent well over 60 hours doing so), this is an incredibly polarizing RPG. On one hand, the visual style is excellent – the characters are expressive, the core gameplay of the series remains mostly intact, and the story, while nothing groundbreaking, is solid. On the other hand, Brothership is held back by its awful pacing, disappointing technical performance, and a large amount of filler content between its main story beats.

Fifteen years down the line, I’m not sure that Nintendo could actually fix any of Mario & Luigi: Brothership’s biggest problems via a traditional remake. Many of its greatest issues are baked into its story and presentation in such a way that it would require significant retooling of plot points and gameplay. But today, we’re going to go over a list of changes that would help cement Mario & Luigi: Brothership as the best entry in the series. We’re not banking on these changes ever being implemented, but it’s fun nonetheless. Do keep in mind that we’ll be discussing spoilers, so you might want to bookmark this post and come back later if you’re still trying to avoid them.

Before we get into all the negative things and how to fix them, I want to clarify that I like Mario & Luigi: Brothership. It’s probably my second least favorite game in the series, but it’s a title with incredible potential. Like I mentioned earlier, the art style is excellent. Characters are super expressive, and the animations fit their personalities very well. It’s a faithful 3D adaptation of the traditional Mario & Luigi art style, and it helps give its characters a striking and unique look. Not to mention that the end of the game is excellent in theory – in practice, it’s held back by overly long sections that feel like they never end, plus a four-hour side quest right when you think the game is over. Mario and Luigi being assimilated into a virtual reality dream world version of the Mushroom Kingdom where Bowser is friendly and everything is perfect is a surprisingly mature plot point for a Mario game, and the main antagonist, Reclusa, almost feels like an antagonist right out of the Persona series. Despite Brothership’s shortcomings, its villain and final stretch wind up very memorable.

The main problems with Mario & Luigi: Brothership are its length and pacing. Its story clocks in at around 40 hours if you’re rushing, which is roughly the same length as Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. That being said, Dream Team has many more plot points and spaces them all out much better than Brothership. Most of Brothership’s cool story points are within the last ten hours of the game, and they only last for roughly thirty minutes each. Most of the game is spent hopping from island to island and connecting them with Shipshape Island, but not much tends to happen on each island. Several of the islands, like Bulbfish Island and Merrygo Island, wind up feeling particularly repetitive and frankly rather boring. This is an issue that can’t be fixed with a simple remake way down the line – Brothership’s story feels like it should be twenty hours, not forty hours. Nintendo would need to cut down on filler dialogue and possibly even remove a lot of scenes, and at that point, the game would be significantly changed.

Pacing is also a huge issue throughout the game. It takes much longer than normal to get hammers and especially Bros. Attacks, which are spread out over the forty-hour run time. Especially in the early game, you’re left with not much to attack with other than jumps. Another problem related to pacing is the side quests – if you’re thinking of playing Brothership but haven’t done so yet, I would genuinely recommend skipping most of the side quests. There are just so many of them, and nearly all of them are filler quests that add very little to Concordia’s world-building. For every side quest you finish, it feels like at least three new ones pop up. If you’re going for 100 percent completion, it’s very easy to get burnt out and lose the motivation to keep playing. Some side quests are only available for a limited time, so if you advance the story too far they disappear for good.

One of Brothership’s most unexpected problems is its performance. In the early game, it’s not great, but it’s not too bad. Brothership targets 30 frames per second, and there are sometimes dips, especially in the overworld. This is particularly problematic for games like the Hammer Rally, which require you to hit a ball back and forth with perfect timing 100 times in a row. Most of the Hammer Rally locations are in areas with lots of NPCs visible on-screen, which means you’ll often get to 90 hits, experience a random frame dip, and mess up the timing. That being said, Hammer Rally is completely optional, so this would at least be excusable – however, toward the end of the game, the main antagonist takes over and creates a red fog that hangs over every area of the game for the remainder of that save file. This fog causes an absolutely unreal amount of lag – the game may even dip below 20 frames per second at some points. And this fog stays until you beat the game, which means after a certain point in the story the performance takes a huge hit from that point on. The frame rate drop makes the game feel cheap – the graphical style is impressive, but it doesn’t seem like it would be particularly impressive. Mario games normally run fairly well on Nintendo Switch, even if they’re a consistent 30 frames per second rather than 60. Still, Brothership often fails to hit 30 frames per second especially in the endgame, and that’s something that could be easily fixed by a remake or a Nintendo Switch 2 update. In fact, we’re surprised it isn’t getting a Nintendo Switch 2 update – Brothership’s performance was heavily criticized.

Some players are also frustrated with the way Luigi is treated in the game. In previous titles in the series, you could independently jump with Mario and Luigi, but this time around, Luigi is an AI-controlled character who sort of does his own thing in the overworld. In battles, you also control Luigi’s attacks with the A button instead of the B button, but that could easily be fixed with a setting. I personally don’t think these two problems are a huge deal, but I can see how some players would find them mildly annoying. Some players also complain about dry writing and too many tutorials, which definitely plays into the game being way too long and having poor pacing.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership is a game with a lot of potential, but it’s significantly held back because it overstays its welcome and bombards the player with filler content. I personally don’t know anybody else who’s beaten the game, and it’s a shame – all of Brothership’s coolest moments are heavy spoilers, and they all happen at the very end. I find them to be some of the most memorable moments in the Mario & Luigi series as a whole – in fact, I would even say Brothership’s final boss is the second best in the series (second to Bowser’s Inside Story). Not all of Brothership’s problems could be fixed by a remake, but if Nintendo ever decides to do a Switch 2 Edition, a big performance boost and perhaps a setting to control Luigi’s attack inputs would go a long way.

There’s a bit of good news here, though: Brothership sold well, and Acquire will almost certainly make another Mario & Luigi game a few years down the line. Nintendo is fairly receptive to feedback within their games, so there’s a very real chance that the next title will have much better pacing and performance.

If you’ve played Brothership, what did you think of the game? Did you manage to beat it, or did its long runtime cause you to lose interest eventually? Let us know in the comments down below.