For a game that many claimed stood out for its playability, humour and charm; Mario and Luigi: Partners In Time is a title I found lacking in most departments. It is a frustratingly inconsistent game. For every humorous moment - the frequent allusions to Luigi’s subordinate popularity - there are many more that ultimately fall flat. Timing is everything in great comedy and the difficulty in recreating the swiftness of skilled comedians in the delivery of script or physical movement will, at least for the near future, remain an issue in the use of comedy within videogames. I recognise that this is a Mario game at heart, with an audience spanning a great deal further than most games and a consequent need to contain broad appeal. However, whilst poorly written text can be skipped through and overlooked, agonisingly slow and repetitive comedic animations cannot and soon become trying.

The sheer level of repetition throughout the game is unforgivable and extends far beyond the use of humour. The gameplay and narrative structure throughout the game is agonisingly predictable and linear. I fail to see how such A to B, item collection, based gameplay is forgivable purely because this is an RPG that has been developed for a handheld system. Does the fact that it will likely be played in sporadic bursts necessitate such a dull, formulaic story? No. It just demands a flexible save system. Just because I am playing this game on the move does not mean I want a watered down experience. Simply travelling from location to location, working through a routine of being given a new ability and then using that ability over and over throughout the next section just smacks of a lack of imagination and effort. Whilst the metroidvania system of attaining new abilities to facilitate exploration into new areas may work in an action game, here they feel slow and cumbersome. It is not fun to have to drop the baby characters, take control of them and dig into the ground every other screen to collect another ‘bean’ that eventually proves to be essentially worthless. It is similarly not fun to have to solve the same five or so puzzles only against different backgrounds.

The combat contains the framework to be a valid feature of the game but again, screams of a lack of consideration and balancing. New attacks come in the form of a hammer and disposable items and the player uses all dynamically through timed button presses which should inject some life and participation into what can often be stagnant turn based battles. However, the items are mostly redundant until the latter stages of the game and even then swiftly become repetitive. For those that bemoan random battles in RPG’s, enemies do appear onscreen to be engaged in battle by the player and although the game features a wealth of imaginative enemies to encounter, battles are rarely engaging and involve little threat of defeat due to the overwhelming amount of health items scattered liberally throughout the game. The only other customisation is offered in a choice of clothes and badges that are systematically upgraded in the game’s store after the completion of a level for the player to passively upgrade stats without much consideration. Although badges have different status effects and attributes the ease of the game almost entirely undermines the necessity to strategically equip the protagonists before battles.

That all being said, I still persisted until the game’s conclusion, not through a desire to learn the entirety of the story but because I blindly held onto the hope that at any minute the game would inject some variety or challenge that would improve the experience and turn it into what I had hoped. As it stands though, this is a polished, if greatly limited RPG that may hold an appeal to younger players, especially as a gentle introduction into the RPG genre, but remains too linear, too safe, to satisfy expectations any higher.

C

Jake.