Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

Just finished my first-ever playthrough of PORTAL! It was a really fun game, I got it on sale in a bundle with both, so I'll be starting the sequel soon. I cannot get Still Alive out of my head, it is so catchy!

Recently just beat Mario and Luigi: Brothership. I can't say it really lived up to my expectations though, at least as a fan of the older games in the series. It makes sense why it feels lacking though, given that there were only a small handful of Alphadream staff that worked on the game- with the majority of the presentation side of things lacking key members that originally worked on the series. Due to that, it feels like those aspects work against the game itself.

The narrative is probably the best part of it- and I'm not talking about the execution, but rather just the core idea and ending. The plot idea as a whole is actually probably one of the stronger Mario and Luigi games. It doesn't rely on a McGuffin like previous entries, and the villain is actually pretty interesting in concept. It's just that the moment to moment writing falls extremely flat. The dialogue and jokes aren't as good as previous entries, and the characters feel a bit off. Luigi suffers the most in the writing department, with him being sidelined a good bit. In the originals, he always had a chance to shine alongside Mario- but in this game it feels like Mario gets all the moments while Luigi doesn't really get to be as zany as he used to be.

The combat is one of the other elements I enjoyed. It felt pretty standard for normal Mario and Luigi combat, with actual improvements. Plugs are a natural evolution of the badge system from previous games (and a pretty good one at that), while Mario and Luigi control pretty much as they should. My only gripes are minor. Things like how when one bro is K.O.ed, the other doesn't actually have a delay when carrying the knocked out brother. There's a massive lack of weight and I'm not sure I'm a fan of it. On top of that, I don't like how Luigi's options aren't fully controlled with the B button. It makes battles awkward, and even 50 hours into the game I still kept making the mistake of hitting B when trying to use his menus. This translated to the overworld as well- with the whole issue of me pressing the A button whenever you control Luigi (in the limited segments where you actually do get to control him).

Speaking of the Overworld, I feel like the puzzle design and map design was pretty well done. My main gripe comes with the fact that Luigi doesn't feel like a character you have much control over. Sure- you still get the ability to use Y and B for the Hammer and Jumping, but it feels like you never actually need to do that. Luigi can jump on his own in the overworld, and you can send him out to do things like plucking veggies or breaking boxes on his own. The only time you ever need to use his hammer are when puzzles require him and Mario to split up. Luigi gets it so bad in this game, that even when you fail to trigger battles by only having one of the two brothers jump, Luigi still doesn't start combat when being ran into.

A few gripes I had were: Islands being split up into level-like chunks instead of being apart of one massive interconnected overworld like previous titles, the forced backtracking that the game makes you do- which is genuinely only there to act as filler, the fact that the game only has three mini-games with one being repeated constantly for no good reason (and the one that gets repeated is the most annoying one in the game), the art style being all over the place, and the over-all lack of creativity in the game's character designs and world. All to the point where it feels like the game has the same issue Paper Mario had with the whole "Toads with different clothes" syndrome. Instead, it's less noticeable though- given that it's a new race of characters that look like plugs. Even then, it feels like they genuinely didn't get creative with the concept outside of a few of the main protagonists and antagonists.

Over-all, Brothership is a game plagued with a lot of small but nitpicky issues that cause me to like it less and less as time goes on. It isn't a 5/10 game, but I definitely see where people are coming from with giving it a 7/10. It's an enjoyable game for those who probably never played an entry before in the series- but for fans that were excited about the return of this version of the Brothers, I'd say this really isn't what people were wanting. Hopefully the series can climb back to what it used to be- assuming it still even has a future. Given what's going on with Acquire and how long it took Nintendo to find a suitable developer for a new entry, I can't imagine the series is going to return for much longer. We'll be lucky if we even get another one of these in the next ten years.

@VoidofLight Thanks for the mini review haha, it actually clarified a lot for me!

Sonic Superstars. The actual Zones weren't too bad except Press Factory, that Zone with its irritating gimmicks drove me up the wall. Next we have the bosses and oh boy where do I begin here? in the Mega Drive/Genesis games you could always bull the bosses so you could beat them in seconds but in Superstars it's just a stupid waiting game. The last fight with Fang playing as Trip was easily the worst designed boss I have ever seen in my life. Why give the Player rings if literally everything he throws at you can kill you instantly either way? finally we have the purple dragon which to this day I still don't know where it fits into the story, it just seemed to appear out of nowhere. As far as the actual fight goes it was easily the lamest Super Sonic fight in the entire series.

Thank Christ I never have to play this rubbish ever again.

@CaleBoi25 No problem! I like writing mini-reviews here of the games I've played. Even if no one really pays any mind to them, it's a good way to express my thoughts and make clearing my backlog feel a bit more worth it in the end! Glad I was able to clarify things for you!