Review: Mario & Luigi Dream Team

I finally finished Mario & Luigi Dream Team!

Background: Mario & Luigi is a series of games for Nintendo handhelds - the first was on GBA, followed by two for DS and now Dream Team for 3DS. I played both the DS games, but I'm uncertain if I actually finished either of them. These games are RPGs, in the Final Fantasy style of gameplay: i.e., you control your characters wandering around the world, but if you run into enemies it switches to a turn based combat system. Your characters level up and gain new abilities throughout the story, giving access to new areas in the overworld and new attacks in combat.

The gimmick of Dream Team is that half of the game takes place in the dream world. Mario enters Luigi's dreams, which alters both the combat and the overworld mechanics. Dreamy Luigi - Luigi's dream self avatar - has the ability to merge with background parts of the dream in order to rotate gravity, control gears, change the temperature, etc. Also, there are "giant battles" where Luigi becomes enormous to protect Mario from a giant opponent. These battles are done with the 3DS held sideways and controlled with the stylus. Also, being a 3DS game, it uses the "tilt the DS"/accelerometer as an input for a number of the bigger attacks.

My take: The game was definitely fun - early on, I put hours into it at a time and didn't notice. It dragged on a bit towards the end; I spent the last 10 hours of gameplay wondering when it would be over. That's probably a bit biased because I thought it was going to be a 40 hour game and it ended up taking me 50 to complete.

For me, the best part of the game is the overworld. I like exploration more than I like combat, to the point where I was actually just dodging enemies to avoid fights. This left me a little below top rank (Level 40 - you get some more bonuses and although you can continue to level after this, it's less beneficial) when I got to the final battles, so I actually went back and grinded a bit. The only issue with the exploration is that you unlock different moves as the game goes on (digging for +1 stat beans, being able to jump higher to get to new areas, etc), so earlier in the game you'll see all sorts of things you couldn't get to. That made my brain feel a bit overwhelmed trying to remember things to go back for, even though it really didn't matter much.

I saw some complaints that folks didn't enjoy the giant battles, but I thought they were fun. A lot of tutorial with most of the battles to show you different moves, but that didn't trouble me. The dream mechanic was fun overall... the only issue was that some of the transitions take longer than I'd like, so I was actually impatient when I had to use those mechanics. That's a bit of an overall complaint, actually - not enough ability to skip through things. The cut scenes are cute enough, but they drag on and you have to continually hit A to get through them if there's talking.

With regard to the 3DS accelerometer controls, I found some of the attacks hard to aim and some relatively easy, so your mileage will vary. The biggest issue is that as soon as you're tilting the device, the top screen gets weird if you have the 3D turned on. As such, I usually had the 3D turned off or very low - with the exception of a few attacks where the 3D made it easier to tell which character needed to dodge, 3D is really not required in this game.

Some of the fights are hard, which surprised me a little. Hard in the sense that the bosses just do a lot of damage when you're first learning how to dodge their attacks, so I had a couple demoralising fights where I lost a character nearly right off the bat and rebooted my DS in disgust... but since I'd learned the attack pattern, the next time I tried it I had no troubles. That's not how I'd prefer to learn a fight. In the event that you do find a fight too hard and lose both characters, you get the option of doing it on easy mode. I didn't make use of this, but I presume it's to make sure kids don't get stuck on something they can't handle / adults don't get frustrated with a mechanic they don't like.

There was one moment in the game where I honestly thought I was stuck and just not going to be able to continue: running section with bombs coming at you and being reset if you get hit. You just have to do it, but I took about 10 shots at it and was getting concerned because there's no way to skip it. My problem, incidentally, is that I tend to focus on where Mario is and forget that Luigi trails slightly behind, so it was L who would clip a bomb.

Basically, I won't replay the game any time soon (you do unlock hard mode after being normal, but... why would I want that?), but I don't regret spending the time to beat it. :)