Mario & Luigi: Dream Team staff on cut Luigi attack, tough development, AlphaDream/Nintendo collaboration, old Mario
As is the case for development on most games, AlphaDream cut a number of ideas while working on Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. One such idea was a volcano Luigi attack – tons of little Luigis would take on a volcanic form, erupt, and attack enemies.
The idea may have “looked cool”, as Hiroyuki Kubota explained to Kotaku, “but it wasn’t going to control very well”.
“It was something that once we came up with the prototype for, played around a little bit. We realized it looked cool, but it wasn’t going to control very well, so that was something we had to strike out.”
To say that Mario & Luigi: Dream Team went through a difficult and length development cycle would be an understatement. The game was made between two platforms and went through seven versions over a four year process, right after Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story was completed.
According to Kubota:
“I guess one way I can sort of encapsulate the journey on production of this game was thinking about all the different iteration we did for ideas with Luigi. This is something that changed as the platform that we were developing for changed. You know we moved to new hardware over the course of the project, and suddenly found ourselves able to express ourselves with a greater level of richness and detail and processing power.”
“When we hit upon the idea of having a lot of the gameplay action set in a dream, I think that’s when it all came together and started to make sense for us. But that was quite the process—it was a journey.”
Mario & Luigi: Dream Team is the fourth entry in the series that started out on the Game Boy Advance. As far as the collaboration process goes between AlphaDream and Nintendo, Nintendo producer Akira Otani said:
“Of course these guys come up with all sorts of very interesting ideas, and at some point someone at Nintendo has to express a judgement on them one way or another.”
Kubota also chimed in:
“Since this is such a longrunning series and we have such a deep working relationship with Nintendo at this point, we’ve gotten to the point where we have almost an intuitive sense of how they will react to certain ideas that we propose, and exactly how far we can push forward the outer boundary of those ideas every single time. And I like to think that we are always testing them a little bit with each new project and its new set of ideas. We want to slowly tickle and expand the area that we are given to work with these characters.”
And one more random, crazy topic for the road: could there ever be a scenario in which Mario becomes an old man?
Otani offered the following insight:
“Sure, if we had some really good ideas along those lines. I’m not sure if aging is really fun, especially considering the older you get, starring in an action game would probably be pretty rough.”
