4/5 ★ – cyank9's review of Mario & Luigi: Brothership.

At the risk of sounding like a boomer, Mario and Luigi Brothership feels like the kind of game that rarely gets made anymore. It chooses to continue the story of this traditionally handheld series not by swinging the camera behind your back and trying to modernize and amaze, but by embracing and leaning whole-heartedly into what it is. It's a slow paced game, with a more subtle sense of humor compared to most of the recent Paper Mario games, and a "cheesy" message that it delivers time and time again with its whole heart. It feels nostalgic to me. Its battle system may be the best in any Mario RPG to date: the battle plugs add so much strategy to the game and then force you to change those strategies constantly, and some of the attack patterns get really crazy. The music also really impressed me. When I heard that Yoko Shimomura wouldn't be returning for this game I was incredibly disappointed, but as it turns out, Hideki Sakamoto makes a pretty dang good replacement. The musical style is definitely different from past game-especially battle and boss themes-but it's just as good in its own way. I honestly found myself disagreeing with a lot of the major complaints people had with this game. The abundance of side quests definitely could have gotten annoying, if it weren't for the fact that most of them are very short and really help to connect you to the world and characters. Yes, you revisit old areas often, but different things are always going on, and by the end you really do feel like a community has built up around you and you can recognize even random npcs. Probably my biggest issue with the game is the pacing of the final act specifically. The game goes on for about 8 to 5 hours longer than it needs to, pulling out random excuses to have you run around doing boring tasks just so that you can finally get to the long, drawn out final dungeon already. It's a real shame, as so much of it could've easily been cut, and then the finale would've been great, what with the spectacle of the final boss and everything. On the whole, though, Brothership was a worthwhile experience and a cozy call-back to handheld gaming. I felt like I was playing a game that would've belonged on my 3DS again, and I mean that in the best way possible. I hope the mixed reception doesn't scare Nintendo from letting Acquire handle another one sometime in the future, because I think with this game now under their belt, they could make something truly special next time.