Mario & Luigi: Dream Team

[toblix]

The sequel to Partners in Time and Bowser's Inside Story is Mario & Luigi: Dream Team! Sad to see they're losing the pixel graphics, but I guess it's gotta be 3D, and I still have high hopes. From what I understand, Alphadream are doing this one as well, so there's bound to be lots of interesting mechanics and hilarious stuff or whatever.

[BigJKO]

Even though it was 3D it still looked a bit flat-ish, and even had choppy animation like pixel art. It looked great!

[Roderick]

The Year of Luigi. That tells me exactly one thing: The Year of Waluigi can't be far off now.

[Sno]

Superstar Saga remains one of the best times i've ever had with a JRPG, but i found Partners in Time so boring that i never ended up playing Bowser's Inside Story. (Though i've been informed by multiple sources that Bowser's Inside Story is actually pretty awesome, and that Partners in Time is just a very slow burn.) Still, with that all said, i thought the Dream Team trailer was the highlight of that last Nintendo Direct, it looks pretty great.

[tegan]

Apparently the M&L games always used prerendered models and just traced them to make sprites, which would certainly explain why thy're so oddly fluid. So now they're just skipping that extra step.

I still miss those big black outlines though.

[miffy495]

Sno, you need to play Bowser's Inside Story. That game is fantastic.

 

As for this news, hell to the yes. One of my favourite series gets a #4! After the disappointment that was Paper Mario Sticker Star (it's not bad, it's just gone a totally different direction from what I'd want. I still like it, but thinking about what the series could have become after Thousand Year Door makes me sad), I'm totally on board for some M&L goodness to wash that taste out of my mouth.

[lobotomy42]

Superstar Saga remains one of the best times i've ever had with a JRPG, but i found Partners in Time so boring that i never ended up playing Bowser's Inside Story. (Though i've been informed by multiple sources that Bowser's Inside Story is actually pretty awesome, and that Partners in Time is just a very slow burn.) Still, with that all said, i thought the Dream Team trailer was the highlight of that last Nintendo Direct, it looks pretty great.

I did the exact same thing.  Loved SS, hated PiT, and never played BIS.  But I do like Luigi, so maybe I'll get this new one.

[Roderick]

Oh man, everyone has the same story. It's mine as well. Should play BIS at some point.

[Sno]

Man, was Partners in Time that bad? How many people did that game ruin the series for? I just remember it being kind of boring and feeling like "Okay, alright, they ran out of steam after the first one." Is Bowser's Inside Story really that much better than Partners in Time?

[Roderick]

I think everyone. The trouble with Partners in Time is that it lacked the spark of ingenuity that made Superstar Saga so delicious. PiT was tediously linear, it had a bunch of annoying (baby!) characters, it became an entirely unlikeable slog very quickly. There's nothing objectively 'bad' about it, in fact, everything is pretty OK! More than OK!

The thing that I disliked most about it was how absolutely and completely 'polished' everything was. There was nothing exciting or dangerous or edgy about it - it was neutered to perfection. This was the game that made me realize I'd rather take an experience full of blemishes, that reaches for something new and exciting, than a game that is consistently good but plays it safe, and is therefor kinda boring.

[Sno]

One of the things i remember really turning me off the game was just that doing anything seemed to take forever, and there were huge long stretches between save points, so you couldn't even really attack it in small chunks.

It was so completely contrary to what a snappy, fast-paced game Superstar Saga was.

[tegan]

I loved Superstar Saga, played through Partners in Time without thinking much of it, and played most of Bowser's Inside Story and then decided not to finish it for some reason. I'm not sure why, because I remember mostly liking it. I was at the very end of the game, too.

[miffy495]

I loved SS, played PiT to completion and enjoyed it well enough, but found it inferior to SS, and then loved BIS again. Honestly, I don't get the hate directed towards PiT. It wasn't as good, sure, but I still enjoyed it a lot while playing it.

[Larsen B]

I lost my copy of Superstar Saga (along with the GBA Castlevania games) so I can't join in the Great > Poor > Good cycle of Mario & Luigi opinions.

 

This really was a highlight of the Nintendo Direct.

[Sno]

Oh man, Superstar Saga is ten years old.

That realization hit me pretty hard.

[HPopper]

I, too became disenchanted with Partners In Time and never finished it, but I really enjoyed Bowser's Inside Story. I thought it was quite clever and fresh. It overstayed its welcome a bit right at the end, but I felt like the rest of it was well paced.

[toblix]

I've played about an hour of this, and so far it's been pretty much more of the same, only with 3D levels (the characters are still sprites, thank God!) and more mini-games.

[Sno]

There's a demo up on the eShop, if anybody is curious about the game not quite to the point of putting down however many dollars.

[Larsen B]

I'm 25 hours in and maybe 2/3 through. The mechanics and writing are still enjoyable but I do feel it's a little long. Also the minigames are brutal to achieve S ranks in.

[mikemariano]

There's a demo up on the eShop, if anybody is curious about the game not quite to the point of putting down however many dollars.

It certainly saved me however many dollars. This definitely isn't my kind of game. Now if only there were a Paper Mario demo!

[Sno]

It certainly saved me however many dollars. This definitely isn't my kind of game. Now if only there were a Paper Mario demo!

 

Did you expect it to be like Paper Mario? That's funny, because those Mario & Luigi games are more like Paper Mario than the last few actual Paper Mario games have been. (I didn't play the 3DS one, to be fair. Everybody i've talked to about it has been incredibly disappointed with it, though.)

[toblix]

Okay, so I turned on the water in Dreamy Mushrise Park and activated a bunch of mustache trees, but they don't get me high enough to reach all the platforms. Is there a secret trick to getting them to throw me farther? I'm currently by the first one near where you start, and there's a platform and I can't get up it's sooo frustrating plz helllppppppp

[mikemariano]

Did you expect it to be like Paper Mario? That's funny, because those Mario & Luigi games are more like Paper Mario than the last few actual Paper Mario games have been. (I didn't play the 3DS one, to be fair. Everybody i've talked to about it has been incredibly disappointed with it, though.)

 

Sorry, didn't catch this until now.  I genuinely don't know how Paper Mario plays, so I wanted a demo to check it out.  Just last night I removed it from my 3DS store Wish List.

[miffy495]

Okay, so I turned on the water in Dreamy Mushrise Park and activated a bunch of mustache trees, but they don't get me high enough to reach all the platforms. Is there a secret trick to getting them to throw me farther? I'm currently by the first one near where you start, and there's a platform and I can't get up it's sooo frustrating plz helllppppppp

 

It's all about the angles. If you pull back really far, you'll go farther but have a shallower angle. I never reached a platform that I needed to go to that I couldn't hit, though sometimes it takes a few tries to find the right shot to get you there. Keep at it, you'll figure it out. If it helps, I'm nearly 30 hours in now and Dreamy Mushrise Park is the only place in the game that has had those trees, and all the subsequent Dreamy Luigi forms have been easier to use than that one.

[toblix]

Thing is, I don't need to get up there. I already unlocked the way to the next area, but I wanted to completely explore the place, and there's this one platform, on the same screen as a save block, that I can't reach. I'm assuming all the trees are supposed to take me somewhere, but there's nowhere to go with this fucking thing. Now I'm obsessed. There's no mention of it anywhere, and all the video playthroughs ignore it.