Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story (Review)

From the very start, the newest game in the Mario & Luigi series is leaps and bounds better than the previous Partners in Time entry. The story this time around sees a mysterious virus causing the Toads in Mushroom Kingdom to become extremely fat. During a meeting to find a cure for the outbreak, Bowser storms the kingdom's castle only to be defeated by Mario. He stumbles off to a forest where a merchant sells him a strange mushroom that it gives Bowser an ability to suck up things. It also puts him temporarily under the merchant's control, which turns out to be Fawful from Superstar Saga, making a welcome reappearance. Bowser again storms the castle and swallows the brothers and everybody else up, while Fawful plots to take over the kingdom. It's a crazy story and one that is actually engaging to go through, showing us aspects of the Mario universe that have never been seen before (Bowser‘s Insides notwithstanding). The game also features some of the best humor I've ever experienced in a Mario game. Like in Superstar Saga, Fawful’s lines are pure gold and Bowser is just hilarious.

Mario & Luigi don’t really do anything new in terms of gameplay, so Bowser joins the fray as a fully playable character. This adds a completely new take on a franchise that was starting to get a little stale. A good portion of the game is spent playing as Bowser and it feels more like Mario and Luigi are supporting characters with Bowser as the star of the show. In combat, Mario and Luigi still focus on jumping and hammering, Bowser mainly attacks by punching and fire-breathing. In addition, Bowser can use his newly-acquired vacuum ability to inhale some enemies and let the Bros. deal with things. Outside of battle, the Marios have to help Bowser out in a variety of ways since they are stuck inside him. At certain points, Bowser tries pull off extraordinary feats that he would not normally be able to do. When this happens, Mario and Luigi power him up by playing a variety of mini-games and unlike the past games these are actually pretty enjoyable. One of my favorites is a recurring mini game where Bowser needs his arm muscles powered up and you have to play a rhythm-based game as Mario and Luigi where you hit balls of electricity with into the muscle tissue with your hammers.

It seems that the developers have learned from their previous mistakes, and have improved this game based on that. Partners in Time suffered from featuring enemies that simply had too much HP. Well, this time around, all the enemies' HP got toned down a bit and have their attacks boosted instead. Some of the enemies hang around a bit longer than they have any business to and a lot of enemies have attacks that are just flat out cheap and over-powered, but it’s a hell of a lot better than Partners in Time’s time wasting showdowns. It'll take around 10-15 hours to complete the game, and beyond that there's still rare items, beans, and fun side-quests to invest more time in. Overall I’d say that Bowser’s Inside Story is actually better than the original Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga in terms of quality. It’s full of laughs, entertaining gameplay and takes the best qualities of the past games, and adds new twists to them to create a very enjoyable experience that belongs in any Mario fan’s library.