Mario & Luigi: Dream Team Bros. is the fourth entry in the Mario & Luigi RPG series, developed for the 3DS. Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach and the Toads all fly to Pi’illo Island for a holiday. However, they encounter an enemy along the way although they still arrive at the island without too many issues. They find an ancient artefact, which when Luigi sleeps on it, allows Mario to enter his dreams. The enemy from before then appears, kidnaps Princess Peach and escapes into the dreams. Thus begins he journey of Mario and Luigi once again trying to rescue Princess Peach. The dungeons, and the game in general, are split into several smaller screens separated by short loading screens. They’re actually pretty interesting, with enemies roaming around that you can get the jump on. Where it sucks, or at least it is noticeable, are when you transition into battle or when you exit the menu, because the delay / loading to get back is a tad bit longer than you would expect. The game uses a turn based battle system with the twists that the Mario RPG series are known for. It’s a lot more involved than your typical turn based battle system. For one thing, when you attack, you can time it right so Mario or Luigi will jump and do more damage to the enemy. All enemy attacks can be dodged or countered by timing it correctly.
The unique feature in this game is the dream levels. When Mario enters Luigi’s dreams, a dream Luigi pops in. During battle, he merges and powers up Mario, leading to some visually interesting attacks that pack quite a punch. Luigi can also merge with the environment at certain points and via the touch screen, touch Luigi’s sleeping head to affect the dream world. Dream levels are usually the more imaginative and clever levels but can be confusing with their multiple paths, levels and puzzles. These dream levels are also in 2D side-scrolling format in contrast to the 3D overhead view of the “real” world. The game adds in platforming elements from the Mario series such as blocks and platforms in lieu of treasure chests. All of this combines into a unique and fun formula. Although the amount of abilities you can use on the field, such as the hammer, spin jump and dig, will start to become unwieldy by the end of the game. The graphics are colorful and looks pretty good. The environments are in 3D but the characters are in some sort of 2D sprite, so it is a weird combination at first. There are typical RPG elements such as gaining experience points and earning money in order to buy better gear to increase your stats. During every level up, in addition to the normal and automatic stat increases, you can choose one to increase even further, which allows your own unique build, to a degree.
The abundance of tutorials was the biggest complaint for the game when it was released and this is true. There are way too many tutorials that come frequently throughout the game. Since the game’s cutscenes are already slow enough waiting for the characters to move and talk, when a tutorial happens and you have to go through quite a bit of text, then practice going through the feature, it can severely break the flow of the game. It doesn’t help that it pops up a tutorial from time to time on something that it had already shown a tutorial for. The game is mostly easy as long as you don’t skip on the enemies. If you lose a battle, you can immediately try again or try again in easy mode. Easy mode massively increase Mario and Luigi’s attack power, making it absurdly easy to win the battle. It’s a bit disappointing if you wanted to fight an easier battle while still feeling a sense of achievement because this mode just allows you to steamroll the battle, whereas normal mode may have been just a tad bit too tough. Several boss battles can be big difficulty spikes though. You can easily dispatch the normal enemies in an area but then the boss of that area will hit like a truck with a massive HP pool. It’s kind of annoying and makes the game uneven.
Since every battle is very involved with what are pretty much micro-games, the enemies become too gimmicky towards the end and too annoying to beat. When run-of-the-mill enemies start to take more than a minute to defeat as you wait out their attacks, it can become tedious. This coincides with the game outstaying its welcome. You’re constantly sent to this place and then that place to collect this and then that. There’s too much filler and even though you don’t have to backtrack a lot of the areas, the game becomes wearisome in the second half and you just want it to end. In addition to normal boss battles, there are giant battles, where Luigi becomes huge, which is impressive and fun... for the first time. Every single time afterwards it is extremely tedious since it takes forever to knock down health and is laden with gimmicks like tilting the 3DS and excessively using the touchscreen. Enemy attacks does way too much damage, so while most of them are easy, when you get to the one that relies on the stupid gyroscope and with the 3DS being terrible at it, you’ll die for no good reason. This game is a prime example why you shouldn’t shoehorn non-traditional control methods into the game, because when they are broken, it makes the game unwinnable and causes far too much frustration.
The bad game design shows its ugly face in the final dungeon. Most of the platforming in the game was simple and fun, but the final dungeon requires timing and pinpoint precision which makes it a massive annoyance in an already bloated section. Yes, it is supposed to be the final dungeon but it is so overladen with gimmicks, which by this time in the game you’ve been playing 30-40 hours, it is tiresome and dragged out. It severely overstays its welcome and normal battles somehow manage to last even longer than normal, dragging it out like a slow painful death. All of the bad culminates into a horrendous final boss battle which takes place in giant form. It has one of the most uneven and unbalanced final chain of boss battles in a game. It manages to combine everything wrong with those into one fight and it is disgustingly cheap with the enemy doing five to six attacks in succession before you get your own turn, which does tiny amounts of damage. After grinding through all that in 15-20 minutes, you lose due to the gyro controls failing. Every time you are forced to retry, you have to listen to ALL the talking and watch the stupid drawn out animations again and again. That battle was seriously unfair and unbalanced, without checkpoints or even the option of an easy mode. It is unbelievable that for a game that was somewhat well balanced for everything else, the developers thought that this was a good idea.
Since the core of the story is pretty bare bones with it basically being Mario and Luigi chasing after Princess Peach and collecting stuff along the way to open up paths, they get sidetracked a lot to lengthen the play time. It’s not a bad thing since the rest of the game is pretty good but dragging this on for 40 hours will even up making it feel tedious when it does the typical things of needing Mario and Luigi to get five of this, or beat four of that. Overall, Mario & Luigi: Dream Team Bros. is a fun game at the beginning but ultimately starts to wear you down with excessive gimmicks, excessive tutorials, and poorly designed giant battles that are horrendous with broken controls, cheap unfair difficulty and lacking any fun whatsoever. It is hard to recommend the game when it is so unbalanced like this, the developers screwed up massively in bloating up the game so much and making it such a tedious chore to play.
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