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.