My mother and father were taking me on a road trip as I hadn’t left the state of Florida throughout my life, and seeing as how my 12th birthday was around the corner, they figured there would be no better time. The trip was long and arduous, the seemingly unending road ahead of us nearly made my father swerve off of the road and slam into a nearby tree, or realistically fall into the river of Alligator Alley. I woke up suddenly to the unfamiliar sensation of my ears popping from the rise of elevation. I looked outside of the backseat car window and the first thing I noticed were the trees, towering and winding above the road, each trunk housing centuries of untold stories. A still darkness lies beneath them with beams of the sunset's light shining through the cracks of the leaves, burning my half-asleep eyelids shut once again. As we drove on a bridge that was above the canopy of trees, I noticed the vast ocean of mountains. The beauty of the insurmountable that laid bare upon my unknowing and immature eyes astonished me, cloaked in a mist of distant fog, shielding me from what lies beyond. What interested me more however, was that I had multiple street-passes on my red 3ds XL that I had in sleep mode during my slumber. That was true happiness.

Nearing dusk, we arrived at the destined mountain in which my grandparents resided. The one way gravel road with many twists and turns and minimal lighting was a horror beyond human comprehension, especially when your father was showing symptoms of being high due to having three mango slushes from Sonic. My Father does not remember this part of the story. After nearly driving off of a cliff multiple times, we arrived at the house. Dimly lit, it was slightly illuminated by the local firefly population. Sadly, we still couldn’t see shit and went to sleep because mosquitoes kept biting my ass. Ouch.

The morning came and I woke up to the smell of fresh air and nice smelling food. Just kidding, it was the exact opposite. I smelt rotting eggs and my balls were shivering because it was so fucking cold and I didn’t have a blanket. This fucking sucked. What’s more is I found out I was sleeping on an air mattress, which at the time sucked until I walked around the rest of the house and realized everything in the house and the house itself were rotting away at the seams. Then and only then was it seen as a blessing. Thank you mother. It was tradition for me as a kid to put my 3ds under my pillow as I slept, and before even opening my eyes I would scrummage around my bed trying to ensure my favorite toy was still there. Thankfully, not unlike all of the preceding days, it was and all was good in the world. Except for the stench of rotting eggs, which I was too lazy to follow. Instead, I opted to play Mario & Luigi Dream Team, a game I had purchased on the eshop months before. I was sitting on the edge of my air mattress in the heat of the final battle against whatever the fuck his name was, when suddenly my “grandmother” barged into my safe heaven, undoing the imaginary locks on the rotting wooden door and allowing the aforementioned stench to flow into my olfactory glands in it’s purest form, and only after reaching my olfactory cortex did the odor truly fuck me up. The ogre stood in the doorway, blocking the light from the morning sun from reaching my once pure, not grimacing face. She asked, no, demanded, “DO YOU WANT EGGS?” in a loud and quaking tone in her raspy voice akin to that of an eldritch demon. Startled, I stood up from the side of the air mattress, the precipice of fate, starring the demon in her ugly and moldy eyes. Pleading for my life, I begged “No, thank you”, then walked past the horrific creation of a jaded God, resting my opened red 3ds XL on the corner of my air mattress and ran as fast as possible toward the door. Not before seeing the watery eggs she had crafted. I dodged a fatal bullet.

As I swung open the front door, I heard a roar from the inner tunnels of the dwelling in which I rested, the demon cursing in her native tongue. It was only when I exited that I saw our location in light. Our cabin was atop a small hill with a barn at the foot of it. I was taken back in awe at the beauty that nature provided, staring distantly at the mountains and treeline. I snapped back into reality when I heard my mother yell my name from the bottom of the hill. I ran down the hill and told my father what I had experienced in the previous 10 minutes. After telling him the tale in which I escaped with my life, I instinctively touched the pocket on my red shorts… It was then I realized the grave error in my judgment. My red 3ds XL was not with me. I recollected the events and came to the conclusion that it must have been left on the air mattress. I looked back at the hill and saw the menacing castle before me, fumes of green oozing out of the many crevices of the once inviting home, a haunting laugh emanating from the inner corridors. I had to make a decision. Face the stench and find my love, or hide in my sorrow and fear. I ran as fast as I could up the hill, dodging the many bugs that came to attack me on my hurried pilgrimage. I rammed open the door and saw the beast sleeping on a throne of human skull. Tip toeing toward my goal, every creak in the floor could be my end. I refused to even breathe on my careful descent into the lair of madness. I eventually met the door and stood quietly in front of it, slowly moving my hand toward the doorknob. I opened the door as slowly as humanly possible, and what laid on my bed changed the course of my life forever.

My favorite, red 3ds XL. Shattered in two pieces. The hinges on my love were completely broken. The game would not even turn on. I wept for an eternity as I realized that I would never be able to play my favorite games again. What’s worse is that there is no conclusion. We don’t know how it happened. My mother believes it was the result of it sliding off of the corner of the air mattress and her stepping on it. My friends think she just snapped it in half out of anger due to the lack of watery eggs in my stomach and vomit in the toilet. But deep down, I know she sat on it because her legs were tired after standing up for 5 minutes after making eggs. Furthermore, the extra padding on her behind due her comically large body weight caught the innocent red 3ds XL off-guard, and couldn’t find a way to lift the pressure of 10,000 suns crashing down upon its red, feeble, extra large body. I never got to complete this game. I can’t ever go back. This is my story.

I think this game would be really good if it wasn't for the insane amount of hand holding it feels like you can't do anything without the game stopping you because god forbid you figure anything for yourself in this game.
it has a very unique RPG system but also one that tends to make combat drag out often thankfully the game isn't too grind-y but there were definitely some types of enemies where I would go you are not worth the XP I am out, there a lot of enemy/attack/animation variety but by the end of the game I was tired honestly for me it was keeping me going was mostly the puzzle platformer aspect of it, it's chill not particularly hard but not too easy the ability you gain throughout the game are intuitive there's a good balance here at least when the game again isn't hand holding you.

You know that joke from hard drive where they are like "Next Pokemon set to have the even slower text" That's this game unironically this game, I started playing this months ago every time I would pick it up and try to play a little and the most drowsy feeling like capable of curing the most powerful insomnia would come over me it is sleep-inducing every time you have to sit through some minimal dialogue in this game the first 4 hours in this game are hell I really thought I was not gonna be able to finish it based on how boring it was but it gets better that being said if you don't have the patience of a saint I have a really hard time recommending this

sometimes i look at the opinions that i see online and i'm like. damn. mario & luigi fans really only like bowser's inside story.

this game's got hella issues, but i'd be lying if i said i didn't at least kinda like it. tutorials out the ass, giant battles that are essentially 20 minute long cutscenes, at least half the game is worthless padding... not to mention the combat feels really, REALLY wonky sometimes. call me a scrub if you want but some of the counterattack windows feel really stupid, and a ton of your bros/Luigi attacks feel really terrible - especially the gyro control ones where they sometimes expect you to be pixel perfect. especially your luiginary attacks - the only ones that didn't feel either frustrating or severely underpowered were the ball and hammer (love that fuckin luigi ball though that shit is sick).

but like. damn. the game just hits this really weird sweet spot for me that's hard to describe. it's not the aesthetics, since the world feels like shit most of the time and most of the dream areas are empty, hapharzard platforming messes. it's not the story. maybe it's just how the spritework feels like a big step up from the DS games, or the funky ass music. none of this makes up for all the issues this game has, but. there's some good stuff here. i don't hate this one as much as i probably should.

maybe i just miss the days of starting fights on miiverse. i dunno. sometimes it feels like the year of luigi never ended.

Wow. Talk about a game that completely blew away my expectations.

For this being a 40 hour game the fact that it managed to make me enjoy my time with it as much as it did, is an accomplishment and should not be understated. Games of that length WISH they could be as engaging as this game was. Like I said, invest everything into the POW + Stache stat and just learn to play good, because if you do that, you wont ever have to focus on gear catered to defense and you'll be killing foes before they get the chance to attack ya. The best rank upgrades to get are Counterer (does 150% more damage when countering enemies) Casual Bros (reduces the amount of bp used for a bros attack), and Quick Level (self explanatory) And then the gear upgrades so that you have 5 gear slots by the end. The game is not hard, the game does not drag, it is purely the matter of if you know what does what. If you fight literally everything you encounter you will be just fine. Not once did I ever have to grind in these games. Unless I wanted to. The common misconception is that battles are slow, but they're not, they're only like that if you allow them to be. Speaking of. I really loved this battle system, it brought back a thing from Superstar where every bro got a new attack/move whereas in Inside Story and Partners in Time they shared the same move pool. The dreamy bros attacks are also very fun to use, and alot of these are just bangers in terms of the variety they put in. The world exploration is probably the best its been since Superstar Saga imo. There's just a lot of beans and goodies to find throughout the world. Exploration never became a chore imo.

That being said, this game wasn't perfect, that final boss is just annoying. They really can't ever top BIS in terms of a game finale. Hell, even Superstar Saga did it better. While this one definitely felt like a finale to a game, the Dreamy Bowser fight really left a sour taste at the end. I'm fine with Final Bosses being able to heal, if its limited, this mother fucker just does it whenever he feels like it and in turn it can make the fight drag on and on. Something that I haven't experienced in this game till now. there were numerous times where framerate would drop and sometimes it did actually hinder how I played. The final boss for example has a move where Mario and Luigi are running towards the camera and have to dodge dreamy bowsers fire, thing is, everytime he does this the whole fucking game lags. I think it might've slipped past game testing cause it makes these already shitty 3D dodging segments even more unbearable. SPEAKING OF. FUCK 3D dodging segments. This has to be this games biggest flaw since I hated every time the camera shifted to a 3D perspective while battling because the depth perception is awful. And these are just everywhere, they're not all bad, but the ones that are end up souring a lot of these great boss fights.

The story is just really predictable... man, I'm sorry but once you figure out how this game works you can tell what'll happen at each area you visit. You know exactly what will happen and what will be awaiting you. The game does like to shake it up at times, but its very far in between as the moment to moment gameplay is easily something that you'll love or hate. I ended up liking it but this is where I can see people get annoyed with how it doesn't do much to shake up the narrative.

Character writing though is still fantastic, only characters that suck is some of the early people you meet and Starlow, but Starlow was already pretty shit anyways so I don't really give a fuck. Dreambert clears in like every way possible, that's my goat. He is easily the best partner in this series. It helps that I also really like his design and personality too.

I didn't expect myself to like Dream Team as much as I did and in some areas it even beats out BIS with the 2D dreamy mechanics and the big luigi battles being improvements to the formula.

i’m a very new m&l fan so i have no nostalgic bias towards these games. a couple years ago i decided to finally play through them all. LOVED the original trilogy to bits but something about dream team felt… off? it felt too slow, messed with my muscle memory i’d gained over the last 3 games and it didnt feel right. I shelfed it for a year or so and grew a bitter resentment towards it, saying it ruined the series and never got what made people love it…

until people got on my ass about it i decided to give it a second chance, see it through to the end to see if it was truly worth the hype. my answer? its GOOD. but i wouldnt consider it on par with the original trilogy. its a game with stellar world building with the pillos, zeekeeper and antasma. its amazingly fleshed out and i got really interested to its story. but the pillo kingdom itself feels very… bland? it uses the grass, desert, beach, jungle etc locations mario fans are used to but shakes it up in a way that doesnt really change it all THAT much. the gameplay however is where the game faulters hardest. it’s the same m&l you know but with weird motion and confusingly inconsistent input commands?? why would i use bye bye cannon when jet board is right there and does more damage? (granted this could be a nonissue because its been a while since i played the other games but idk)

the dream world itself is interesting in concept but doesnt really do much for me in terms of gameplay, its just very uninteresting puzzle solving mixed with fun luiginary effects, i like pulling on his mustache and making him sneeze, plus luigi’s character arc towards him being more confident… while done before was super nice to see :)

the main area where this game shines for me is the giant battles!!! oh my god these are soooo good, the spectacle of it all is magnificent! the bowser fight ESPECIALLY was great for someone like me who loves BiS to bits. plus the zeekeeper fight and the giant town robot were probably luigi at his coolest. while basic in gameplay the pure spectacle of it alone easily made going through the game worth it, just to see how cool it could get.

me personally, i wouldnt blame you if you skip it but if you decide to see it all the way through, you’re in for a pretty fun time with cool characters and a cool setting.