Brothers Two: Mario & Luigi: Brothership brought to Russia
The Super Mario brothers, Nintendo's main brand, are back in a new project with the subtitle Brothership. The originality is that you have to control both brothers at once, and the game itself is not a platformer for spinal cord development, but an ironic adventure RPG with an excessive amount of witty dialogues, a complex combat system and great music. In Russia, copies of the game were brought without Russian translation, and fans are confused by the low ratings of some international editions. "Izvestia" familiarized with the release and confidently declare: the mushrooms in "Mario" are still as bright and miraculous, and the project itself - a wonderful answer to the gloomy and dreary November.
New Mario is like a fairy tale about Ivan the Fool
It's hard to say how much of this actually fit into Nintendo's strategy, but it's safe to assume that Switch owners were purposefully prepared for the release of Mario & Luigi: Brothership over the course of an entire year. First gamers were offered a re-release of the super Nintendo hit Super Mario RPG, followed by a remake of another Nintendo 64 hit, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. It 's been more than twenty years since both of those games were released, but it turns out that the love for them hasn't waned, and new generations of users have discovered for the first time that Mario can not only run, jump and race go-karts, but also talk, solve puzzles and, in fact, think.
A still from Mario & Luigi: Brothership.
And in November, Nintendo released Mario & Luigi: Brothership, which stands out among the three because it's a completely original game that combines the idea of turn-based combat with the kind of development that not every Final Fantasy game could dream up.
It's understandable why Nintendo might have needed to put this kind of artwork in place for a new game. Despite all its fame, the Mario brand is still associated with purely entertaining genres: run, jump on enemies, eat healthy mushrooms, collect coins, dive into water pipes, defeat a dragon, kiss a princess. A parody of the fairy tale about Ivanushka the Fool, packaged in an uncomplicated (at first glance) form of an arcade platformer.
But role-playing releases with Mario are more exotic for gamers for whom the game is not a game, but their whole life. At least in Russia, where you had to know English to understand what they wanted from the player in the same Super Mario RPG. Besides, while the Super Nintendo was relatively common in gamers' homes, the Nintendo 64 was always a rare beast, which naturally narrowed the circle of gamers, and the situation wasn't much different in the rest of the world.
A still from Super Mario RPG
The Mario & Luigi mini-series of games originated on Nintendo's handheld consoles, and what made it special was that you could control the two brothers at the same time, rather than taking turns as in other releases in the franchise. And literally: one button - Mario jumps, the other - Luigi following him. And all tasks must be solved simultaneously, too, cooperating and inventing all sorts of combinations to get further.
But never before in the Mario & Luigi series, which, for what it's worth, has the action unfolded in such a large-scale, purpose-built universe that honors the " mainstream" Mario as we saw him last year in Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
Mario and Luigi use giant hammers
The gameplay is set up as follows. Mario and Luigi, like the other inhabitants of the Mushroom Kingdom, fall through another dimension and into a world that has been fragmented and exists as wandering islands in the World Ocean. One island is one "world", or level. Traveling to one of these islands, the brothers must literally annex the others so that this archipelago will eventually regain its former peace and prosperity.
A still from Mario & Luigi: Brothership.
On each island there are settlements, where brothers find new tasks and at the same time innocently procrastinate, listening to unintelligent lines from local poets and rehearsing local ritual dances. Separately note the dialog in which the natives tell Mario that such a mustache without a special gel in such a beautiful form can not be kept. Surely Mario has the appropriate gel with him, but... It would still, unfortunately, not fit, because the local rockabilly star needs hair gel, and if Mario finds it, the holiday will be saved. And with it, the island.
After such motivation, of course, you want to immediately rush towards the adventures, and they are solved here quite unusually. Let's say that it is pointless for brothers to beat enemies one by one, the damage will be too low. You need to do somersaults from enemy to brother, pushing off the latter as a springboard. And there is also a ghostly possibility to pass the whole game without taking any damage, because from the attacks of enemies you can not only dodge, but even counterattack without leaving your seat. Gradually, Mario and Luigi upgrade their arsenal, acquire heavy hammers and learn collective superstrikes, which become more powerful and deadly.
A still from Mario & Luigi: Brothership.
However, all this does not turn the game into an action game, the general mood of "Brotherhood" is relaxed and laughing negativity, pure "relaxation", surprise at how ingeniously the simplest elements are woven into the mosaic of an adventure of a couple of days' length. True, this is the very case when you do not want to hurry, and there is no need to hurry. Let Luigi carefully check all the beds, let the brothers look under every pebble, because under it there may be a small treasure or, more often, some other chatterer who will make you smile, if not laugh, then definitely smile.
This optionality doesn't seem like a virtue to everyone. The influential gaming site IGN trashed the game and gave it a humiliating five out of ten possible points, which in this case means a solid "fail". But look at those colors and turn up the music, listen to the characters speaking in a mixture of Italian, Japanese and gibberish, and it's clear that it's not the IGN skeptics who are right, but a lot of their colleagues, who, by the way, call Brotherhood a worthy final chord of Nintendo's gaming platform on the eve of Switch 2.
A still from Mario & Luigi: Brothership.
Whether the game has a great future in Russia, it's hard to say. The importing company Achivka, which provided a copy of the game to Izvestia, has invested considerable effort in promoting the release in the country, but how the spoiled gamer will react to the lack of Russian translation and a certain number of negative reviews on the Internet, it is difficult to say. The high price of the novelty (5-7 thousand rubles on marketplaces) makes it not too accessible, but we can only hope that the glorious Mario brand will pave the way as bravely as the plumber brothers in red and green caps usually do.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
