I can feel the effort that went into this, it's a shame that there are so many things holding it back.
To list a few:
1. Boss fights all suck ass. They take forever and you just feel so weak and helpless but not in a fun way.
2. The dream sections are almost a direct downgrade to the gameplay. Dream combat is messy, the 2-D overworld is a nightmare to traverse, and the visuals go from clean looking, cohesive and fun to a mess of color and random elements all splashed onto the background. Every time Luigi puts his head on one of those goddamn pillows I want to lose my shit.
3. The story is terrible, but for some reason they just can't stop having these people yap at you the whole time. The pillow guy is yelling at you, the star guy is yelling at you, the yellow cube guys are yelling at you, I just want them to shut up.
And the worst part is that when people aren't talking at you and when you're not in the stupid dream world and when you aren't bashing your head against the absurd boss fights (especially that sprinkler one) you might actually be having a nice time. There were moments where I thought the game was being cute with the visuals and the combat was being fun and the puzzles were okay. The problem is that at the end of nearly every one of these fun areas is another stupid pillow and you just immediately stop having fun.

This is the "Skyward Sword" of the Mario and Luigi series. The highs are very high, but the lows are very low.

Like Skyward Sword, this game is filled to the brim with padding and lazy filler (every objective in this game has like, 7 different hoops you need to jump through before you can even start working towards that initial objective), but when this game hits it strides, it offers the best experiences in this entire series.

I think Dream Team is still too inherently inconsistent to be ranked better than PiT or BIS, and because there's so much filler, it's way too long to be considered as replayable as the earlier games in this series, but it's definitely an experience worth seeing through to the end at least once, those high points are REALLY damn high.

Been plenty of years since I've played this so I gave it another go. I still wouldn't say that it's the best of the series, but it's still very good. Criticisms that bros attacks take too long or that there is too much text are very valid, in the time it takes you to do one Star Rocket in this game, you could probably do 3 Chopper Bros from Superstar Saga. Cutscenes, while having a few moments that genuinely got a chuckle out of me, are pretty frequently poorly paced with downtime between actions and text that are unnecessary. Before I discuss more gameplay-related things, I should mention that I played Hard Mode, which as far as I can tell just inflates enemy stats. I did enjoy the challenge, I recall the game originally being very easy without it. You can only carry 10 of any given item and higher enemy HP stats make it so your best option is to use lots of bros attacks and pump up your own attack power as much as you can, so you'll often be ignoring your defenses and banking on your skills with dodging, which is where I think this series shines at. For some reason though, it doesn't let you retry battles after a loss, booting you back to the title screen instead. I don't get that change, it just makes things less convenient. The giant battles are mostly unchanged, but you do take far more damage in them, with most bosses beating you in one poorly dodged move, or maybe 3 smaller ones. Game looks incredible for a 3ds game by the way. The subsequent remakes or Paper Jam look worse honestly, but the way this game looks is practically what put Alphadream in their poor financial situation honestly, so it's kind of a shame at the same time. The giant battles look pristine, Luigi's model looks like it's out of a far stronger console. On my old original run 3ds there's some frame drops here and there, usually when there's too many effects on screen. The biggest example I saw was Dreamy Bowser's fire breath attack would chug whenever it was used, which made it even worse to dodge. The 2d sections of this game feel a lot better and more natural than the Bowser's body sections from Inside Story, as they're scattered about like mini-levels and usually have one larger, more focused section per area. Basically all of the Bowser sections had the gimmick of an on-off switch that you controlled with Bowser while the bros were on the bottom screen, and they do much more interesting, varied things here. Instead of Bowser battles you have dream world battles, where you just get a buffed up Mario with the support of Luigi, which I think is much more condensed than the Bowser fights were. You don't have to worry about specially equipping one pair or the other character, you just worry about one. I think it works. Overall I think the game could have used some condensing, there's points where the large amount of text and slow scenes bore you a bit. It's still good, I enjoyed my time, and it's a nice reminder of before Nintendo put a cap on more original locales in the Mario series. I'm glad that cap seems to have come off once again in recent times.

On my final stats screen, it said I had a 95% Excellent rate. I thought everyone should know this.

this video game in relation to the Mario and Luigi series is basically the equivalent when you hit your sibling really hard and they start crying and you give them a lot of what they like while making sure they promise they won't tell mom.

that sibling's name? Luigi Mario.

in all seriousness I'm surprised this game gets as much shit as it does considering that Bowser's Inside Story can be just as bad or sometimes worse in the aspects this game is regularly criticized for

+ Luigi appreciation
+ Team attacks are fun to use
+ Call backs to first game
~ Game/story feel dragged out
~ No Fawful
- Defending feels more like a mini-game
- Battles are often drawn out
- Tutorials plague this game
- Dream Battles can become unfair very fast