Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time

Nintendo is never too keen on trying out new ideas for their poster boy Mario. Mario is their #1 asset that maintains their accessible marketability, the buoy that has kept Nintendo afloat for so long in the gaming landscape. Because of this, Nintendo feels adamant about taking risks with Mario in fear that deviation from the norm risks sinking their multi-million dollar vessel that they’ve built over decades of time. This is why multi-genre spin offs of Mario are essential entries in the overall Mario series, offering intriguing ideas revolving around Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom increasing the ubiquity of his brand and keeping it from stagnating. I’m partial to the few Mario JRPG spinoff series because the genre’s broader narrative scope allows the developers to swell Mario’s properties to something more substantial. It forces Nintendo to make Mario step out of his comfort zone and dive in the deep end for a while after mastering all kinds of swimming techniques in the shallow end. Suddenly, the most recognizable video game character to ever exist in the medium feels fresh and interesting after generations of soaking itself in a bath of its own familiarities and pruning up as a result. However, there is a possibility that the JRPG series could also languish in their own idiosyncrasies eventually. Both the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi series have multiple entries themselves, and there has to be some sort of cohesiveness between each entry to make them identifiable with one another. What happens when the series intended to break the cycle of tired tropes and ends up falling victim to the same fate? Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, the second entry in the Mario JRPG series mentioned in the latter, is another JRPG game with Mario and his green brother Luigi sharing equal billing. The game has the same dynamic mechanics and humorous presentation that made Superstar Saga an excellent Mario adventure. However, perhaps the game is too close to its predecessor for comfort.

Initially, Partners in Time seemingly strays away from Superstar Saga’s identity with its plot. I never pegged Princess Peach as the eccentric type of royal figure that comes with the territory of having more fame and fortune than one knows what to do with and little sparks of boredom-inspired creativity, yet she decides to embrace her inner H.G. Wells and travels back in time using a rocket-shaped time machine manufactured by Professor E. Gadd (I guess he’s a Mario & Luigi mainstay at this point). However, her enterprising journey isn’t for recreation, The princess calculated a course to a period of the Mushroom Kingdom’s history where a race of sentient purple mushrooms called “Shroobs” enact a full-scale invasion of the Mushroom Kingdom. Upon anticipating Peach’s arrival, Mario and Luigi are instead greeted with the hostility of a rogue, hulking green Shroob, indicating that something has gone horribly wrong. Through another time portal that has conveniently materialized on the castle grounds, the plumber brothers plunge into the past and rendezvous with their youthful counterparts who are taking refuge from the Shroob invaders. Mario’s vocational duty of rescuing Princess Peach this time around involves crossing the plane of the fourth dimension, simultaneously saving the past and the present on an adventure with such huge stakes that the pairing with his brother needs to be doubled. Despite how many plot holes are seeped into the premise of many time travel stories, this one included, the topsy-turvy nature of time travel is a perfect new narrative device in the kooky and whacky Mario & Luigi series.

Beneath the excitingly intricate notion of time travel, Partners in Time fails to use its premise to its full potential. For one, all it amounts to is the same collectathon quest from Superstar Saga. The Cobalt Star is the power source for E. Gadd’s time machine has been ruptured into five separate pieces. Retrieving these pieces is of utmost importance for the Marios and Luigis, for it is the only way to restore balance to the space time continuum that all of this interdimensional galloping has caused and sever the unnatural connection between the two periods of the Mushroom Kingdom. This type of fetch quest should ring familiar to those who played the previous game, as the Beanstar was the former all-powerful plot Macguffin that spurred story progression. In saying that, obtaining the pieces of the Beanstar only became significant to the plot for the last third of Superstar Saga, while picking up the pieces of the Cobalt Star is an objective that spans the entirety of Partners in Time. I wasn’t all that enthused when Superstar Saga’s manic pacing came to a screeching halt when it introduced this scavenger hunt, so you can imagine my disappointment with Partners in Time inflating this typical task for the whole duration of the game. One could argue that committing to a single overarching mission gives Partners in Time a better sense of narrative organization, and splitting each individual trek for a piece of the Cobalt Star should recall the chapter-based pacing of the Paper Mario games which I professed to appreciate. Still, the Mario & Luigi games should exude a different tone from its thinner Mario RPG associate to establish its own tonal identity as the first game did. In terms of visuals and presentation, Partners in Time upholds the expressive, animated pixels that made Superstar Saga so charming. Yet, Partners in Time feels bogged down by its more stringent arc, as if the game is submitting to order by some bureaucratic gaming force that demands order and neatness. Superstar Saga’s wilder pacing that only acceded to plot regulations made the game more interesting because the wonky direction the game would dart through was unpredictable.

Toning down Superstar Saga’s erratic pacing with more construction is one thing, but streamlining the way in which the game goes about dividing its disciplined plot adds another worrisome layer of accessibility. The time rifts are endemic to the present day Peach’s Castle, as her royal domain was ground zero where the dilemma occurred. Because the dissonance is confined to the castle, it's the only entry point to the past. While this makes sense, the developers use their realm of logic to dilute the overworld to a standard level hub. Portals to the past are located in each room of Peach’s palace, signified by a psychedelic swirl encompassing the diameter of a crater caused by the shaking up of time and space. The transport on the other side resides in a unique district of the Mushroom Kingdom’s in its glory days, and returning to the castle is a two-way backpedal through the same hole. Normally, I wouldn’t chide a hub so emphatically, especially considering that Peach’s Castle here meets the same exemplary qualifications as its other iterations. Still, I can’t ignore that Partners in Time presents a stark regression in this regard. The BeanBean Kingdom’s overworld that took a liberal helping from A Link to the Past’s Hyrule wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of an open world environment, but it was the optimal inspiration point for a 16-bit adventure with a top-down perspective. Implementing an open landscape like the BeanBean Kingdom was a mark of excellent effort on the part of the developers, to integrate something with more spatial depth in a franchise that is usually content with the simpler, more conventional hub areas (even if Mario popularized their widespread pervasiveness). In Partner in Time, we’ve reverted back to traveling to levels via a shrouded warping process that makes the player put the pieces together for the geographical rationale of the trip themselves. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using Peach’s castle as a middle ground between all of the game’s areas again, but it's rather disappointing when the developers have proved that they can offer something more interesting.

At least the individual areas that stem from these portals still uphold the quality standard issued by Superstar Saga. Each area encompasses the journey to collecting one shard of the Cobalt Star, circling around the district back to the entry point either from natural occurrence or comedic mishap once the task is complete. The Mushroom Kingdom’s areas that are under siege by the Shroob forces are a varied bunch, which signifies that the purple buggers have already seized large swathes of Peach’s monarchy in the short time since the initial invasion. The areas here solidify my comparative observations between the Mushroom Kingdom and their BeanBean neighbors, for we now are witnesses to the developers rendering the Mushroom Kingdom in its first Mario & Luigi outing. Toadwood Forest is another shaded wooded area that vaguely resembles that of Chucklehuck, minus the thirsty tree golem blocking the path to the objective. Gritzy Desert is another sand dune with some ancient mysticism sprinkled in, and Bowser’s Castle is a tutorial level inverse of the climactic final area it served as in Superstar Saga. Besides areas that reuse level themes at a dissimilar angle, a few of the Mushroom Kingdom’s places of interest are fresh-faced destinations that share less similarities with BeanBean’s. Yoshi’s Island is newly rendered in the Mario & Luigi format, a particularly inspired choice considering this tropical offshore dinosaur villa is where the babies originated from. I don’t recall seeing the monstrous Yoob casting a shadow over the island with its drooping gut in Super Mario World 2, and I’m thankful for not encountering this abomination back then. Here, the core of his gaseous stomach also makes for an area with a riveting foreground. Navigating through the inner sanctum of the Thwomp Volcano is more involved than the other areas due to zipping and hopping around its floors to reach the exit point instead of a straightaway descent. Star Shrine sort of reminds me of Magicant from Earthbound with its otherworldly splendor and mandated tasks to get to its center. Overall, the Mario & Luigi level design still thrives with the abundance of puzzles and enemy variety whether or not the area motifs look suspiciously familiar or not.

The process of solving the puzzles in question is now divided between the paradoxical pairing of Mario and Luigi and their infant forms. The division of work is a collaboration between the teams of the adult brother and the baby brothers instead of swapping Mario and Luigi in Superstar Saga. The grown-ups will throw the babies off their backs to allow them to journey off on their own as their own tethered duo, using their underdeveloped sizes to squeeze through crevices in an alternating sequence with the older brothers. When separated, the two teams regroup by hitting a block with a warp pipe symbol, summoning the duo not being controlled by the player. As useful as this seems, the baby's utility simply amounts to gaining hand-me-downs that their older counterparts used in Superstar Saga. Only the babies are granted hammers to drill themselves into the earth, which also means that Baby Luigi is the sole volunteer to whack an engorged Baby Mario when he gulps down too much water as well. Grown up Mario and Luigi roll into a ball to flatten the babies like pancakes instead of using the hammers, but all this change does is highlight how team-intensive the moves on the field tend to be here. All of the moves are recycled from the previous game, only with Mario and Luigi violating child labor laws by making their younger selves perform half of the work. Really, the appeal of cutting the quartet in half by age brackets some of the time is to flaunt the two screens and doubled controller buttons of the DS. The flippable handheld was still in its infancy, and swapping between the screens when the babies are on their lonesome with their own button commands was something Nintendo thought everyone would marvel at back then. Personally, I’d rather have the characters perform some fresh, new abilities instead of reusing stale ones.

The double screen gimmick is also highlighted in the combat. With comparisons to a 3D movie, the developers have implemented some cheap minute effects like a Piranha Plant enemy’s neck stretching out and shooting projectiles upward to fall on the brothers from above. Other than these neat little peripheral tricks, base combat is essentially the same as it was in Superstar Saga. Mario and Luigi still hop on enemies for offensive and hop over their projectiles and bodily rammings for defense. Mario and Luigi carry their respective younger selves on their back, and this isn’t a weighted burden as one would expect. In fact, Mario and Luigi should always come into battle with the babies strapped on their backs. While together, the babies use their hammers to counter damage by pressing their respective buttons, and the window of time holding the hammers before they strain themselves is much more lenient than it was in Superstar Saga. The babies can fight in battles involving Mario and Luigi but ideally, they shouldn’t have to. The babies only take matters into their own hands when their older self has fainted, which might give the impression that their lifeforce is hanging by a thread and it's time to wave the white flag. Not only can the babies pull their own weight in combat, but their turns can be used to fully revive Mario or Luigi to get their feet back into battle. Evidently, the Mushroom Kingdom’s resources seem to be as bountiful as BeanBean’s, so the babies should always have a 1-Up in their inventory to stave off defending themselves from potential harm. Ultimately, this outcome upon defeat in battle acts as an unintentional safety net, an Aku-Aku-like shield that has the potential to never diminish. It never did for me. Because the enemy health pools also aren’t upscaled for this augmentation, Partners in Time manages to be breezier than an autumn afternoon.

But isn’t the lack of difficulty only an issue during the standard battles from the Shroob grunts and the kingdom’s various wildlife? Surely, the boss battles offer something more substantial and wouldn’t allow the brothers to slide by them so smoothly? On paper, the bosses in Partners in Time are more complex than the average Shroob underling because they require exploiting a weak spot to deal a sizable dent to their defenses. I especially enjoy making the Wiggler boss sickly and pale after slipping him a poison shroom mickey into his healing beverage, or saving the Yoshi’s in Yoob’s stomach for them to drop a Chain Chomp boulder on the head of a ghastly Yoshi egg. However, the more engaging boss battles can revert back to a guerilla beatdown with a new feature: the “Bros. items.” These nifty tools in the item menu replace the convoluted Bros attacks and require an honed accuracy to use them effectively. Shells of the red and green variety are batted back and forth as they bounce off the enemy, and the same goes volleying an egg that can make the enemy dizzy. The most powerful Bros. items are the cannonballs and trampolines, which incorporate both DS screens as the brothers flatten the enemy with the force of four swift landings. Needless to say, each of these Bros. items deal whopping amounts of damage, making quick work of each boss after their weak spot is exposed. I suppose this is what I asked for considering I griped that the bosses in Superstar Saga tended to overstay their welcome, but now I almost feel remorseful for doing these bosses so dirty like this. Also, the Bros. items are just as plentiful as the healing ones, so the game is practically incentivizing their use with their high stock.

Upon my reflection of what the baby Mario brothers add to the Mario & Luigi gameplay mechanics, a record scratch sound interrupts my thought process as I begin to ask myself one important question: does anyone really like the baby versions of the Mario brothers to begin with? The last time that I checked, all Baby Mario accomplished was as an effective advocacy for abstinence for everyone who played Super Mario World 2 as he wailed in his helpless panic as Yoshi scrambled to retrieve him. Any offshoot Mario kart and sports venture that includes the babies dials back on their infantile proclivities to cry and whine at every waking moment, but their inclusion in the fray of competition always seemed like filler to me. Mario’s universe consists of a plethora of creatively designed creatures, and Nintendo thinks they can pull a fast one on us and pad the roster with the same characters portrayed at a different age and mass. The fetal forms of Mario and Luigi have never inspired feelings of true joy with Mario fans, and this is not only due to acting as glorified skins of the mustachioed men in overalls. I’ve said this a thousand times already, but Mario’s appeal is his wide accessibility. Games that fall under the “E for everyone” rating from the ESRB actually exhibit content that accommodates a wide audience as opposed to merely children, but there are games that are specifically catered to very young children. Including the babies as a focal point in any Mario game teeters on that accessibility threshold, for some adults might be put off by the babies doing the puerile things that babies usually do. The character dynamic between Mario and Luigi in Superstar Saga is compromised because they both have to act as solid rocks to balance the babies. Mario and Luigi playfully interacting with the babies is fairly cute until the realization that they’re both playing with themselves creeps in and things feel weird *ahem*. So much of the humor their dynamic facilitated in Superstar Saga is lost because they’ve both been relegated to the roles of babysitters.

To make matters worse, Partners in Time decides that every familiar character needs to interact with a younger version of themselves to bloat the list of secondary characters. A relatively youthful Toadsworth spends his time with his present self trying new ways to entertain a Baby Peach with amusing contortions that count as the brother’s team moves on the field. He also proves that Peach’s “protector” was still a total oaf before he became a senile old man, for they often fail to entertain the princess which results in her uttering a baby cry so excruciating that I put my DS volume on mute. Please cancel all Yoshi sequels that could potentially feature this character, please. Baby Bowser exhibits more personality as a spoiled little twerp, but all he does is confuse me because his design and voice mirror his son, Bowser. Jr. Padding the game with even more childish characters is grating enough, but the character that irks me the most bares no resemblance to any preexisting one. For some reason, the developers found it appropriate to give the suitcase in the item menu sentience with googly eyes and feet to boot and call him Stuffwell. He lugs around the pieces of the Cobalt Star, and I wish that was all he did. He also insists on popping up frequently to offer unsolicited guidance to the player on their objective, which is entirely unnecessary considering every objective is still clear as crystal. I would say that Stuffwell has the personality of a cardboard box, but that packaging apparatus would actually be far more interesting. The fact that the developers implemented Stuffwell to keep on the player’s side at all times in a desperate attempt to maintain his presence as a character is laughable, and his constant condescending input exemplifies the worst trope of children’s media. Fuck off, Stuffwell. Go help Dora the Explorer or something. Meanwhile, Fawful is making his presence remote in the underground sewers as a black market badge dealer that only the babies can access. Oftentimes, I’d visit him just to hear the sweet sounds of his grammatical errors. I’d let Fawful off the hook!

The Shroob forces aren’t all that colorful either. These demented, dwarfish mushrooms that look like someone forgot to add a pinch of chlorine to the Toad gene pool to clean the gunk out of it do not deviate very far from the standard model. The developers could’ve used the X-Naut army from The Thousand-Year Door as inspiration. Perhaps the Shroobs work more efficiently with a stronger sense of unity. By the end of the game, they’ve taken total control over the past version of Peach’s castle. The climactic build-up to the finale of Partners in Time is storming the palace and sending the Shroobs and their dinky Plan 9 from Outer Space saucers back to their polluted home planet. As seen in the first game, the difficulty curve completely ratchets up here, which made me fearful of the final boss at the end of it. The Shroob Princess is by and large the most challenging fight in the game with her forcefield phase and spider walker, but she’s not the final boss. The last piece that fully reforms the Cobalt Star actually houses the true heir to the Shroob throne, and she’s more sinister than her spare of a sister. The beastly Elder Shroob Princess is as daunting as Cackletta was in Superstar Saga, with her multiple phases progressively becoming more durable and unpredictable. An even bigger slight against the player is that if they die on the Elder Princess, they’ll have to tackle the grueling battle with her sister AGAIN as well. Thank God for the Bros. items for both of these fights, for I was sweating bullets the entire time. The developers learned from the fight against Cackletta. Apparently, saline would’ve saved me the trouble, for Baby Luigi’s tears are the substance that eradicates the Shroob presence from the Mushroom Kingdom. Interesting.

Given everything I’ve said, it should be apparent that Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time is rather underwhelming. It’s a by-the-numbers sequel that does very little to innovate on its predecessor except for doubling the playable characters, the items, and the screens the player can use as reference. It all amounts to practically nothing of substance. However, I wouldn’t go as far as to declare Partners in Time as another unfortunate example of a “sophomore slump.” It’s more like a student finishing a semester with a 3.0 GPA after sweeping the dean’s list their freshman year, a hard act to follow indeed. Still, achieving that average is a respectable accomplishment. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with Partners in Time because the Mario & Luigi foundation is so solid, and they’d have to botch it pretty badly to make me forsake it entirely.

We're going back in time to the first invasion to get Shroobs off the menu. That's right, we're going back in time to the first invasion to get Shroobs off the menu

Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time for the most part updates the M&L format with the DS' usual bag of tricks. AlphaDream streamlined the controls, increased the combat difficulty and enhanced both boss variety and graphics, but the few bad design decisions resulted in a linear, tedious, bland variation of that formula.