An abysmal mess of a game.
So, I hate this game. Why did I waste so many hours playing a game I hate, you ask? Well, one, because I hated it so much that I felt a need to write this review. But secondarily, and more importantly, this was the only game on my 3DS that I hadn't completed for long stretches of time, so it became my default bathroom-time game. Normally, if I'm playing a 3DS game that I like, the system gets elevated out of bathroom duty for the duration of the game, since the game is good enough that I want to keep playing. This game, however, never graduated from the toilet - literally or metaphorically.
What's so bad about it? For starters, let me state that I have played and enjoyed several of Mario's RPG adventures in the past, both of the “Paper” and “Mario & Luigi” variety. I generally found them to be charming and inoffensive, occasionally funny, and reasonably entertaining games. So I'm not someone who came into this game expecting to hate it. On the contrary, I thought it would be a decent little time waster.
With that out of the way, let's discuss why this game is bad. The game has four major areas of poor execution. First is the story and characters. I'm not going to go into great detail on this since it's such a subjective thing, but suffice to say that I found almost all of the characters in the game to be relentlessly insufferable, spared only by occasional appearances of the charming Big Massif.
The second area of concern is the over-tutorializing of incredibly simple things multiple times. When the game started out, it was super hand-holdy for the first hour or two. I was annoyed by the overly-verbose details of every little thing, but I understood it. Some people need a little shove in the right direction at the start of a game, so fine, shove away. The problem isn't the first couple hours. The problem is that thirty hours into the game I was still getting these overly long, repeatedly interrupting tutorial moments. Just as a single example, as the game starts, you have a basic jump, which is used both in the overworld to, uh, jump, and in battles as a jump attack. You'll get tutorialized to death on the intricasies of the jump attack, jump evade, and so on. You'll enter the dream world and see a big purple crystal in the air. Rather than letting you jump into the crystal with your only means of interacting with stuff in the world, your little helper buddy will leap out and say something along the lines of, “Hey! That giant glowing purple thing in front of you looks interesting! It's right over your head, so maybe something will happen if you jump into it!”
OK, I say, we're still in the tutorial, and maybe some moron out there won't figure out that the way to hit something over your head is to jump into it. Fine. The next ability you get is your old, trusty hammer. Mario has been hammering stuff since Donkey Kong. Got it. You'll be given lengthy explanations on how to use the hammer outside of combat (you hit things that are directly in front of you) and in combat (you'll hit things directly in front of you). After this, you're given an area in which you hammer rocks out of your way to clear a path and enter the side-scrolling dream world again, where at the end of the level you're presented with another large glowing purple crystal. Only this time, the crystal isn't over your head, it's right in front of you. Now, if you have at least seven functional synapses in your head, you're already switching to hammer mode as you walk up to the crystal to smash it. However, right before you get to it, Shitty McHelperson jumps out and yells at you again, telling you that maybe this mysteriosly-placed crystal can't be jumped into, and maybe there's another way to hit it. “Yeah, my hammer! I'm great at hammering things placed directly in front of me,” you think, assuming the game will give you back control. Before it does, another text box comes up telling you that, yes, in fact, you should try hitting it with your hammer.
Seriously? This is the most brain-dead “puzzle,” a game could possibly conjure, and yet the game doesn't even offer the player the satisfaction of solving it on their own before interrupting them to tell them the solution.
That leads us into the game's third problem. The overworld puzzles. They are, from the game's start to its finish, the most rote and useless puzzles I've ever encountered in a game. They all work the same way. Over the course of the game, you'll gain a broad range of abilities which you can cycle through with the R button. Each of these abilities is useful for exactly one thing. As the game goes on, you'll be presented with obstacles which are tailor designed to be overcome with that one exact thing. You'll switch Mario and/or Luigi to that ability with R, and then hit the appropriate button, and then the obstacle is passed. That's it. You will do that over and over hundreds of times for no real reason other than to waste your time and make sure that the R button is still working on your 3DS.
When people discuss game systems having depth, the above is the perfect example of the polar opposite of that. There are tons of abilities (breadth), but each is so strictly limited in what it can do, that it is literally only useful for one very exact task it was designed for. This is theoretically fine in a game where you're trying to apply a very limited toolset quickly or intelligently, but this game has neither. You just walk up to the obstacle, select the very-obvious correct tool, and voila, you're past the obstacle.
So the characters suck, the story sucks, and the puzzles suck, but at least the combat is fun, right? Well, not so much. The combat breakdown is as such: You can jump on things. You can hit them with hammers. For basic attacks, that's it. You also have a variety of special attacks, depending on the particular type of battle you're engaged in. First, there are overworld battles, where Mario and Luigi team up for Bros attacks. Second are dream world fights, where Mario fights alone, and is supplemented by Dreamy Luigi's special abilities (which amount to turning Mario's basic attacks into AOE attacks), and third are Giant Dreamy Luigi battles, which are.... well, I'll get to those later.
The overworld and dreamworld battles are very similar, so I'll discuss them together. They break down as so: If the monsters have spikes on top of them, hit with them with the hammer. If they don't, jump on them. The special attacks are basically useless in any non-boss situation, since they take such a long time to complete, and they deplete a resource. Just jumping and hammering is all you need for every regular enemy in the game. You will get very, very tired of jumping and hammering before this game is done. The special attacks are generally pretty uninteresting anyway, and basically consist of a crappy minigame you have to play before the attack happens, with the success of the minigame determining the damage of the attack. On boss encounters, you'll find which one of these works well, and then you'll repeat it until the boss is dead. You'll get really tired of these things too.
The most interesting part of the combat is the various enemy attacks. Each enemy has a couple of attack patterns it will use (or a bunch of attacks in the case of bosses), which will require you to properly time a jump or a hammer swing to dodge or deflect the attack. Enemies are intentionally designed to be confusing, so you'll have to take a few hits until you get each type down. This is all fine, but it could have been a lot better with a single, tiny adjustment. Each enemy attack automatically puts you into jump mode or hammer mode, so you're limited in what you can do to avoid them. Mario jumps with B, Luigi jumps with A. Mario hammers with B, Luigi hammers with A. The game decides which you'll use on every single enemy attack. This game doesn't use the X or Y buttons for anything throughout the entire game. If they had simply put the jumps on A and B, and the hammers on X and Y, it would have made the combat much more interesting. There could be more variety in how you go about avoiding damage, or you could make a tradeoff where you take a hit intentionally to deal damage with the hammer, and so on. But that's a common theme in this game. The game tells you exactly how you need to play it at all times and any deviation or thought from the player is unacceptable.
And now we arrive at the Giant Dreamy Luigi Battles. Oh, did I ever save the worst for last. These things are awful. If a designer made a game that was nothing but this crap, they'd be fired on the spot. Everything about these battles is terrible. Every action is done with stylus swipes, stylus taps, or tilting the 3DS. No matter which one the game chooses, they all suck. Swipes are used for replicating the hammer and jump attacks, except now they're finnicky and sometimes the game misinterprets your input. The jump attack requires that you hold the stylus in place for a few seconds, and then swipe upwards to perform the jump, but sometimes it would jump immediately as I touched the pad to hold it in place, which results in the weakest possible attack. The regular swipes are less problematic, but there's always giant arrows on the screen instructing you on exactly what you must do in any given situation, and they're still worse than the way you perform the exact same actions in the rest of the game by just hitting a button.
The biggest issue with the Giant battles however, is every time it decides to use the tilt function. In every single battle that used it, I died at least once because the tilt completely stopped working halfway through the tilt minigame, and Luigi or the reticule would just go drifting off into the corner of the screen and get murdered by projectiles or fly into the lava, or whatever hazard was there. Alternatively, it would get stuck in the “down” position, and I would keep tilting up until the 3DS was facing completely away from me to the point where I could no longer even see the screen without hunching myself over upside down to tell if I was dying or not . (I was. And I was also still in the bottom corner of the screen.)
Compounding the control issues with the giant battles is the fact that every single attack is prefaced with an over-long animation that drags everything out to a ridiculous degree. Also inserted are frequent “helpful” hints from Shitty McHelperson who tells you things which are plainly obvious if you just look at the screen, and dialog boxes popping up from the villain. All of these repeat every time you do the fight if you die because you got stuck in the corner of the screen, so enjoy that.
And there we have it. This is unquestionably the worst game I've ever played to completion in my life. There's still the remnants of a decent design formula in there, but the game so infrequently allows you to explore its mechanics or exercise any level of applied knowledge of concepts that it just becomes a tedious game of connect-the-dots that is dragged out over 40-50 hours by constant interruption.
