Retronauts - 690: Mario & Luigi

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

Two Mario RPG brands launched at the dawn of the 21st century, and while Paper Mario had the more immediate gimmick, Mario & Luigi devoted itself to standard RPG mechanics dressed up in Mushroom Kingdom finery. Though the series burned bright in its early years, the back half saw a decline with undercooked sequels, unpopular remakes, and the seeming death of Mario & Luigi—the brand, not the characters. And now that it's back once again, we must ask ourselves: is Mario & Luigi worth celebrating? This week on Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Mike Drucker (author of Good Game, No Rematch), and Stuart Gipp as the crew times out their button presses to deliver you a perfect podcast. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 100+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

This week on Retronauts, we find productive ways to hit each other with hammers. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackey. This week we were talking about the Mario and Luigi RPG series. Yes, it's the Mario RPG series that never stray too far from its chosen genre. And yes, Paper Mario, I'm looking at you. So after about a decade without a new game, it's back. And though no one really seems to care anymore, we're going to figure out if we should care. That's going to be the point of this episode.

Should we care about this series that takes about six to eight years off between games at this point? Before I go on any further, let's see who's with us today. Who is our first guest? It's Mike Drucker, King of Kings. King of Kings author of Good Game No Rematch in Stores Now That's right It is a comedy book about me playing video games throughout my life From childhood to today

And how I've humiliated myself with them So if you've ever wanted to hear about someone getting shot in the nuts At Nintendo of America headquarters with a paintball gun This is probably the only book that will feature that That's right And these games have very good localizations And Mike actually worked on a few And I'm sure that will come up in our discussion

For Nintendo specifically That's right And who else is here with us today? Hello, it's me Stuart Jip, and I do not have the blowups. This is just what I look like. I see. So, Stuart, you don't have access to the vast array of Mario and Luigi Powers. Unfortunately, no, I can only go under the ground, and I can't come back out again.

It's really unfortunate. Well, I'm replaying the first game now, and I don't want bean fever, whatever that is. You eventually turn into a bean. It sounds terrible. Yeah, so I guess bean fever, most summers actually. Bean fever does sound like a British condition. Yeah, it really does, yeah. The focus on beans is really put on the back burner, let's say, after the first game. They're very bean-focused with this first game.

We'll get to it. But before I go on any further now, I want to know where we're all coming from when we talk about this series. What's our history with Mario and Luigi? Let's start with Mike. Sure. I would say not I used to be a big fan of the series in the sense that something turned to me off of the series. But I haven't played Brothership and I didn't play the remakes. but I was a huge fan of the originals as they came out.

I think I just sort of petered off towards the remake era. And Stuart, how about you? I've played all of them. I love the first one. We'll get into obviously the different ones in some more detail, but I've played all of them all the way up to Brothership, but I haven't finished all of them, mostly because one of them is so dreadful that I had to just stop.

We'll get to that, though. But I would call myself a fan, despite the fact I like mainly about three of the games and I only kind of like one of the three that I like so you know, still a fan. I think I like two of these games because it's a real case of

diminishing returns. Yeah, as for me, a big Mario RPG fan, the original game. I did a podcast about that game and the remake. I played through it over and over again just because it's like a 12 to 15 hour game. It's so digestible, so fun. The music is so great. So Paper Mario, I did enjoy, but when this came out, I thought,

okay, now we're talking. This is a real Mario RPG. It feels like a true successor to the game I really liked. And I really enjoyed that first game. And then as you were saying, Stuart, as time goes on, they start to wear on me a bit. I really love the third game. And then I kind of am tapped out a bit during the 3DS era, except for one I review, and then I didn't play Brothership. So I am really on and off, hot and cold with this series. But when it hits, it really hits, I'll say. But when it misfires, it can be very tedious, very boring, and just, uh, you're, you're wishing it was a Paper Mario sometimes. And I don't even like half of the Paper Mario's. So I have a really

complicated history with Mario and RPGs together, but like I said, when they're good, they're really good. Oh, curiosity, did you like the RPG remake, um, Bob? I, I loved it. I thought it was amazing. It was very well done. Yeah, I loved it too. And I played, I recently played the Dragon Quest 3 remake, and I thought, I wish the amount of love went into this that went into that Mario RPG remake because it just, the Dragon Quest 3 remake was $60 and it did not feel like $60 worth of my money went into the development of that game. It felt a little cheap to me, even though I did enjoy it and did enjoy the refinements. I absolutely agree. I like the Dragon Quest 3 remake, but like I still somehow feel like the Game Boy Color version is my

favorite, and that should not be the case when you do an HD2D remake of something. Yeah, weirdly enough Star Ocean 2, a game with maybe 5% of the audience of Dragon Quest 3, has a much better remake than Dragon Quest 3. I don't know how that happened because I think Square Enix published both of those games, so I don't know. But yeah, the Super Mario RPG remake, fantastic. I did an episode

that covers that in the Resident Evil 4 remake, so check that out in the archives. Both really good remakes. So before we go on any further, I want to cover Alpha Dream. So Alpha Dream is the now defunct developer that existed from 2000 and 2019, so a 20-year run is not

bad for a video game developer in this in this very harsh environment that video games exist in. And I want to talk about the people who founded this development studio. And when I mentioned who they are and where they came from, the resulting games will really make a lot of sense. So those people are Tetsuo Mizuno and Chihiro Fujioka. So Tetsuo Mizuno is not just some guy. He was the president of Square from 1992 to 1998.

So he oversaw this golden age of RPG development that we can't stop talking about. Final Fantasy 2 and Final, sorry, Final Fantasy 4. Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger, you name it. FF7, it came out in this very golden era for Square, and I'm sure he had a lot of creative input on what games are being greenlit, what platforms are being supported, and so on. If you look at his history, he is kind of like a business guy for the most part, but I think what he oversaw really speaks to his performance as a company president.

And yes, he is more of the suit of the team. I'm not sure he worked on any games directly, but I really couldn't find any info about that. The other person, though, is more of a hands-on developer type, and that is Chihiro Fujioka. So we understand how Mario and Luigi is the way it is, because this guy is one of the two directors of the original Mario RPG. And before that, he worked on other weird square games like Final Fantasy Legend 3, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Yeah. I'm a big fan of that one, too.

It's a very weird game. It's not what you expect. That was my first Final Fantasy. My sister got it for me for my 11th birthday, because it was on sale. everywhere because no one wanted it. That was my first that might even been my first my JRP. Really good music too. It's fun.

I think we've all come around on that but this guy worked on a lot of weirdo stuff and it feels like Mario RPG was his first seat in the director's chair because if you look at the staff of that game it was a lot of new people that Square were just pushing onto a project presumably because they were kicking off development or deep in development

of FF7 and they didn't want to put a lot of key talent on a game that was being published by a company. They were distancing themselves from. This is the era in which they were like Nintendo Go Away, we like Sony and discs now. Yeah.

So, yeah, this guy is a fun weirdo. So I believe after Mario RPG, he goes to a developer called Love Delic with Super Mario RPG Associate Kenichi Nishi. Now, Stuart, do you have any familiarity with this developer? They only made three games, but they're all really bizarre.

I mean familiarity. Can you even say? I don't know if I can say I even have familiarity having played some like playing played some of these games but uh i know about moon remix adventure uh RPG remix adventure which is this uh well it's like a quasi kind of real time like um almost conflict averse sort of RPG about making connections and uh that didn't that came out i think on i want to say PS1 um yeah it didn't come out in english for the longest time uh i think it's been out for a little while I've used in the notes here

it's been off about five years now and I absolutely cannot remember what the full-ops are L-O-L-L-L-L something lack of love I think that's what I'm in love and I believe the other one is DNA yeah it's called DNA yeah but I don't know much about those because I don't believe they've been localized

they might be fan translations but I haven't played them unfortunately yeah I think one of them is at least a weird life sim kind of a game that's just very bizarre and esoteric but one of their games is Moon RPG Remix Adventure and that did get localized in 2020

I believe it's on, I played it on Switch but now I believe it's on Steam and other things. It's a really cool, it's a parody of Dragon Quest in RPGs, but it takes the form of an adventure game that operates on a clock sort of like Majora's Mask and there are seven in-game days and the same things happen on every day and you have to sort of plan your adventure gaming

around the different events in the game and it's such a unique game it can be kind of hard to get into it first because your resources are so limited but I had a lot of fun with it during like deep pandemic times so I think it's a lot of fun and then you see these guys would go on to form onion games who they also make a lot of weird stuff mostly for Steam and Switch and things like that so love delict did not really go away in any way but you can see like the weirdo developers of Mario RPG went on to make this weirdo development

company that only made three games and people didn't like them because they were too weird and then moon RPG remix adventure would later be very fundamental and informing things like Undertale in Delta Rune. I know Toby Fox took a lot of inspiration from that game. So we're still talking about Fujioka, and while at AlphaDream, he worked on all the Mari and Luigi games in various

roles. And now post-Alpha Dream, he is credited on the latest Mario and Luigi game, and he's credited on Hiro Nobu, Sakaguchi's most recent RPG Fantasian, which, if you didn't know, that used to be an Apple arcade exclusive, and they recently made a

port for Switch in PS5 and and everything. So you can now play that if you don't have an iPhone. And from what I hear, it's pretty good. And I'm the last story in Blue Dragon Guy. Yeah, it is, it is, it is the closest I felt to an old PlayStation 1 square RPG. Now, I'm not saying it's like one to one the exact same thing, but like if you kind of miss that era of like

FF7, 8, 9, it feels like that feels like sort of like a, almost like road not taken for the series. Yeah, and I believe Uyamatsu does the soundtrack for that as well. So there's a kind of like a hidden soundtrack by him in a recent game and he's kind of retired now so it is a pretty monumental there so what else has he

done well it sounds like he's still tight with his former square pals in fact he's the drummer for earthbound papa is Ui Metsu's possibly defunct band so he didn't really it feels like these guys are just like goofing around after work and they formed a rock band and they did

stick together but there's been no releases in over a decade so Ui Matsu had the black mages and I guess Earthbound Pappas was the next band. No relation to Earthbound, weirdly enough, even though there's a lot of earthboundiness in these Mario and Luigi RPGs. Also, Ui Matsu, I think, recently released

a specially written piece of music for Sakaguchi's grandson. That's true, that's true, for the birth of his grandson. So now he is a grandfather, and I guess he is not fully retired yet, it sounds like. I think he is making his last game, or at least he says he is. So this is not essential information,

but I wanted to throw this out there, because it is interesting. Alpha Dreams origins are very strange. The company began as a staffing agency for a construction company called Alpha Star. That was the name of the company. And in 1999, I guess,

the staffing company said, oh, video games are big. Let's fund video game development, which is a very Japanese thing. I love your fan. Yeah, if you look at the Famicom boom, it was like, oh, record label wants to make video games. Or like, I believe Taito was an electric company

or something? Yeah, yeah. Kempco, one of those. There's so many stories of this weird little company said, let's hire eight guys to make a Famicom game. And this is kind of, well, still kind of happening in the late 90s. I think development costs are way too high to do this today. But it was still happening then.

So in any case, Alpha Dream was spun off from Alpha Star in July of 2000. They kept the alpha part of their name to, I guess, recognize the roots or maybe it was mandatory. But it does work into a great little play on Final Fantasy because we have Final Fantasy. What's the opposite? Alpha Dream. So I guess that's something.

I don't think Dream is the opposite of fantasy, but there's some ties there. Is it one of those things we're in Japanese that makes a little more sense as sort of like a reversal pun? It could, but I also think they were just stuck with Alpha and they were trying to find something clever to do with it. I guess Alpha Dream.

I don't think I would ever have plucked that in my entire life. Yeah, I mean, when Sakaguchi made the last story, I was like, okay, I get it. Final Fantasy, the last story. But this is a little, the connections are a little more tenuous here. So Alpha Dream gets their feet wet with the Game Boy Color Pokemon-like called Koto Battle. Nobody has really played this. Nobody's really heard of it.

But Alpha Dream really provided their Mario RPG proof of concept with the 2002 game Tomato Adventure. It is a Game Boy Advance RPG that at the time, a lot of Game Boy Advance fans were really crowing at Nintendo to localize it, but they never did. Are there fan translations? Yes, there was a fan translation very, very recently, 2021. So if you want to see what Alpha Dream did before Mario and Luigi, fans have translated the game. And if you look at the game, it looks a lot more primitive because apparently it started as a Game Boy Color game, and Nintendo said, hey, we've got this new system coming out.

Port this to that, the Game Boy Color is kind of dead, although not really. But you can see if you watch a long play of it, which I did, I watched, I was skimming through it you can see there's very similar Mario Luigi stuff like the battle system is all about timed commands and there's fun stuff happening on the overworld and it's just like a very goofy silly game with vegetable people and the vegetable people

will kind of creep into Mario and Luigi but they won't really last long because I think Nintendo really put their foot down on the use of OCs no more vegetables like absolutely not having any of it harvesters I remember I remember seeing this game in magazines

back in the day and it looked I think it looks great It has that sort of pastel look of Mario RPG Sorry Mario Nuiji But then it never did get localized And for some reason I always thought it was something to do

With Princess Tomato In Salad Kingdom That there's game But it's absolutely nothing to do with that whatsoever There's only three lines of tomato Tomato, sorry They never followed up Just tomato

But You say tomato, we say tomato We'll call the whole thing off Oh that's true I guess some people do say tomato Okay The song is correct But yeah

I found that Through doing research on these RPGs, Nintendo has, loves to become the fun police with their games. And I understand they want to keep things on brand. But I think whenever they look at an NPC in these games, they ask the developer, can't this be a toad?

Why is this not a toad? Everyone you talk to should be a mushroom person. And that's just kind of how things go. They're allowed to make their first game with weird NPCs, but then it's like, everyone's a toad now, okay? That's just the edict we're giving you. Having been inside there, though, I know how much detail they focus on each

individual character. So I can imagine them being like, We do not need 20 new pages to this style guide. Yeah, I can see that. How tall this character is, what pronouns to use for them. If there are different genders of this, or if it's just one gender that has the same pronoun, like Bullet Bill, they are detailed in those style guides. Yeah, and I guess in terms of design,

there's kind of like a towed template. You can kind of stick things on it to make it a new character. And then if you have a new character, that's wholly from original ideas. You have to, like, design everything from scratch. get a lot of approvals, things like that. That was like a criticism that sort of came around with, like, the Paper Mario Sticker Star, color splash, et cetera.

I mean, I'm a defender of those games, and even I will not defend that aspect of them, really. I don't understand why they did it. And it does creep into this series as well, although it's a little bit of a slower kind of an infection until you get to, like, paper jam, and then it's full tilt, tows everywhere. Yeah, you're just collecting them, you're finding them everywhere, you're talking to them. real Toadfest. We're still talking about Alpha Dream, by the way. Yeah, yeah. So the end of their story is not great. So we cut to the chase. They file for bankruptcy in October of 2019. Apparently, just as development for Brothership is really getting

off the ground. And my own speculation, knowing what I know about the games industry, is it looks like they were having issues getting the budget they needed for Mario and Luigi games after Dream Team. So Paper Jam feels like a real reuse of assets, even though there's a lot original content in that game. And then after Paper Jam, we have two remakes that show up very, very late. They are on the 3DS after the Switch launches. And even though I was a weirdo playing my 3DS, once the Switch launch, everyone just kind of chuck theirs in a closet or perhaps a garbage can.

Not knowing that every game they didn't play, it now costs $300, unfortunately. Yeah, I mean, I remember when the Metroid 2 remake came out on 3DS and I was like, I'm really playing, I'm spending a lot of time on this 3DS, and my Switch is right next to me. Like, they actually did have some good games that came out on the 3DS towards the end. There were a lot of great games like 2017 to 2019. But unfortunately, like I said, 3DS e-shop is down. And now if you want a cart, for whatever reason, these games now cost hundreds of dollars. So it's a real bad situation.

There's no other way to get them once in. No, no. Don't bother looking. No one has figured it out. So, yes, they probably shouldn't have died. But the good news is that some legacy alpha dream talent found their way. on the development of Brothership, which was developed by an Acquire co-developed

the Octopath Traveler series. So they have experience with good RPGs, and we can talk about Brothership towards the end of the podcast. Spoilers, I have not really played it yet, although I did buy it to support the series. I'm hearing it's not super great. But also, one thing about Alpha Dream,

if you, for some reason, like the Hamtaro games for the Game Boy Advance and from what I hear, those were very good for kids, they had a big hand in developing those as well. And I think those are kind of like RPG. in their own way, like kind of parodies of RPGs? I don't know why, really, but I played Rainbow Rescue back in the day. I have no idea why I even picked it up at all, but I got obsessed with that game.

There's so much in that game that made me like. It's really funny. Like, the comedy is really amusing in that game, kind of like in Mariamar and Louisiana. But it's mostly just kind of mini games, but they're good, and it looks beautiful. I really did enjoy Rainbow Rescue a lot. Yeah, I think I started emulating one of their games back in college. As I got a few hours in I thought, I am in college. how much time do I want to develop myself

to playing this Hamtaro Game Boy Advance game and they quickly moved on to other things that were in no way more mature but didn't make me feel shame that's me, I'm like, yeah, I'm not playing this tears it away and starts playing Sonic every day.

Give me the mature Mario World any day. So, yeah, that is Alpha Dream. They existed for 20 years, and they mainly made these Mario and Luigi RPG games. So we are going to break down each of the individual games, but because they have a lot in common, I wanted to first talk about some generalities, what makes these games special, what makes these games stand out from other RPGs. and especially from Paper Mario. So we're going to talk about all the different elements that are unique to this series.

So the first thing I want to start with is the unique control scheme. So in this series, you control Mario and Luigi as a team. And in the overworld, the controls are always very consistent throughout the games, except for the last one, apparently, and I guess we'll talk about that at some point. So A button makes Mario jump, B button makes Luigi jump, and this central concept feeds into how the games are designed.

So, but in both the overworld and in battle, A, controlling Mario and B controlling Luigi is fundamental to kind of everything you're doing. And this can feel a little awkward at first, but soon you will understand that like A is Mario button, B is Luigi button. It was also a good way to get around the limitations of the Game Boy advance because there were only so many buttons on that thing. Did anyone else have issues adapting to this when this idea first came out? Because when you're in the overworld, often, you know, Mario or Luigi can fall at the ledge in front of you or behind you. you have to like go back and get them they find a good way to keep them kind of like stuck together at the hip so it's not like

an escort mission but it can still be kind of hard to wrap your head around okay I have to jump with both characters or jump one character and then the other character in certain areas of the overall. It's surprising I think it's surprising how quickly you do get used to it because it is so unique to do that but I mean it's like you'll

find when you're jumping across gaps for example initially you might be like I'm going to be clever and I'm going to press A and B at the same time and that very rarely works so you really have to learn it's a then be very rapid succession it is an odd maneuver but i think you do get used to it it gets awkward when you're using the shoulder buttons and such to uh switch around who's in front who's behind who's using what on who that can get a bit confusing but the basic movement i think is pretty easy to pick up and it's pretty compelling as it means just getting around is slightly

more interesting than it than it needs it to be i guess yeah yeah and i think going back to your point like the fact that the controls were so simple on the advance it wasn't like playing Red Dead Redemption where I'm trying to get on my horse, but I punch it. I know that these two buttons only do these two things, and that made it a lot easier for me. Yeah, and because of this control scheme, the overworld is littered with little mini-games to do. We'll talk about how you explore it later, but I was catching up with Superstar Staga remake earlier today, and I remember like, oh, when on the overworld, there are coin blocks where when you hit it, it starts a mini-game where it goes back and forth between Mar and Luigi.

you have to work out hitting the block back and forth or this one will kind of like jump back and forth between them randomly and you have to make sure you're hitting it with the right character just they're finding new ways to make hitting a block more interesting which is something that the original Mario RPG really didn't do or didn't attempt so we have the unique control system that all the games are built around we also have a really cool battle system with timed hits so Mario RPG introduced this concept

though the player had to determine the best window in which to hit the button an extra time and that was mainly through trial and error you kind of have to figure it out there were no prompts on the screen letting you know hit the button now here they're more essential which means if you screw up you are penalized you either miss your attack entirely

or you do your attack for way less damage and also dodging is part of the battle system as well in Mario RPG the original game you could hit the button time it out so you kind of like duck or shield yourself to guard yourself from incoming blows in this game you jump or you hit back enemies with your hammer depending on their attack and this is also essential you kind of have

to do this every time or else you will be dead in battles so in in this case of attacking and defending time hits are a necessity this time around it's it's it's it's interesting how they make everything pivot around the a and b buttons controlling each brother and it becomes so second nature that you're just um there isn't forgiving especially the first game it's punishing at times but um it's interesting how just how many variations they come up with on how you're dodging your attacking and you're counter attacking by if you're clear careful you're landing on the enemies as they attack you and getting another extra hit in it's just a really satisfying system i think especially in those early games before they start they just start adding things

yeah i don't like i think because this was a trend i think maybe even starting with mario but remember a couple RPGs in this era that started to be like, oh, if you hit the button at the last second, you'll do extra damage. That did some weird psychic damage on me, where even RPGs where that's not the case, I will still reflexively try to hit the attack button again right before a strike. Absolutely, yeah. I was doing that before the first Mario RPG when I was playing Dragon Quest or Dragon Warrior. In my head, I thought, like, if you hit the button now, you'll do extra damage. So I think they were just adapting their games to the way people were magical thinking their way through RPGs.

Down and B when the poker will closes it works. Yes. I haven't played a Pokemon game in a while, but I still, when the ball is shaking whatever timing you have to do or that you think you have to do, it feels like it works for me. It's interesting in that respect. Because because kids and players would do it

anyway, making it something that's actually functional is quite rewarding the dopamine hit because you are actually getting results from something you would probably be doing anyway. That's a very Nintendo thing to do, I think. And I don't know how you guys feel about this in terms of how it relates to Paper Mario, but they each go their own way.

They each technically have time hits of their own. But in Paper Mario, it feels like things kind of shut down more when it's time to attack the enemy. Here it feels more like an organic integration of using time hits for battles. So like if you do use your special attack in Mario or Paper Mario, you kind of feel the mini-game prison bars slam down on you. And it's like, okay, now I'm trapped in this mode instead of just like, like, oh, I have to tap the A button now or the B button now. It feels more like a distinct mode you're answering. For sure.

It's like maybe Mario, for example, you're attacking, you're holding left on the unlock stick, releasing the hammer. If you're getting attacked, you're pressing A to block and reduce damage. But here it's like, you'll have like a para gumbar or a paro spine or something. He'll swoop at you so you'll jump. But then he might swoop back high and fake you out into jumping into it. They find just so many, like I said, so many different ways of making it interesting through so many different enemies that it can't.

I think it's the most dynamic battle system they've ever done in the MRI RPG, and that's not me criticizing Super Mario RPG, which has great combat. It's more of an extrapolation of the term-based sort of Final Fantasy thing than this doesn't feel like Final Fantasy at all. It's its own thing. Nothing has ever really tried to imitate it that I can think of. And replaying a bit of the first game, I did notice, just how well things ramp up. The areas are pretty small, and by the time you get to the end of an area, you will have. internalized what all the enemies do in all of their various attacks and how they can kind of fake you out sometimes, how they'll use certain techniques to kind of obscure the screen to make you not know which brother they're going for. I like how the game kind of keeps you on your toes in that way. And then the boss battles are a big challenge. Can you internalize all of these things within the context of one battle? And can you make it to the end with all of your hit points? And flower points? Are they bro's points? What are the points in this called? I think it's I thought it was flower points, but I honestly can't remember. I've actually just played it again. I still can't remember anyway. Let's call it magic. Yeah. And then you have these team-up duo attacks where they're essentially QTEs, where you have to

perform all of the inputs when prompted. And I did not look up a play-through of the first superstar saga, but I feel like in that game, there were a few hidden prompts you could put in to do a little bit of extra damage that weren't explicit. Like, you feel like, oh, if I hit the B button here, maybe something extra will happen and it did. But they remove that from future. games to make it more like you either do it right or you do it wrong yeah we'll talk about it

in the future games in brief but it's like initially you can set the difficulty so to speak so it will be that you get full prompts and slow down when it's when it's time to hit the button or it'll be like there aren't any prompts and you just have to remember when to do it and that's how you do the most damage and the more you use them the more the more powerful they'll become they might add new steps to them you know it's it's an interesting system and they're just fun to watch they they find fun ways to have the bros interplay with each other. And a lot of this game is slapstick humor, so they're often, like, throwing each other around

or knocking each other around with hammers. So they find, like, cartoon-y fun things you don't mind watching a hundred times when you're using these over and over and over again. It almost, like, in a way, because I remember as a kid, like, as a kid, I was probably in college when I played this. Jesus.

There was almost something about it that reminded me of the old Super Mario cartoons. Because, like Stewart's saying, it did feel like I mean obviously every Mario game they're going on an adventure but this did feel like they're going on a wacky adventure where they're like bumping into each other and like they're getting in each other's ways and it kind of reminded me of again being a kid and watching the Mario series when those characters were a little more fleshed out yeah I think it gave the brothers more personality than they'd had in a long long time and the interactions with one another were nice as well

because Marion and Luigi don't interact with each other that much in the games sort of prior to this really And when they do it, it's usually just, like, to jump on each other to bounce off and get a coin or something. But in this, you can, I mean, Luigi's got his personality. I think this must have been informative outside of, like, Luigi's mansion for Luigi's personality. Oh, yeah. Big time. Yeah, that's something I really noticed when I first played this game. Things are maybe like a 15% askew when it comes to how they look and how they feel.

But it makes the everything feel a little spicier. And just the characters are a little more extreme. There's funny animations that reflect that. One of my favorite animations is in battle when one of the brothers is down, technically dead, I guess, and you use a one-up on them. You go over to them and kind of force it into their mouth. It's so funny, yeah. I always, like, at least smile when that happens, because it's just so twisted. Doesn't it grab the big bulbous nose and, like, pull them off open, shove the mushroom, and then you see it go down the throat and then they're up?

It's very funny, yeah. There's a lot of funny animations. This is a very niche one, but I'm very fond of right at the beginning when the, uh, the bowels of, all line up to get on the Cooper Cruiser and Luigi is just kind of sort of sifting his way through the crowd so he doesn't get caught up in it. They've made up a spoke animation for a slightly

embarrassed socially unconscious Luigi that they really didn't need to make. I love that very much. We'll talk about how they speak at the end of this little section here but because they don't really speak English or have any written dialogue they have to come up with a lot of unique animations for Mario and Luigi

as characters, even outside of battle so they can convey certain things that they're doing. I mean, you get like little thought bubbles and cheats like that, but there's, there's a ton of animation in these games. Yeah. I, you know, I've always, I have always been a fan of, and I like this in Super Mario RPG as well, like the over-emoting, the over, like, pantomiming, and then everyone's like, no, we understand what you're talking about. That was always very, very charming to me. Like, I didn't mind when Super Mario 64 added, like, you know, Wahoo and I'm Mario, but there's just something, maybe it's because I like old cartoons, too,

and I know that Mario is partially inspired by those old, like, 1920s cartoons. But I kind of like that, like, again, like you're acting everything out. You're jumping, like, in Mario RPG, he'd, like, pretend to jump on a cloud and hang midair. And they'd be like, okay, you did this and that and this and that. And that to me is such a fun way to tell a story. Yeah, yeah. They found a creative solution to Mario not being able to talk at Mario RPG, where he will mime out what has happened so far.

He'll transform into different characters and kind of switch roles. And even though it's so limited as to what they can do, you, the player, understand what he's trying to convey. It's cool. It's cool. Mario and Luigi gained various abilities they can perform, which change based on whichever character is currently in the lead. So they're mostly for traversal and obtaining items,

but they feed into the series general sense of humor because Alpha Dream, it feels like they were given a little bit more leeway than other developers in terms of what they could do to Mario and Luigi, and a lot of the abilities are Mario is going to hammer Luigi into the ground and he will burrow underneath the ground, or Luigi will hammer Mario and Mario will become small and be able to fit through small gaps, or look it on each other's shoulders.

There's all of these fun little animations that feed into exploring the overworld. And yes, this is a Mario Luigivania. You can go back to old areas with your new powers and get new items with those powers. So we're going to coin the term here. As long as we don't call it Metroid Braini. Oh, yes.

That is where I draw my line in the sand and quit. Well, I got a refund on the blueprints after three hours, so I reject that term. I'm sorry, everybody else. I can't do it. I just can't do it. I gave it a good time. I liked it, I liked it, but I also understand why people are like,

hey, you really built this up a lot. Yes. Also, I was, I was in college for nine years. I don't need to play the game like this, where I need to, number one, to play the game, buy a notebook, okay. Can't take notes in the game? No, you can't. I'm just, like, I'm not saying it's bad, obviously,

that would be insane, but like, sometimes I just know that it's not for Stu. You know, like, if it's, this game's, oh, yeah, this game really, like, this will twist your malon. There's a really make you think I'm letting out. It's not going to be for me. I'm pretty stupid. Yeah, it was a case of not for me. And it made me feel like a real jock because I was like,

I'll go back to playing Indiana Jones on the Great Circle and smash rocks together. I think it was for me. Same with the Art of Worlds. Just no, sorry. Oh, no, no, no, no. I think it was for me. But the reason it was for me is because I grew up on games like Mist and Ribbon. And this felt like a new take on it that I hadn't seen before.

But I also can respect coming in and being like, what is this? Okay, I know the solution to the riddle. if the randomly generated deck comes in my favor in eight hours, I can solve the riddle. Like, I get the frustrations of that. Yeah, that was my main issue. We're working a little blueprints, a review. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry.

It's okay. And the blueprints episode of Retronson. It's okay. I have no one to gripe about this, too. So I'm among friends here. It's great. I think there's a part in the first game where you have some blueprints. So that kind of, there's a connection.

There we go. And my blueprints is Sank the Hedgehog. I'm sorry, folks. Oh, hell yeah. You have my ex. That was said facetiously. Stewart is really the bigger Sonic fan here. Without a doubt.

I'm afraid so in every respect. Without a doubt. I'm very, very sick of him. So I did let everyone know up front that Nintendo is kind of the fun police. And you can see Alpha Dream is having a bit too much fun in this first game for Nintendo's taste. Which is why we see they're kind of reined in, really starting in the 3DS era when things get like a little more smoothed out and on model. But especially in this first game, game, Alpha Dream really put their mark on these two defined characters by giving Luigi

these stripy socks, which I completely miss in the future games. Because just to kind of put their own stamp on the character, I feel, they make Luigi's overall legs a little shorter, and then you can see these great little stripy socks. But I feel like Nintendo said, Luigi does not wear stripy socks. Please check the story Bible. This is not in his character. What's worse is there was probably a conversation after the game came out to ask do we want Luigi to wear stripy socks and there was a very long meeting about that

there wasn't all hands that took the entire workday multiple power points I feel like they sort of set the tone and I'm not going to be as non-crass as I can about this by the fact that the first game opens with a toad seeing Mario's penis and testicles presumably like oh yeah does he running on Mario in the shower yeah he does and then he runs out and he like goes all red and his head goes really big and like there's only one thing that means which is he's just seen Mario's junk and I think that's great like a fantastic opening to a game like allude to the fact that Mario even has genitals like that's crazy I think the first in third game at least have this real fun gag manga sensibility they really feel like the Super Mario Kun manga that

is still ongoing in Japan just like a little bodier a little sillier the characters can be a little more selfish or stupid just for the sake of a joke, I feel like they were going with that vibe instead of like, oh, Mario is hardworking and trustworthy, and Luigi is a coward, but he's still a good brother, like these very generic traits that are now like part of the CG renders of those

characters that they have made to find. Mario is the hero character, but he's the hero character like at the expense of Luigi's well-being at times. At the beginning he runs out of his house, runs, Luigi's like dragged along with the washing line behind him, screaming.

It's just it's wonderful It's so much fun And I wish that they would do more stuff like it Yeah yeah It feels like that maybe they just let this team do what they wanted Or there was less oversight or whatever But I really love how the earlier games feel Compared to the later ones

And this is where Mike can come in It's because Mike you did some localization for Nintendo I believe I was looking at your Moby Games credit Is it just Kid Icarus Uprising and a Mario Party game Kid Iqris Uprising Mario Party game I also did the localization work on, like, all the interviews and the... Remember when they did the Super Mario World re-release for the Wii, which felt...

Oh, yeah. I did all the localization on all the interviews that came with the booklet. And then when you're there at Nintendo doing localization, one of the jobs that... It's kind of one of the more fun side jobs you do is everyone will get in a room, all the writers and translators. And they'll put enemies on the screen. They'll put locations on the screen, new characters on like a projector screen. And you're just going around the room, pitching ideas for it. And you'll have a translation team being like, this is what it is in Japanese, this is what the developer wants out of the character, this is like the character's personality.

What should we call them? And it's two hours of some of the most fun you can have it in Nisando. That's great. And I really feel that these games, they do feel a lot like your Kittakerous Uprising localization where they're very fun. They're written by people who know what a joke is and know how to be funny. And they really flow well. And in a Kittaker's Uprising, you're not being stopped in order to be. read the text. It's just kind of flowing as

you're going through battle. And I hope one day we are on the brink of the Switch 2 release. We need to find a new platform for Kiddickrace Uprising because I played a little bit of it for Retronauts and I really loved it. But if I play any more, I will need surgery. And I'm not willing to pay that, even in Canada, I'm not willing to pay that price just to play

Kidikers Uprising. So let's hope for the, the Switch has a mouse. Switch 2 has a mouse. It's perfect for the game. There were like rumors, because Sakurai was going to announce his next game at the last Nintendo Direct and there were rumors it was going to be that. And it dropped and it was Kirby. And I'm the biggest Kirby fan in the world and I was still quite disappointed. It was Kirby Airwriters. I was like, come on. I do remember when I was there, because we were working on Kid or Chris,

I remember someone mentioned that Sakurai had been bummed by, or Air Ride not being like widely embraced like his other games. Like, he sort of felt like the game was misunderstood. So this makes sense to me of him being like, you know what, I'm going to get this one back on the table and you guys are going to respect it. You have to let me make this. You know how much of my life I spent making Smash Brothers? It's only fair Yeah Let them have this

I just feel like if we wanted more people to embrace He should have made it like less weird You boot it up and it's like Here are the three games I don't understand This is other inside baseball When we were making Icarus Sakurai actually did injure his hand

Because he was testing the game so much Wow wow well damn it No wonder it's shipped with that ergonomic easel Yeah Wow But I wanted to ask you like, did the writing in games like this really encourage you to get into that field? Or did you want to, when you saw writing like that, did you think, like, I could write like

this or I want to, I want to tell the mushroom people what to say, what to do? I mean, it definitely, I never thought I'd get a chance to work at Nintendo. So it wasn't like there was a straight line between those games and me getting a job there. But it definitely was like, oh, my God, I love that this is funny. Like, when I played the first Mario and Luigi and the first Mario RPG and the paper Mario, I remember being like, oh, like, these games are funny. And they're funny on purpose. And it's not just like a one-off gag or a silly name.

It's like literally these games are comedies. And that to me was weirdly mind-blowing. Yeah, to integrate that into something, which in terms of comedy, RPG does not really go hand at hand. Right, especially at that point. Like, at that point, like late 90s, early 2000s, when I was just used to these big purple epics, that occasionally had a comic relief character that you never put in your party.

But it was rare for me to see a game that was just comedy. Some of the scenarios are so completely insane. I remember, like, making a save right before this section where you, you go in, I can't remember the context, you go underground in a cola factory and you find a very old man who's been telling jokes to a cola, a barrel of Coca-Cola or something for years and years and years and years to make it taste better. And then the cola becomes alive, bursts out of the barrel and pulls a sword. the man jumps into the air

and like all the background goes all kind of pink sparkles and he starts like waxing lyrical about how wonderful this cola is and then I'm sort of sitting there like what the what the hell is going on here and then of course we have the boss fight with the cola because why not you know it's just it's completely crazy

and they definitely toned it down in the subsequent ones the part I just played Mario gets bean fever for some reason I forget what it is and Luigi has to go save the day but in order for Louisie to do a dungeon on his own, he has to be hypnotized into thinking he's Mario. Yeah. It doesn't play into any of the mechanics, but just a funny idea.

You first have to, like, find your way to the hypnotist, and they make you think you're Mario very briefly, so you can actually do something on your own. But, Mike, you were saying, and growing up with RPGs, Mike Stewart and myself, all understand that for a long time, localizations were not good, and a good localization was still a very novel thing in 2003. I will say, unfortunately,

as time goes on with these games they really indulge in the writing and now a bad localization is rare when something has a bad localization or a bad translation like holy shit this still happens but now these games I feel like they talk a little too much

or maybe just not as special anymore but going back to 2003 it was very special and then you have a character who is a parody of bad localizations like Nintendo is admitting we know where we came from and Fawful speaks like a game

we translated in 1987, essentially. I mean, yeah, you know, I think that was also like really when the tree house was not to use a pun, but like getting its roots in the ground and really figuring things out. So I do think that was like the moment they were like, oh, we can have fun with these. I also think that this is around the time when they were figuring out a system in which they were writing the script concurrently with the game's development. Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Because, you know, obviously in the 90s and the 80s, there was a lot of, you know, like with games

like Final Fantasy 7 that have a famously bad localization, it's because they basically handed a guy, you know, a thousand pages and we're like, can you do this in two or three weeks? It's already done. Whereas like when we were making Kid at Gris, you know, we would get, I'll say new pages, but really it was like new lines in a spreadsheet, but we'd get like new pages from Sakurai and you'd be like, here's what's happening in the story, here's what changed in the story, here's the mood of the scene, here's what we want out of it. And that makes localizing so much easier when you're working hand in hand with the team, then it does when you're sort of like sitting alone in a room trying to be like, okay, is this moment supposed to be romantic or is it just sort of like

sad? Like what's the vibe of this scene versus being able to ask instantly? Yeah, getting the context is essential. And at times, working on localizations, you didn't know how much room you would have because famously Japanese takes up much less space. And in old games, especially cartridge games, even in 2003, expanding all that Japanese could push you over the limit as to what the cart could hold. Yeah. Which, again, we didn't really have as much an uprising because we were sort of just past the cresting of that point. But that was kind of fun, too. I remember, like, I was, I didn't work on the last Golden Sun game, but it was in development when I was in the treehouse.

And I remember them, like, kind of struggling with that, you know, like writing and rewriting and writing and rewriting just to make sure those text boxes fit. So I really, I do love story-based games, but I find that these games can get a little talky. In fact, this is not Mario and Luigi, but I just replayed the picture. or Mario a thousand-year door remake. Maybe it's because I had COVID when I was replaying it, but I was getting very, very bored with just how overwritten that game is. And it's a game I thought I really loved,

and I still like aspects of it, but that at the time was very novel. Like, it's 2004, and this game reads like a very funny book or a very funny web comic. But now you're like, I can kind of get this anywhere. So I kind of regret that I'm jaded enough that this does not feel special anymore, but I do want to underline how special it felt

to have a game that was as funny in this well-written. Yeah. You know, I also think that, you know, it was so original that it was like, oh, my God, this game's hilarious. But now, you know, we kind of want one or two characters to be the straight man. We don't need every character to have funny one-liners. Like, not every NPC should have the funniest comment. Some should just be, like, freaked out about a situation going on. Or at least just giving you the information you need, instead of you having to page through, like, a big joke to find out where the mountain is. Yeah. Which I think is a problem with Paper Mario sometimes. But, you know, you. Yes, very good localizations throughout the series. Also, a key element of the series is Yoko Shimomura, a fantastic composer.

She put together the Super Mario RPG soundtrack, a really good soundtrack that I think is underrated. And she writes soundtracks for all of these games. They're very good, they're very bouncy. The battle themes are so catchy. And they are a little kingdom-heartsy, which I guess you can take or leave if you like that series. But I find that these soundtracks don't get enough credit.

And she is so legendary, and she has done so much. But this feels like people don't. regard this in as high as regard as her other work, I feel. I mean, they're so Kingdom-Heartcy that I sometimes get mixed up in my head, which songs are from which games. Like, it's...

Yeah. I know, like, some of the level-up themes in these games are absolutely astonishing. You just want to leave it on the level-up screen just to listen to it. And, yeah, there's some great music going on here. And her, just to throw this out here, I know a lot of people played it, but her Final Fantasy 15 music

is insane. It's so good. It does not sound like her at all. And that's That's not usually what I ask for. When I want Yokoshim and Moro music, I want to hear the bouncy, bubbly, kingdom-heartsy, Mario and Luigi stuff. But she put together an amazing soundtrack

for that Final Fantasy game. So yeah, she's a key element of the series, but she's not on Brothership. So that's another strike against Brothership. And another element of this series is traditional RPG mechanics. So Mario and Luigi feels a lot more like Super Mario RPG than the Paper Mario series

because Paper Mario is all about small numbers and experimenting with the RPG format. often making your game very not like an RPG at all with Sticker Star and Color Splash and so on. But Paper Mario or sorry, Mario Luigi falls back on very standard RPG elements. You have hit points, you have magic points, you have equipment, accessories. It's not more complicated than Mario RPG, but it's also not being afraid of the RPG status. They're kind of proud of being an RPG, but then they can put the Mario dressing on other elements you recognize from Final Fantasy and other games. I don't know about you folks, though, but I did like Origami King, the Paper Mario game, but Stuart is a Sticker Star Liker.

I'm sorry, I absolutely love it. I love it to death. It's not an RPG at all. It's a Sierra-style adventure game, and I understand completely, and without regret why people don't like it, they are fine. I am fine with that. The game, it will drive you crazy, but it's just like, this is driving me crazy. I love this. but yeah

Origami King I liked except for the combat and yeah the combat ring I did not enjoy but the everything else the writing the jokes the exploration I thought was on point I mean I didn't talking about Mario RPG I didn't really play

RPGs before I mean I wasn't an RPG guy I'm a Mario guy which is why I played this and I feel like these can act and as they did with me they can almost be like entry level RPGs because Because the customization is quite simple, and the story is quite light. I mean, like, the first game is, like, what, 10 hours, 15 hours or so?

It's not going to waste your time at all. But I went sort of from the used to thinking, hey, maybe I could try an RPG, maybe I'll enjoy it. And, you know, I did. So thanks, Mario and Luigi. On the flip side, I literally remember because I think it did come out maybe my, like, junior or senior year of high school, Super Mario RPG. and there was like one or two guys in my school who were like

that's an RPG for babies we've been like come on guys we're all like 17 here calm down in my school the question was what's an RPG and then slash that sounds gay was the other comment because it was 1995 I mean yeah it's like

all my friends were into Final Fantasy 7 and then Final Fantasy 7 was really cool but I mean I was just like what do you jump on you don't jump on anything in this and then finally finally this comes along and you know Super Mario RPG of course in which you do lots and lots of infinite jumping

it's fantastic but yeah yeah I just I'm not a fan of where Paper Mario went and I just like that this series is always kind of there for me they're like we're an RPG coming to the warming loving embrace of the RPG when Paper Mario they did two RPG games and they're like okay now we're Super Paper Mario

now many years later we're Sticker Star now we're Color Splash and then Origami King is like we're kind of an RPG again we're figuring things out but I like how even though the games in the Mario and Luigi series feel kind of samey they do welcome you back with all those familiar elements you kind of want from an RPG.

And the last thing I want to mention here is what I call Italian duolingo. Yes, these games can teach you Italian if you want to be beaten up by a man who runs a pizza restaurant. So Mario was a mute character in Super Mario RPG. He's mute in Paper Mario. But here, in a move that kind of feels

inspired by the Sims, I don't know. The Sims was a very big game when these games are in development. Mario and Luigi, they babble in what I would call pseudo-Italian. and I'm going to throw this out there Maybe it's insensitive I'm not Italian

I can't speak to this But I will say It's always funny I always think it's funny And I can't believe They went with this choice And they didn't They didn't deviate from it

Even when people could say Well I don't know if you should be doing this They kind of stuck to their guns On this very cartoonish Pizza Boxman portrayal of the characters And it's only in this game series Yeah I think you know Maybe what gets a pass on it

Is it's just that The Italian itself is gibberish And it's not like they're doing Over the top Italian stereotypes so much. You know what I mean? Like, it's more like the language is like, yeah,

and you're like, okay, but it's not like they're like, you know, bringing, I don't know, like bringing out a pizza or some like old mom. I don't know. It just feels like it's so cartoony and contained in what it is that I don't feel like it's making fun of Italy. They're not supporting

Mussolini. I mean, I mean, we don't know. We don't know what they're saying. but um i mean it's not it's not like it's not ideal it's not like apu you know it's not the whole thing it's it's just it's kind of funny and they probably wouldn't do it now i can't remember if they do it in brothership or not but um yeah i mean mario's also had that kind of you know let's a go he's a bit italian kind of you know yeah yeah and there's just felt like an extrapolation of that because they couldn't really do full voice clips so it had to be just like

but I thought or so they're demarro like that and if me doing that is a problem please delete it no I'm Hey Mario Luigi you've been getting away with it for 20 years 20 plus years Yeah I feel like it just goes back to the way Charles Martinette is it sorry it's Martinette

Not Martinet is it Martinet I believe it's Martinet I always get this wrong They call him Martinet Yeah I think it is Martinique's They call him in future Legend of Rhythmalian We're gonna stick to Martinet But I feel like he was allowed to define the character back when things were very loose

with those appearances at the conventions with the virtual Mario head and I think that just filtered into this game as well he's probably in a booth and they're like well what would Mario and Luigi say that it aren't words and he would just do like the classic cartoon Italian for them and they were like okay that sounds funny

let's go with this not knowing like well what are the implications of this could people be mad about this but I think there's been very little protest over Mario and Luigi and then if you look at the characters they literally jumped off of a pizza box to be your video game pales so they're designed

is essentially problematic if you want to go that far but I think I think they're cute and cuddly and fine the thing is it started as Italian they're just Mario and Luigi now they've gone so far beyond any kind of really truly recognizable kind of cultural thing outside of their own output

if that makes sense they're just Marion Luigi now but then again you can make that defense for characters like Apu and it wouldn't water so goodness note well there is a moment in the Mario movie the recent one where they briefly do the Mario voices and the joke is, can you believe if we talked like that? And I thought, I want to see that movie. Can we get that cut?

Just the high-pitched Mickey Mouse Italian. I want to kind of see that. It would have enhanced my viewing experience, I think. I'd forgotten that movie existed. I'm sorry. It's been a long two years, Stuart. Yeah. And I do think the difference between Mario and Apu is that Apu exists in a stereotype

that is an Indian people stereotype. You're an immigrant who runs a corner store and you have 10 kids. and you're kind of taken up space. And so I think that was a little more offensive whereas it's not really an Italian stereotype that two guys are plumbers. Like if they were in the mob or something or like some sort of like

or if it was like just focused on cooking in some weird way, I think it might be more offensive but it's almost like they're Italian and their plumbers but no one's like, oh man, great, another Italian plumber gut character. Yeah, they always keep pasta out of the games. Pasta and pizza and Italian food.

They never intersect with the games always like a cartoon or movie thing it comes up in Hotel Maria but nobody cares about Hotel Mariah. I guess that's true. Disregard. I mean it's not canon. I hope she made lots of spaghetti.

I guess they retain that element in I guess they're just barring from the cartoons, who knows? But I can say that I live right within the heart of Vancouver's Little Italy and I don't see Mario and Luigi. I see a lot of old guys with track jackets and gold chains. So if Mario and Luigi looked like that, I could see

that's a stereotype and people can get offended but it's like they're just guys they're just kind of out of the Fleischer era and they want to fix your pipes and according to Mario and Tonica the Olympic Games sometimes they throw them a flag that's like Saudi Arabia so you know who even knows officially

Who are they working for? That game's fast This is the smallest side note but that game's fascinating because they'll just randomly assign what country it is so it'll be like Wario doing flips for France it's a very wacky game So it's also tangentially relevant because I think Arthur Dream worked on

at least one of those so there you go we're back in I think that could be one of their last games is the the 2020 game maybe whatever recent Olympics there was before they shut down maybe 2018 something like that yeah the non-tokio ones

they couldn't do that I think I don't know Thank you. So I want to move on to talk about the individual games here. And we're just going to highlight what's special about these before we move on to the next one. And it all begins with Superstar Saga, which was released in November of 2003. So Paper Mario comes out in 2001 in America, excites everybody who loves these Mario RPGs. But this game kind of came out of no one.

and like we said earlier is the successor to the 1996 square game Mario RPG even Gino makes an appearance unfortunately he's cut out of the remake but they're just letting you know this is the DNA that is behind this game it's the best one it's not all downhill from here

because there's a big bump up again after we skip the next game yeah I agree I agree this is for me this is the best combination of like gameplay story it does have its tutorials but they're not forced so much they're not as absolutely wearingly long

as they are in the later games and it's all just nicely kind of pared down and it's very funny has the most variety of locations, enemies I think I think has the best most cartoony exaggerated look of all the games as well

which the remake ruined by the way I agree yeah the remake sucks don't even get me started but this is wonderful and you can play it on your switch with the expansion pass right now The remake is a bit compromised. The original version, though, I will say it was a really refreshing RPG.

It came out at a time when we just finished the PlayStation era. We were moving into the PS2 era, or we're already in the PS2 era. And this is an era in which RPGs were just so bloated. They were really abusing the CD format and the DVD format. Here we have a 15-hour RPG that because of the cartridge, it's limited in what it can show you, but it's always showing you something new for that limited runtime. And because of that, you're always seeing new character. fighting new enemies, going to new locations.

It just keeps moving. The pacing is probably the best of any RPG I played outside of the original Mario RPG, which I think is even shorter than this one. Yeah. I also think that, you know, at that time period, it was interesting. Like, just even the visual style, because, you know, you're used to grim dark JRP's or ones that sort of had more of an anime aesthetic. And this was a JRP that had neither of those.

It was like lighthearted and fun, but it didn't feel like, you know, I was working with 12-year-old witches. Like, it kind of had an interesting. look and feel for that era. Yeah, it was, it did feel like it evoked the, the gag manga of the past of the 90s, just like kind of like squat, funky-looking characters that were very evocative of that style. And this takes place in the Bean Bean Kingdom. We have a lot of vegetable people.

I feel like it is the tomato adventure legacy. But it also follows a Super Mario RPG tradition of introducing Bowser as a villain, but then he immediately gets stomped by some new big bad who humiliated. him and in this game Bowser is possessed by the new villain so he doesn't get to join your team here like he did in the original which was a really cool choice but he

is more of a sympathetic character because he is so abused and made subordinate quite a lot of this game is kind of hanging out with this thief called Popple and they make a really amusing sort of double act throughout you'll run into them in a lot of scenarios and they're usually

are very compromised state of failure it's a lot of fun And like I said earlier, AlphaDream was having a lot of fun with the characters, and I think that is the reason why this is the first appearance of the Cupa Kids or the Coupa Lings since Yoshi Safari, which was not even made by Nintendo, because I love the Cupa kids, I love the Coupilings. I've got a Larry Cupa behind me somewhere over there.

And it felt like Nintendo was really behind these characters in the early 90s, and then they were like immediately done with them. And then we have Bowser Jr., which is another can of worms. Either you like him or you hate him, I might be warming up to him, but still I need another 20 years. figure that guy out. But seeing them in this game was just like, wow, I can't believe it. They're here. There's like Dr. Mario

enemies in the game. There's enemies from the original Mario Brothers. Just having so much fun by shining a light on these dark corners of Nintendo history, characters that they didn't really pull out of storage very often. It's only a slight shame that the Kupilings are used in what is essentially a boss rush, although it is still extremely cool

fighting all of them in a sort of reasonably quick succession. Yeah, yeah. They're not a major part of the game, but they still designed unique character assets for them and unique battles, yeah. Awesome fan service that even show up at all. I remember the excitement online when that became back. It's like, only crap, it's them.

They're not dead. But they're no longer his children. Right, right. They had to put that statement out there. We don't know the mother or the father. They're just, they're child associates of Bowser. Yeah. Because if you remember, like, again, I hate to go back

of the Super Mario Super Show but like they or the Super Mario 3 cartoon that followed that. Yeah. They like were really his kids to the extent where half of the episodes were them being like, dad I want to go to a concert. Like that was like half of that show. It was real like single dad raising like baby boom

style comedy. Yeah. So yeah, they're back in the game and there's not much more to mention because we covered all of the main mechanics and that forms the core of this game. So we have the remake which was called Superstar saga plus Bowser's minions, which launched for the 3DS in October of 2017.

It's a good game to remake, not the best time or the best platform, and it's technically a good-looking game on par with Dream Team, the first 3DS game, but it does eliminate a lot of the personality from the original hand-drawn arts, and I feel like starting with Dream Team, that's when

everything is really smoothed over, that's when everything becomes more on model, more of the house style of Nintendo, and that's where I start to lose interest. But technically it still looks good but it does not have any of the style that you like it's very good looking um got it'll be very brief about it but basically i have a big issue with this remake which is slightly pinniqueteer i think but i really hate that they put on the

x button to make both brothers jump like that it feels like they had no confidence in their own idea at all it's like oh here's how you play the game but don't worry about that you can just press x now and if and the whole game kind of feels like that it's like anything that did have a little bit of any kind of frictional personality they went, now this was wrong, let's fix this, by making everything easier or making everything just more on model. I mean,

the one I point to is there's a sequence near the beginning of the game where Bowser is launched into the screen, he hits the screen, and then falls back down. If you look at those side by side, you'll see that one of them is an extremely funny cartoon drawing of Bowser's kind of mangled face into the camera. And the other one is just kind of a normal

drawing of Bowser, and it's like, I don't know, why? I just I don't appreciate that much I mean it's still superstar saga you can still have fun with it but I just other than just to look at it I don't know why you would play this version if you have the choice

and if you own it you are now rich congratulations oh thank you thank you unfortunately it's a digital copy so I don't know what I can do with that but I'm gonna squirrel it away for the future until my 3DS dies but this also comes with a little bonus content we can talk about it in like 30 seconds

because it's not that great I honestly don't recommend you play it it's cool that they included more stuff But it's pretty tedious. So this Bowser's Minions thing is essentially an auto-battler RPG where you assemble a team based on the enemies that you see. And then it plays out automatically. You can send different characters in. And there's a lot of grinding in it.

There's kind of too much story for what it is. And I appreciate that they're giving you something extra. But honestly, Superstar Saga is a great game. You don't really need any other side content to make that fulfilling experience. So yes, that is Superstar Saga, a great place to start. And like Stewart said, can play this on the Nintendo Switch Online service.

If you have a million dollars, you can buy a cartridge of the remake, but I also feel like the original experience is the best one. So we're going to move on to the next game here. That is Mario and Luigi Partners in Time. It launched for the DS. Two years later, in November of 2005,

and I feel like this is a real sophomore slump game. And you can tell what the general consensus is about this game, because when they were remaking their series, Alpha Dream skipped this one. They're like, one, and then now three so I feel like even they were like we didn't do a great job on this let's forget if this happened what are our thoughts on this one I could not everything in this game just took so long to do that I slipped off of it very quickly and I was a 23 years old with like a

part-time college job I had so much free time for these bad RPGs I they yeah they they immediately failed to make a better game unfortunately that the bro's attacks were replace, I think one of the bigger problems, the bros attacks were replaced with items and the items are way more boring. They're usually just mashing A and then meshing B, or like, there's one where you're kicking a Cooper shell that bounces back and then the other bother kicks it. And it literally is just A, B, A, B like that. And if you've got like a red shell, that will go on and on until you miss a kick. And it's not that hard to keep doing it. So most of the battles just become like, choose your strongest item

don't mess up the inputs you're done but even then I mean I played this through right to the end I got to the final boss and the final boss I think I fought it for about 35 minutes and then I died and I was like I'm not nah forget it there's like a 12 there's like a literally

an eight minute cut scene at the beginning that you can't skip and it's just mashing through dialogue and I just found myself thinking like this is so this is not Nintendo you know you shouldn't have to do this in a game like this and also the writing it's not bad writing i think it's trying more to be funny if that makes sense they're putting cramming jokes into every line and the nadir of it

is that he pronounced that word nadir the nadir the low point yeah yeah you meet and this is the most dated thing ever you meet some hammer brothers who speak in leit speak oh oh yeah we are hammer bros we rock saw you then ruffle lemau it's like at the time it's that kind of thing where it was designed to make the internet go, holy crap, we feel seen, and then you go back to it any time now, and it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, like, like, I'm like, like, like, I'm glad they kept it with one or two of the characters in persona three the remake, because that still takes place in 2009. So I'm like, I get it, these characters talking online would still talk like someone in 2009, and I'm glad you kept that, but I absolutely

agree. It's also weird, like, you know, persona three technically takes place in the real world of some sort. It is weird to hear internet speak in a market. in a Mario world where we don't quite know what their internet is? That's true. Yeah, like where did this come from? I think I recently replayed the first Ace Attorney Investigations game and I think one of the characters does speak and lead speak

and in case you're not 40, I can explain what that is. It's go back to the early 2000s and you can see people instead of writing the word U, YOU, they put a lowercase J and then two zeros like Jew, like typing everything out with numbers and letters as complicated as possible. L33T speak. Yeah, it's it's Megatokio and nobody wants to be reminded of Megatokio.

Unfortunately, I only think of Megatokio when I think of Leetspeak, and there will be no more questions about Megatokio on this podcast. It's still going. Anyway, it's still, it's, yeah, that's my issue with this game in the nutshell really is. It doesn't feel sort of, it feels like I'm putting too much weight on this Samarothers thing, but it isn't just that. It's not timeless. It's too talky, it's too tutorialy, and it's only going to get more tutorialy from here.

and it's a downer it's not a horrible game it's just I mean we haven't even talked about the babies which just means you do everything twice yeah I want to get into the babies and I want an internal investigation

to happen at Nintendo I want to know why they were so focused on babies at this point in time because for reasons unknown to us they were going through a real baby area a baby era in the early to mid-aught so Mario Kart double dash full of babies Yoshi's Island DS all the babies

this game it's full of babies did something tell them oh people love babies Was baby geniuses like this big hit overseas that we don't know about? I don't know, but everybody I know at the time, like a bunch of surly 20-somethings, they hated this crap. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody likes babies. Everybody hates babies.

It's just not an effect. And it's ridiculous. And yes, Stuart, because of the babies, everything takes twice as long to do because Mario and Luigi are A&B, baby Mario and baby Luigi are X and Y. Yeah. It's like you're always covering the same ground twice. You're sometimes doing the same minigames twice. adding the x and y inputs to the combat system so that the x and y i think the babies are on your shoulders and they're using the hammers while marian luigi jumping it doesn't add anything it just makes everything a little bit more

annoying i think the real killer is the items that just make the battles take forever and the fact that as you've mentioned everything has too much freaking HP uh and it's a bummer it's not the villain isn't as good it's just kind of these boring purple aliens you know you'd think it would be exciting to introduce this kind of alien tyrant race into a Mario game but they it's everything just seems worse the exploration isn't as good it's a shame because it looks so nice

it plays so smoothly but what it's doing is just it's just not there and it wasn't until the next game that they course corrected very nicely oh yeah completely and my biggest problem with this is it's a time travel story but time travel mechanically has nothing to do with what you're doing in the game like I love chrono trigger I love data tentacle I love games

where time travel is a gameplay element and mechanic here which is to set up the story of how you can interact with your baby self and use yourself in battle, I guess. And just one final panegity criticism. There's this one piece of music in this game that they play every single time until it dramatic happens, and you hear it five or six times in the first ten minutes,

and it's like, for God's sake. Hey, Yoko does not come cheap. Maybe they didn't want to pay as much for this one. It's a great song, but you don't need to hear it that many times. It's a shame. So, yes, I'm sure there are people who like this game, but it feels like the developers don't really care much for it

and like all of these games review very well but then after years past people are willing to say well this wasn't the good one or this one was very tedious and this one has a high metacritic score but I think most people will agree

you can skip this one and move on to the next one which is very very good Bowser's Inside Story It came out about four years later So there was a big gap between these games And I'm going to say this is the best one I prefer how streamlined and short and compact the first game is

but in terms of like pure concept and how it's executed I really really love this game and if you go back to our two power browser series that we did for retronauts this is one of the very few non-sports slash fighting games where you can play as Bowser Nintendo does not like you to do that outside of those contexts I think I mean for me it's not my favorite

I think it's a completely reasonable pick for the best one my only literally my only issue with this game is it's a 15 hour game and the first five hours are so handholdy that it's like two-thirds great but having said that there's so much here I love mechanically like the fact that because the Mario brothers have been shrunk down

and I're inside Bowser's guts they're on the bottom screen and Bowser's on the top screen that's very clever I like that the way that Bowser interacts with the world is called the fights where you turn the DS sideways like it's brain training that's just really creative

and also it looks so good the sprites are so good in this game. It's nuts. The tail end of the great-looking Sprite era for this series. And in terms of the pure concept here, Fawful returns, Mario and Luigi end up inside of Bowser, which

really excites the VOR community online. People are way into that. Bob. I can't... No more talk about Vores or Megatokio on this podcast, but... You know that's fair enough. The gameplay bounces back between Bowser and Mario and Luigi.

Bowser is on the overworld, and Mario and Luigi are inside of him, and there's a lot of interplay between those two elements. Bowser has his own battle system where he operates differently, and then there are these boss fights starring Bowser where you turn your DS sideways in book mode and you fight these mega bosses and it's the only

time I did not mind breathing into my DS for a special attack. Yeah, I also like how the Mario and Luigi sections are all 2D, they're all 2D platforming. That's right, yeah. And that's just clever and cool. And also, what is interesting about it is this is almost,

I mean, as you alluded to, this is a Bowser game. Marion Luigi are like side characters. This is absolutely a Bowser game. And he gets more like in-game development and dialogue and characterization than I thing he's ever had before or since. And it's just a joy. Like once you get, for me, once I get past that tutorial, that intro, it just takes off. And it's just like a rocket ride through this just fun.

There's constantly something fun or cool or interesting or creative happening. So yeah, great game. It's really great. Yeah, Mario and Luigi essentially exist inside of a Metroid game, and then Bowser is in an RPG in a separate game, but they feed into each other so well. Mike, do you have any thoughts on this? Were you a big fan of this one? You know what? I was a big fan of it. I probably couldn't tell you a lot about the story because I played it so long ago. What always struck me about this game and going back to Super Mario RPG as well was I love the characterization of Bowser as someone with a lot of confidence that screws us. up still. Yeah. Like I think I like you know it's so easy to do an over the top villain or have

Bowser just be evil or just you know the whole princess peach thing. I like that like these games actually when I say give him a personality that they don't just say like here's the backstory of why he's evil but they show a man who's frustrated that he's not getting enough respect. Yeah. And that to me is always such a great way to show a cartoon villain. Someone who's like kind of super powerful and could kill everyone in the room but just wants everyone to acknowledge that they will not. Yeah, he's got a lot going on compared to Mario and Luigi. Sorry, Stuart, go ahead.

No, he'll flip between confidence and just, like, total insecurity or just betray this kind of insecurity sometimes that makes him so much more just, like, funny and likable. I really love this one a lot. It doesn't get maybe enough respect, and it also introduces everyone's favorite Mario character of all time, Broch Monsieur. Is he like a giant question mark block man?

Like, what's his deal? With a mustache? France. Okay. He's, yeah, and he's also got a dog

that's called Brog, and there's also Brog Madame. I just like Bromonsior because it's a pun on Croc Munceur

makes me think about delicious sandwiches and that's great stuff. This one, yeah, it is, I feel like

the peak of the series. They could have just went out on this and maybe it would have been for the best, but I just love the concept

to how well they execute on it. Yes, it has a kind of a slow wind-up but a lot of these games do so it's just

part of the RPG experience. And yeah, there was a remake which unbelievably came out in 2019 in January of 2019 almost the second anniversary of the switch this is kind of Alpha Dream's last

game and it's like the last remake we talked about it's technically pretty it's competent but the personality is kind of gone or it's very lesson it's not completely gone and there's another bonus mode which is essentially more of the auto-batler RPG that we saw with the last remake so don't

play that yeah I mean not to get all sort of digital foundry, bless them, but it's also 30 frames per second, and it's not 3D, and it's kind of like, what's going on here that means you can't have it run smoothly? I don't really get it.

It doesn't seem that much better looking than the previous remake. Yeah, I'm glad, I guess, some people got a chance to play this. Spoilers, this game sold terribly. I guess, I think it only received a physical release because Nintendo was publishing it. Otherwise, there would be there would just be an e-shop exclusive, and that's

it, like a lot of games of this era. there are cartridges of it they are very expensive now there is no other way to play this legally if you didn't buy a cartridge or buy the e-shop version of it it's um if you do own a physical copy of it again hang on to it because that's your pension

that's going to be worth something for sure I do like the fact that it exists because it kind of characterizes the last couple of years of the 3DS when Nintendo we're just putting out like really surprisingly good complete like feature packed games I mean this

is not light on content at all. It's just that I suppose if you haven't played this game and you can get this, it's not a terrible version to play, but the DS version will probably end up on a DS expansion pass thing for the Switch 2 somehow, so

maybe keep it out for that. You could tell a lot of 3DS games were in development when they weren't sure, like, well, people like the Switch, the Wii was kind of a failure, and then it turns out it was a huge hit, and then all the 3DS games that launch in like 2017 to 2019, nobody cared. They've received very little fanfare and now they're very very expensive

but you're right Stuart a lot of really cool games came out in that latter 3DS period that are now unfortunately very hard to access yeah a lot of personas a lot of RPGs Kirby games Yoshi's Pucci and Yoshi's Woolly World which is amazing just great stuff yeah

Kirby Planet Robobots that's 2016 game the best Kirby game ever made I just played through it a few years ago and I really really liked it I've never played that I need to play that now super solid it's great and I think I Legal means only, through legal means only. Yes, yes, thank you.

There is no other way to play it. What are you talking about? I think, I think, Stuart, you could be right. It could be the best 2D Kirby game since Kirby's adventure, probably. For me, for me it's the best one, but we'll save it for Kirby Part 6, I guess, if there's ever a movie for six. They need to make more games, but I will gladly put together that a podcast. So moving on, we're getting to the doldrums here, the bad, bad era of Mario and Luigi with Mario and Luigi Dream Team for the 3DS, August of 2012. 2013. So this is their 3DS debut, and the last game was great. People don't seem that excited

for this one. And this one has a reputation of being very talky, very hand-holdy, and we were reaching the period in which Nintendo was getting rid of those elements of their games. There's kind of like a wee-you period where Nintendo is always reminding you, like, turn the game off, you've been playing too long, or do you need help with this level? That kind of goes away right after this, but we're kind of towards the end. And what I remember about this game, which I didn't play, is that Jeremy was reviewing it for U.S. Gamer, and we were meeting

for Retronauts recording 12 years ago at this point, and he was in such a bad mood because of this game. And all he wanted to do was complain about it, and that steered me far away from ever wanting to play it, although I did buy a copy in the 3DS's dying days just to have it, just because I knew it was

going to be worth a lot of money. Did anyone play this one? I did. I own, same thing, I own it, and I didn't play. I finished it and I read it's one I think thinking about the many years I've been playing video games I think the game I regret bothering to finish the most is this one and I'm not exaggerating this game I'm trying not to swear on this show anymore um I do not I do I do I do not say this about Mario games about Nintendo games because I'm not an idiot I can see the quality even in the games I don't like you know this sucks this is a bad game I really don't like this and the most annoying thing about it is it looks and feels incredible again, but it's so long. It's about, I think I put about at least 65 hours into this, and I remember there's a point

in the game where you are assembling this thing called the ulti bed, like the ultimate bed. You have four pieces of the bed, you do four extremely big dungeons that go on forever and don't even have any interesting gimmicks. You get those four pieces and I'm like, holy shit, finally. Oh, I said it, I said shit. God damn it.

And I said, God damn, this isn't going very well. Anyway. You're in a spiral, Stuart. You're in a spiral. I know, I really am. And I'm thinking, okay, great, there'll probably be one more final dungeon. I'm done. And then the story reveals, like, there's going to be at least four more dungeons. I remember, I'm already, like, 30 hours into this game. And I remember just thinking, sunk-cost fallacy, I've got to finish those.

I've got to keep going. And it's just garbage. I hate it so much. It's so boring. It's not even, like, funny bad. It's just so boring. and the tutorials in this never end all the way up to the finale

and they're not even if it's one of those ones where if you say they say like hey do you want to learn about time hits and you say no he'll be like oh well I think you should and then tell you anyway as if that's funny it's not funny it's annoying there is nothing about this one

that I like I know other people will disagree with that I'm sure there are people who like this one it's got a fun idea with the whole dream Luigi thing it's a cute idea but it doesn't lead to anything interesting i just i can't with this game it's the for me it's the absolute pit of the series it's the worst it ever got um i'm i'm actually quite sad now having had to relive some of it but it's okay god yeah when i read your note steward about playing 60 hours my jaw hit the floor

i could not believe this game is that long but i i couldn't yeah and i was rushing i was rushing through this game to finish it i don't think we're annoying anyone with our comments here because i've never heard anyone say oh you know what that's kind of an overlooked gem or there's some good stuff going on in the game. Nobody says anything good about this because most people don't say anything about it. It kind of came and went. During the year of Luigi, this is the year of Luigi. It was a terrible year for Nintendo, a great year for Luigi, but this was meant to celebrate the character. And in concept, it seems really cool. It seems like they had another Bowser inside story on their hands because a lot of the game is Luigi is sleeping on the bottom screen. You interact

with his face to sort of affect the level above you on the top screen, sort of like how there's interplay between bottom and top screen in the last game. But like you said, Stuart, the game will not leave you alone the game does not trust you to play the game and it's just all these tutorials all of these word bubbles it just wears you down and then the game is too long it's it's the kind of game where you walk into a room the game pans over to the thing you need to interact with pans back slowly and then tells you exactly what interaction you're going to have to make with it it's just dreadful i can't with this one so stewart has the most experience here and we are we are really slandering this game but i don't think anyone's going to be mad and i guess uh this bad game didn't

meet sales expectations, so that was not a good move for Alpha Dream, and it looks like they had problems with the development of this game in terms of they're making something for a higher fidelity system that requires more resources, even though we look at the 3DS and think it looks bad now. It was a big

step up from the DS. So I feel like they are now encountering a new generation of hardware, and this is going to be their downfall, where the next game feels like a mix of use resources, and then they're kind of just doing remakes until the end. So I feel like they, like a lot of development studios, they couldn't make the jump to new generation successfully. And that brings us to their final game, Mario Luigi Paper Jam.

I will say, even though this is a mediocre game, I think it has a killer pun. This pun rules because Paper Jam, it's the thing that you experience at your office when the paper won't come out of the printer and you've got to go inside of it. But also, they're having a paper jam. They're dancing around, right? One of the guys is paper. And then in the European version, they ruined it by calling it Paper Jam Bros. It's like, come on, go on.

Dream Team Bros. Paper Jam Bros. Come on. Are there no paper jams in Europe, Stuart? Can you let us know? I don't know. There's all kinds of jam over here in Europe, but not so much. So the concept is what it sounds like. Paper Mario, the distinct character, enters the world of Mario and Luigi. There's interplay between the mechanics.

Conceptually, this is very good. But there's not a lot to the game outside of this gimmick, and things end up feeling a little flat and desperate, because we have these two ailing series that are kind of joining together to justify their existences, and you can kind of feel the sweat coming off of the game. Yeah. Yeah, this is, I don't, like, I don't hate this as much as I do the previous game,

because I feel like the, uh, the stuff that I like about Paper Mario, uh, has been brought into this, to the detriment of it for many other people, of course. Um, there's a lot more focus on exploration in this game. And I mean, like, Paper Mario sticker star style exploration, which is, like, press A on everything and hope that there's something behind it, which for me, that's, that's a big deal. But, uh, for everyone else correctly, probably, it's stupid and boring. but again adding Paper Mario to like the battles

just means that you spend a lot of time pressing Y six or seven times you know to do seven identical jumps it's just and also the areas you go in the game are really boring it's like the first world is just like grass world and then it's like

desert world there's no personality to any of it unfortunately that's what really brings it down for me this is the only one I haven't finished apart from Brotherhood which we'll get to but it's fine it's just there's no reason to play it

really there's no big hook I reviewed this for you as gamer I have no memories of it I gave it a four out of five and I think now maybe like three out of five would be more appropriate maybe 2.5 out of five I feel like I was just happy that they were forcing Paper Mario to be an RPG again in some respect they couldn't make it

too gimmicky but you're right Stuart there's not a lot of personality to the game and then the battles end up taking far too long because like with partners in time you're adding an extra element that just kind of adds on shoe leather to the battle experience you're just doing a lot more actions over and over again and when these games go wrong the battles take way too long you just kind of get bored of fighting the same things over and over uh when it when it goes right you're still playing squash with an enemy

for like a minute yeah like in the middle of a fight multiple times that's like come on did you have any experience with this one mike i you know what i did i think the issue i ran into with it was it it I like paper Mario and I like Mario and Luigi and I think like when I heard about it I was like oh my god these two games I like and they're put together and then when I played it I was like okay these are like two games I like put together and for some reason that was like it almost kind of felt like I didn't need it um it didn't quite justify its existence to me and maybe that's because I'm somebody who like doesn't necessarily always love crossovers you know I'm somebody who's kind of like I like when something stands on its own like I

I didn't need, like, I love Paper Mario. I did not need someone to be like, and here's why Paper Mario is Paper. And it's not that this game does that, but I also just don't necessarily need all my Mario worlds to overlap outside of something like Smash Brothers. And I think my attention fell off it pretty quick. I just kind of felt like it felt gimmicky to me in a way that felt more like the gimmick was more important than what the game was trying to do. Yeah.

I mean, you don't really get the best of either series here. And like, the one thing I'm going to credit for. four mainly is that it has one of the funniest jokes ever in a game which is when paper peach escapes from the cage by just walking out of it casually which is genuinely a good joke but yeah so much of this game you're just doing it you're just

looking for toads and I like looking for toads I'll look for toads but not all the time I want to do some actual puzzles you know a big part of this game is toad hunt quests which involve scrubbing old areas in order to find missing toads and I remember these taking a lot of time when I was reviewing

the game and I looked up a compilation of the Toad Hunt quests on YouTube. It is two hours of the game just finding toads and like yanking them out of bushes. I don't even remember that part. That's presumably also the player efficiently going directly to where the toads are. Yeah, knowing where they all are ahead of time for the sake of like making a guide

essentially. That stuff is very late paper Mario and it does not fit here at all. And one thing I notice about these games as we reached the end of our discussion is even if the games are bad they start with what I feel like are genuinely cool concepts like Mario and Luigi partners in time. I don't like the baby but

adding like the child characters to the battle seems like it could work out but it doesn't in Dream Team making the dream world where you interact with Luigi's face to alter the level seems fine but they don't execute on it. In this game it's a little more desperate but it's like sure I want to see what Paper Mario can do in this world but then they don't really execute on it well so I feel like these games

the bad ones always start with really good intentions but something happens along the way that makes them fundamentally flawed. I also wonder with something like Paper Mario how much oversight there was where they're like no well Paper Mario doesn't do this or you know they would not do that. Having worked

both at Nintendo and at many companies that have done crossover type things, there's so many cooks in the kitchen, there's so many opinions on how this character would act versus this character that I could imagine that being a giant impediment to making this game as good as it could be. Yeah, sure, there

might have been stricter rules about Paper Mario, who knows. Having the character or Paper Mario, who isn't, let's face it, here's a Paper Mario, you know, and the real personality for those games comes from your followers, from your helpers, you know, Gumbella, you know, these really funny characters. And with this, the other characters are just like really toned down Mario and Luigi from Dream Team Bros.

And it's just like, it's not, like I said, you lose the best of both series this way. It's just a shame that it didn't work. Well, we're going to move on to the next and final game in the series for now, because the series seem to be spiraling to death, bad sequels, lackluster remakes. The company goes out of business. but then we have Mario and Luigi Brothership for the Switch which came out in November of 2024 just this past year

and then it seems like people were like no this one isn't good either and we're disappointed that seems to be across the board general consensus and Stewart reading your notes I remember that they don't even stick with the conceit that A jumps with Mario

B jumps with Luigi screw it up completely Oh they don't? I haven't played it They don't it's I think I mean hands up I actually really like what I've played of this but it is so different to the previous games that a lot of people are instantly going to rebel

against it, which is fair enough. But like in the battles A makes Mario jump and it makes Luigi jump and but no, it's the other way around I think. On the map, Luigi isn't directly controllable, he just follows

you around like an automated NPC helper which is just weird and wrong. You know, it's so against what you expect. But then in the battles, yeah, it's like A to select right and then A again. But when Luigi jumps on the enemy, the timed hit is still on B. So you're switching between A and B in a way that's so, like, unintuitive if you've played any other games in this series. That even, like, hours into this game, I was still screwing up inputs because I couldn't remember that you have to press A to select things for Luigi now.

It's weird. I don't know why they did that. But when I muscled through that, I do think this is a big step up. I don't, I think it's probably not as good as dream, as Bowser's Inside Story, but the thing is it's not like it. You're just going to all these different islands that have a bunch of actual sort of fun exploration, things to find in them. It has a good soundtrack.

It has interesting characters that you meet, fun characters. It's not like crazy off the wall like the early games, but it is not just toads anymore. And the fact that it does have the visual bump to the switch is nice. It means that they can branch out a bit. have different kinds of gimmicks and different kinds of worlds to visit. I like it. I think a lot of people wouldn't. I think the fact that there are load times on the battles hurts it quite badly because you really don't want to be...

I mean, the battles take long enough anyway in these games that you really don't want to be watching loading as well. But I like this. I think that this is a very real step-up from the others. It's just that I wouldn't say run out and buy a copy now unless it's, you know, desperate. It's not a bad game, I don't think. You have to kind of get through the initial.

They have totally screwed these controls up. Yeah, that seems, I don't know what they were thinking there because the games try to hardwire you to thinking, no, this button is always Mario, this button is always Luigi, but to swap that around, it feels like a weird issue. Not even to swap that around, but swap it around and then sometimes decide, actually, no, it is that now. I guess they couldn't decide.

Yeah, I bought this game because I wanted to support the series, the series I have some fondness for, but I want to say, like, the past 18 months have been crazy for video game releases. Like there's just so much new good stuff coming out Now the Switch 2 is coming out So I don't know when I'll get around to this But I do want to give it a try Because I feel like it has to be better than

Paper Jam and Dream Team I feel like maybe There's more enthusiasm on the development side To try to make this work again But across the board I have not seen a lot of enthusiasm in general It's definitely better than those two games easily It has performance issues

It has loading issues But it's definitely a step up it's not going to bring the series back to prominence i don't think though it's it's just not quite there but uh it's a step up it's it's also less tutorialy you can actually get around the tutorials in this game but to be honest because they've changed all the controls you probably shouldn't like they actually let you say no this time and they believe you like actually uh we know better it has this kind of it has the kind of fun idea of the fact that you're on islands and the islands are kind of like moving that you have to sort of plan and plot where are you where exactly

you can and can't go at any given time because the environment's going to be shifting around you. And it's just that little bit more engaging. So you're not just going from Grass World to Dunes World to whatever. It'll be like, I can't get to this island right now, but I have this new power now so I can go back to this

island and I can maybe collect some of the stuff I wasn't able to get before. And some people will hate that because it means you can't do what you want at any point, you know? And that's a problem for a lot of players. I get that. But for me, I was just kind of like, hell yeah, I'm a freak, let's go. I had a lot

I liked this and I will go back to it but unfortunately other cool games came out so it just was surrounded by so many better games that I bought it and it came and went

and I realized like oh this is on my switch and it's been there for like eight months but yeah that has been our Mario and Luigi discussion

before we go here I want to ask everybody what do you think the future of Mario based RPGs will be or what should it be and my

my own thoughts are you know origami king was a step in the right direction there's still things in that game I don't like

I like Piper Mario getting closer to being an RPG again. Mario and Luigi, I don't know if there's a future there because people don't seem to care anymore. So my proposition is we make a third

Mario RPG branch, a tactics game, and we can forget about the rabbits thing because I don't want to look at those guys. Let's have Mario Fire Emblem. That's all I'm going to say, I want to do that now as the next Mario RPG. We can have a third brand

and see how that goes. Those are my thoughts. Mike, any thoughts on this? Honestly, I would, despite being a, a fan of the Mario and Rabbits game, I do agree that the worst part are the rabbits. Yeah, the gameplay's fine.

I would love to see, yeah, a tactical Mario game. I do think that knowing Nintendo, they're a company that doesn't like giving up on things. And so I could see, I definitely see a Paper Mario in our future just because I think no matter how those perform Nintendo likes those. And then I bet it's going to be, we're going to get another brother ship in that like,

in 10 or 15 years, we're going to be like, oh, a new Mario and Luigi. game. Wow. We haven't seen that in a while and then it'll come out and you'll be like, did anyone play it? And people will be like, yeah, I heard it was fine. Like, I feel like that we'll have. It's going to be eternally... We'll definitely have a Paper Mario series. Eternally a 7 out of 10

for most people, the series. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Outside of a few standouts. Stuart, how about you? I think that following Super Mario Brothers Wonder, now that Mario, sorry, the Nintendo has actually seen fit to break Mario out of some of the molds he's been in for the last

like 10 years. I feel like we could get something completely new in the RPG mold and that's what I would like to see. I mean, I'm a sicko. I would like another Paper Mario that's just about walking around and hitting things to the hammer and hoping coins come out. I would like that. I mean, I would like a Sticker Star remake. I'm sorry, I really would like a Sticker Star remake.

There's so much they could shave off the edges of that. Fair. But it's not going to happen, I don't think. But I think we're going to get something new and it's going to be cool and everyone on the internet is just going to complain about it. Yeah, in general. I'll say, get these 3DS games on something else so people can play them

because people just can't play them now. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I wouldn't play Dream Team again. They can go to hell, but yeah. If, like, we can make it a form of punishment. Like, if you steal a car, you have to finish Dream Team or something like that. Yeah.

Creative Sentencing. I wouldn't be too surprised if we got, like, Super Paper Mario remade because it doesn't, I mean, the Wii pointer stuff is not exactly, like, impossible to recreate with a touchscreen. And that was a pretty good game, I thought. I thought people generally like that. I'd like to give it another.

chance, I think. But it is... It was kind of weirdly nihilistic Mario game, wasn't it? It's kind of weird and sick and gross, and that was cool. Yeah, I kind of like the concept, but I'm not sure how well it figured out. But... Maybe we'll get a Paper Mario one remake. That would be cool. I might prefer that to the second game, actually, now that I've replayed

the second game. I think a lot of people who came back to that remake of the second game had this kind of realization of like, oh, wait, this isn't a masterpiece. It's just real good. Yeah, yeah. It's like, this was not as good as I remembered, but I still enjoyed my time with it, even though COVID. It helped me get through the COVID.

Give me something to do. But yeah, that has been our Mario and Luigi discussion. This has been an episode of Retronauts, by the way, in case you forgot. And I've been your main host, Bob Mackey. And you can find us on Blue Sky's Retronauts. And if you want to support the show, get these episodes ad-free. And you also get access to, I think over at this point,

100 bonus episodes. Go to patreon.com slash Retronauts and sign up for five bucks a month. Again, you get ad-free episodes one week at a time. And you also get access to two full-length bonus episodes every month, and at this point, since we started in early 2020, there are now over 100 bonus episodes that you haven't heard if you're not a patron,

at patreon.com slash retronauts. And that is it for retronauts. I'll talk about my plugs last. Let's talk about Mike and what Mike's up to. Mike has a new book that's just freshly out on store shelves and on digital shelves too. Yep. Good game, no rematch. It is a it is a very

ostensibly, it's been reviewed well of a funny book of comedy essays about video games available now. Digital, hardcover, audio. I read the audiobook, available wherever books are sold. If you're in the UK, it's coming July 3rd. We had a small hiccup that delayed it a little bit, but July 3rd, it'll be out there. And please buy it.

And Stuart, how about you? I have a book. It's not new, though. It's been out for a while, and it's called All Games Are Good. And, you know, it's got a spirited defensive sticker star in there. It's about my disgusting upbringing where I was playing all the wrong games all the time and going, wow, I love this, even though everyone else didn't. It's a very sincere contrarian book. though because I don't consider myself contrary and I consider myself to be mad and like wrong

but in a way that works for me so yeah please buy that and also you can hear me on retronauts a bunch and you can find me on like blue sky steward chip but I don't recommend that because I talk a lot of shit on that and as for me Bob Mackey once again you can find me on blue sky a bunch of other things is Bob Serbo I also do Talking Simpsons it's a podcast about the Simpsons going strong for 10 years now check it out wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash talking Simpsons sign up there for early episodes that are ad-free, and also podcasts about Futurama, King of the Hill, Batman, the animated series, The Critic, Emissional. We've covered so many episodes of those as well as The Simpsons.

But that is it for this episode of Retronauts. We'll see you again very soon for another episode. Take care. Thank you.