Reviewed by CL on 1/27/2006
The latest trip to the Mushroom Kingdom chronicles the adventures of Mario and Luigi as they try to stop mysterious alien invaders called the Schroobs from turning everyone into tiny purple mushrooms.
This game follows the same winning formula of action based RPG established by the original Paper Mario and more recently, Mario and Luigi: Super Star Saga and Paper Mario and the 1000 Year Door. The new features of this game obviously have to do with the dual screen setup of the Nintendo DS. Interesting, this game makes virtually zero use of the touch screen features except for one tiny part in the story (seriously, you use the stylus for about 15 seconds during the entire game). The two screens are used however in a clever way which ties into the overall story of the game. In this game, Mario and Luigi actually do some time traveling and end up teaming up with their baby counterparts. This ends up catering very well to the dual screen setup of the DS. There are countless times during the adventure where the team is forced to split up and you control the older brothers on the bottom screen while simultaneously solving puzzles with the babies on the top screen. Although this seems like a great idea, there really isn’t too much variety packed into this. The puzzles are never very complex and the teams are never split up for very long. This makes the issue of leveling up somewhat funny. This is because while they are together, the older brothers basically carry the babies on their backs. Therefore, during battles, it’s the older brothers that do all the heavy lifting and taking all the damage. During the entire game, I think the babies only got hit like 10 times during battles, and that was during sessions where the babies were forced to be separated. Of course, it is possible to completely split up the team but this limits your attack options and since the same experience is given to whoever is alive at the end of a battle, it makes the most sense to always be a team. This brings another issue to mind, in order to actually lose a battle, the enemies have to first knock out the older Mario brothers and then also knock out the babies. This makes the game ridiculously easy because most of the battles can be finished in one or two turns. In fact, during the entire game, I never had a game over during a normal battle. This makes beating the game a question of putting in the requisite hours rather than skill and timing. Speaking of timing, this game has taken out the rather deep special attack system of Bros Points and Bros Attacks in the previous game and replaced it with a rather shallow system where the brothers and babies use special items to perform team based attacks. Once again, these involve using a sequence of timed button presses to inflict damage. While these were fun to start with, the problem is that some of them are incredibly long (on the order of 20-30 seconds per attack). This gets really old after a short while and in fact, I really prefer the Bros Points system of the previous game.
Although I mentioned several shortcomings of this game, I still think it was a delightful game that was genuinely fun to play. The thing that makes this game hard to review is the fact that I played and absolutely loved Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga on the GBA. It had innovative ideas and absolutely hilarious dialog (namely Fawful and his “mustard of your doom" comment). If Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time was a standalone game, it would have been an amazingly new and innovative game and would have received one of my highest recommendations. However, my expectations for the sequel to Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga was so high that it turns out that this game just couldn’t match it. In all reality, I had a much better time playing the previous portable game and would have to recommend that game above this one.
