Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time (Review)

The sequel to Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga didn’t endear itself to me as well as its predecessor. In fact, I’d say it’s a noticeable step backwards. This time around Professor E. Gadd has made a time machine and Princess Peach decides to test it out. While in the past she gets attacked by Princess Shroob. Mario & Luigi then proceed to go back in time to save her and they see an alien race called the Shroobs attacking the Mushroom Kingdom of the past. Later, they meet their past selves (i.e. Baby Mario and Baby Luigi), and the four team up to save their past and present from the alien race. The story is just annoying, nothing that happens in the past directly affects the present. The baby Mario bros don’t get their minds erased or anything at the end of the game so why are the present versions unable to remember any of this? Even worse are the antagonists, the Shroob army, led by the intolerable Princess Shroob. They’re smug, annoying, cliché, and speak an unintelligible language which renders any chance for proper characterization impossible. From what I can gather, they’re just evil and want to take over the world because it’s there. The game tries to throw a plot twist at us late in the game, with a couple of hints along the way, but everything I hoped for was more interesting than the actual twist.

The gameplay is pretty much the same as the last game, only this time there are four characters to work with. The Mario team still have humorous abilities used to gain access to new areas. When traveling together, the baby bros ride piggyback on Mario & Luigi. The team is required to activate 4-person panels, throw the babies onto trampolines to discover areas above-ground, and split up to simultaneously hit switches to open up further parts of the levels. There are a few more moves, but I found myself doing these same actions over and over, and unlike Superstar Saga, the situations in which these abilities are used don’t become more challenging as the game progresses, so it gets fairly repetitive.

Despite the addition of the babies, the battle system is the same as before. The bros attack is replace with bros items. There’s a large selection of items that, like regular attacks, depend on timed button presses. These are kinda cool but tiring to pull off because of how confusing the button combinations are. Most of the items have the characters launching themselves at enemies and you have to press the right button for the right character when they appear. The timing can be too rapid and random at times, but the amount of damage these moves do is worth it. The thing that’s really bad about the battling in this game is that there are a tons of enemy encounters, and most (if not all) of the battles are very lengthy, so a ludicrous amount of time is spent in mostly simple combat. The bosses are even worse, they’re easy to conquer, but have way to much health and take an insane amount of time to defeat. I found myself completely bored in the most of the fights and practically took a nap during the final boss. Even if you're using lots of powerful items it just takes forever to deplete their large amounts of HP. Ultimately, the game feels like it was either rushed badly or the developers didn't put much effort into it. There are some moments where the humor and the gameplay manage to be on par with the original, but they’re not enough to save this mediocre RPG. There’s a new game in this series coming out this week and it looks like it could be an improvement. Here’s to wishful thinking.