Last August I decided to finally embark on the Mario and Luigi playthrough journey. Over the last 10 months, I've played through Super Star Saga, Partners in Time, Bowser's Inside Story, and now Dream Team. Here is my review of Dream Team.

This might be my favorite Mario and Luigi game. Before diving into this game itself, I want to gush about this series overall. It's so hard to rank the four games I've played honestly. I really have fallen in love with this series. The combat in all of these games are so fun and satisfying. It's like an addictive drug. The OSTs in these games are outstanding, and I love a lot of the original characters throughout these games. Even existing characters like the titular Mario and Luigi just have so much whimsy and charm in this series. The art style within this series is a blessing, and I love looking at the official art for all the games. I wasn't "blown away" by any of the plots/narratives within these games, but they do just what they needed to do. The adventures were fun and memorable, and I'm so glad I decided to finally cross this series off my backlog.

Lets jump into Dream Team itself now.

This game easily has my favorite atmospheres within the Mario and Luigi franchise. All of the locations here are fun to explore and stand out to me compared to previous entries. Mushrise Park, Wakeport, and Somnom Woods were my favorite areas within the game. These areas are just much more memorable to me compared to previous entries. I love the atmosphere presented here. On top of this, the Dream World itself is simply amazing. I can say with confidence that I much prefer exploring the dream world compared to the inside of Bowser. The way Luigi interacts with the Dream World offers fun puzzles and I just enjoyed it a lot more than Bowser's Inside Story. Dream Team stands out as my favorite game to explore simply due to the atmosphere. The whole premise being based around sleep and dreams is also just very relaxing and puts me at a sense of lull (in the most peaceful way possible).

The combat here is once again great, but I do have a few negatives. For starters, I think the overworld Bros attacks are my least favorite in the series. An overreliance on gyro controls and just rather boring attacks compared to previous entries. I like the bomb attack on Mario, that was fun to execute, but other than that I didn't really enjoy most of the other Bro attacks in this game. However, Luiginary attacks were great. Pretty much every single Luiginary attack is fun to pull off and I much preferred the attacks presented here compared to the traditional Bros Attacks. This doesn't effect my scoring much, but just comparing the overall arsenal of attacks here to previous games, I think this was the weakest in the series outside of Luiginary attacks.

The plot/narrative here was actually pretty engaging. I loved the new protagonist Dreambert and enjoyed characters like the Massif Brothers (and their body-building puns), Zeekeeper, Cedric and the Seahorse siblings, and others. Anasthma is probably my favorite villain in the series. A stellar design and just a great antagonist. I do wish he was present in more of the story if I'm being honest. He really only shows up a handful of times throughout the playthrough, and every time he does it's just great. Wish we could've spent more time with the bat king. His final fight, while great, is also kind of over too fast. This could be due to me being slightly over leveled with good gear, but knowing this was the end, I wish the developers made him a little tougher while accounting for the level/gear the player could likely obtain up to this point.

The final boss being Dreamy Bowser works for me. Not my favorite in the series, but the design is cool. Once again, I do feel like it was a little too easy, but again this could be due to me being at a higher level. Dark Bowser was a more rewarding fight for me, but Dreamy Bowser looks great. I love the atmosphere of the fight.

Giant Battles return here, and honestly I much prefer them to the ones present in Bowser's Inside Story. The bosses were just a lot more fun to fight. Not much else to say here. I know some complain about the gyro controls in this game, especially in the final fight against Giant Bowser, but I'd say about 80% of the time they were responsive. I still don't love Gyro Controls, but I've dealt with worse. I dreaded the Giant Fights in Inside Story, and I learned they returned here I was mentally preparing myself. I'm glad they were more enjoyable for me this time around.

Finally I want to discuss the OST. It's amazing. Very consistently great throughout. Much like Bowser's Inside story, each theme here has a Dream World theme counterpart. I love the renditions of most of the themes inside the Dream World. This OST is up there with Bowser's Inside Story as being my favorite. Honestly, I think I like more theme in this game than I don't like. Mt. Pajama, and Dozing Sands are probably my least favorite themes, and even then I wouldn't say they're bad. I think Dream Team probably has the most consistently good themes throughout, which helps add to how much I enjoyed the atmosphere and environment.

Final closing thoughts. I put in 52.5 hrs, rescued all Pillo's from the Dream World, reached Rainbow Rank on both Mario and Luigi, and ended the game at level 42 with both bros. The level up system was once again great here, and I had fun "building" my Mario and Luigi. I maxed out my Luigi's stache points, and by the end I think he had like a 135 stache stat lmao. Mario was more balanced throughout, but I wanted to give Luigi those lucky hits as it fits his rather clumsy nature. I loved Dream Team. I unlocked hard mode which sounds interesting, but I want to move onto another game for now. I could definitely see myself coming back to this game in the future for a hard mode playthrough. I also wouldn't mind checking out the boss rush mode here as I enjoyed most of the boss fights in this game. I'm not sure where I'd put Dream Team in comparison to other Mario and Luigi games, but I do know that much like the previous games, this will be one I think about with happy memories. I plan on playing Brothership next, maybe this summer on the Switch 2. Thanks for reading! I highly recommend this game, and this series.

The fourth entry in the Mario & Luigi series, Dream Team sees the duo fly to Pi'illo Island with Princess Peach, Toadsworth, and Toad, quite similar to the beginning of Super Mario Sunshine. Soon after, the bat king Antasma teams up with Bowser to kidnap the princess and generally cause shenanigans. Mario and Luigi are tasked with defeating Antasma and Bowser, a job that requires them to enter the Dream World to save the inhabitants of the ancient Pi'illo Kingdom, who help them take on the evil baddies. All in all, it's a decent story, and though the overall arc is still a save-the-Princess-from-Bowser deal, the journey there is fairly unique and different than the usual collect-the-Macguffins you see in RPGs.

This was my first time playing a Mario & Luigi game. I was really hoping that it would be less hand-holdy than the Paper Mario series, and while it did feature a lot more stats and customization in the battle system, the overall level design left much to be desired. Nintendo just doesn't seem to trust its players with its RPGs. This was evident right off the bat with the incredibly long intro/tutorial. I swear it was at least an hour, possibly more, before I was allowed to actually do anything on my own.

And it didn't really stop there. Anytime something required even the slightest bit of critical thinking, the game would pause, and my trusty companion would jump out to explain exactly what I should do. Sure, I had to remember how to do that trick when it came up again later, but that’s not a puzzle anymore. It’s just a nuisance. Like, literally at one point you find a hidden cave that needs opening. Do you solve a puzzle? No. You walk up to it, you press A, your guide solves the puzzle for you, the game forces you in, and you resume play inside the cave. At that point, why even have a "lock" on the door?

Despite, the hand-holding, the rest of the game is actually really good. The level design isn't anything to write home about, but I liked the different settings, and each area had its own unique mechanic or gimmick. For example, the desert area has you mining giant rock mounds with heavy machinery, while the mountain area is staged as a tour with the Massif Bros. It's not quite as charming as The Thousand-Year Door, but it worked. It kept it interesting.

Where the game really shines, though, is the battle system. It's basically the opposite of Sticker Star; while the level design is pretty meh, the battle system is awesome. I really liked the challenge system, where you were encouraged to perfect certain parts of the battle and rewarded for doing so. It always gave me something to work towards, keeping the battles more interesting and the grinding less horrible.

The best part of the game was the amount of character customization. Obviously you’ve got your different weapons and apparel (in this case shoes, overalls, hammers, gloves, and scarves) that all have different qualities and reasons to wear them. But on top of that, you can eat beans to increase individual stats, you can select different bonuses when you level up enough to go up a rank, you get to choose which stats get an extra boost when you level up, and you can buy badges that give you different in-battle bonuses. There are a ton of ways to build your character. While I chose to make Mario and Luigi fairly evenly matched for most of the game, you could easily make one of them the power house and the other a defensive beast. And you don't even get your special abilities unless you put in the time to collect certain items throughout the world. To a certain extent, the game does limit your ability to max out particular stats, but you still have pretty good freedom.

Real quick, I want to talk about two small gripes I had with the game.

First, button mapping. You have to scroll with R to change what the A and B buttons do, when the Y and X buttons are literally just extra jump buttons. By the end of the game, you do have too many abilities to map them each to a button, but at the very least map the hammer to a specific button. As it is, you have to press 5 or 6 buttons just to perform a single action sometimes, let alone do a combination of actions.

Second, and this is a small thing, but it’s kind of annoying when you just “learn” that you have a new ability, conveniently taught to you at just the right time. Like instead of giving you a new item that helps you traverse long gaps, like the hook shot in the Zelda series, you just learn a new technique that you were physically capable of before but you couldn’t figure out without someone telling you how to do it. It’s lazy. It makes me feel like, wow I could have been doing this the whole time.

At least the game makes fun of some of these lazy video game tropes, like the typical path block that opens when the game wants you to have access to a certain area. This game usually makes up a dumb reason and then has a character point out how stupid it is. It’s self-mocking, and it makes up for the annoyance a little bit.

Overall, Dream Team is a pretty darn good game. Annoying as the hand-holding was, I had fun for most of the game, and it did get better by the end. The final level was pretty satisfying, and the final boss was actually really difficult. There’s enough content to log a good amount of hours without making you feel like you're spending an absurd amount of time on side quests. I do feel like I would like the other Mario & Luigi games more, because the Dream World was generally my least favourite part of the game, but Dream Team was good enough that I'm definitely interested in taking on the rest of the series.