Playing Mario & Luigi Dream Team, to be released on August 11, is bittersweet. It's always nice to have more games for the Nintendo 3DS, of course. And with Mario on the box, you know it's going to be good.
The problem is, I've played this game before. And before that. And before that. Mario & Luigi: Dream Team is the fourth sequel to 2003's Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, which at the time was a brilliant, inventive spin on role-playing games. It was absolutely Nintendo at its best, taking a tired formula and adding new gameplay twists that turned it into an experience you'd never had before.
But then there's the other side of that coin: Finding a formula that worked, Nintendo dug in its heels and refused to budge from it. The three sequels that followed don't similarly reinvent the wheel and give you a new experience. Instead, they slavishly imitate the first game, adding a new wrinkle here and there but never breaking the mold. Soon, what was new and exciting becomes well-trodden ground.
What was so great about Superstar Saga? Like previous attempts at blending the Super Mario universe with the Japanese role-playing game format, it put Mario and Luigi onto a lengthy adventure where they'd fight mobs of enemies, level up, equip new overalls and turtle shells as weapons, etc. The twist was that the player controlled both of the Mario brothers simultaneously, using the A button to make Mario jump and the B button for Luigi.
This was true both in the field maps and within the battle sequences. In a typical turn-based RPG you just have to wait and take your lumps when enemies attack you, hoping that your stats and equipped armor will be strong enough to minimize the damage. But in Superstar Saga you could, with a well-timed jump, dodge out of the way of enemy attacks. Similar skilled jumps would let you deal out more damage during your turns. In this way, the game blended elements of RPGs and Mario action games, while adding the extra complexity of having to manage Mario and Luigi simultaneously. The storyline was hilarious and well-written, and the hand-drawn, loose, cartoony art style was a change from the usual.
So here's the thing: Taken in a vacuum, you could apply most of these praises to Dream Team, too. The blend of action and RPG still works (and is still, in great part, unique to this series). The art style is still charming, the writing is still very funny even if the storyline has gotten a little too by-the numbers.
If you had never played any of the previous games, you could play this one and find it to be surprising and unique. But having played everything else in the series over the past decade, I can't help but feel like I'm just going through the motions. It's the same characters, the same situations, the same humorous voice, the same battle gameplay. The gibberish phrases that Mario and Luigi make in lieu of actual words are, as near as I can figure, the exact same sound samples from 10 years ago.
This is what I mean when I talk about Nintendo "playing it safe." I understand why it would want to, with things as they are. Wii U is desperate for some savior, Nintendo 3DS finally got its legs underneath it (but the product line is still not moving anywhere near the numbers Nintendo DS did a few years back). Why take a risk when you could just do what worked before? Sequels aren't bad per se, but there needs to be more of a balance. Once, taking the cast of Mario games and making them ride around on tiny go-karts was mad brilliance. We need that again.
When asked to reinvent the Mario universe, the development team behind the Mario & Luigi series once came through with flying colors. Now it's cranking out rehashes. I hope for their next challenge, they're asked to go back to square one again.
