I just replayed this game for what must have been the first time in almost a decade. I remember it being pretty good when I played it as a kid, so I was shocked to discover in this playthrough that this game actually kinda sucks donkey balls.
For starters, the demographic for this game was clearly a MUCH younger audience than any of the previous games. I just replayed the 3 previous games in the Mario and Luigi series, and while they are certainly very accessible and sometimes a little overbearing with how much they hold your hand, Dream Team takes things to a new level of insufferableness. The first ~1 hour of the game is a very long """invisible""" tutorial, teaching you how to control a character in a video game from a third person perspective. I cannot overstate how annoying it is that you are forced to spend an hour going through a tutorial that genuinely seems to have been intended for people who have never played a videogame before, with no option to skip it.
The next hour or two after the opening are still not great. In stark contrast to Bowser's Inside Story, the action commands for your standard attacks are very easy to time in this game, which is a real shame. The tight timing for the action commands in BIS were great because it kept me engaged and focused on the combat's moment to moment gameplay. Another thing that became very apparent early on in the game was the excessive amount of dialogue, the opening especially is overflowing with NPCs that want to talk to you and waste your time with meaningless text. Dialogue continues to be a problem through the whole game; after completing an objective, learning a new overworld ability, rescuing a Pi'illo, and so on, you will be assaulted with words upon words that the game would have been much better off without.
Rescuing Pi'illo folk is one of the weakest areas in this game. There are 52 petrified Pi'illos to rescue, each one housing a mini dungeon, so they make up a significant portion of the game's content. To rescue a Pi'illo you must find it in the overworld, enter the dream world, traverse the dream world to find and destroy x number of nightmare chunks, and then exit the dream world. There is nothing wrong with that formula on its own, it would honestly be nice to have Pi'illos act as miniature challenges to complete within the larger objectives, but, the problem with the Pi'illos is their execution. Firstly, the animation for entering and exiting the dream world is way longer than is necessary, which gets old really fast since you will be seeing it each time you rescue a Pi'illo (as well as any other time you enter the dream world). After you've rescued a Pi'illo it will also always speak to you and they never have anything interesting to say. Many Pi'illo in the same area will even say the same thing to you just slightly rephrased, adding to the amount of time that the game wastes. And as for the actual content in each Pi'illo's dream dungeon, I was always underwhelmed by the challenges you must overcome to rescue the optional Pi'illos as well as the challenges for many of the mandatory ones. Most of the time, the challenge will be something exceedingly simple and very short: advance past a few enemy encounters, find ~3 nightmare chunks in an empty room, complete a very small platforming challenge. A few times it even felt like the animation and dialogue surrounding the Pi'illo rescue missions were longer than the missions themselves. Because rescuing Pi'illos was so unrewarding (you don't get anything meaningful unless you rescue all of them) and felt like a waste of time, I decided to ignore any optional Pi'illos about halfway through the game, which made the experience a bit more bearable. Rescuing Pi'illo folk would have been much more compelling if there were less of them and the challenges in the dream world felt more meaningful.
Speaking of the dream world, even outside of the Pi'illo rescue missions, exploring the dreamworld felt more annoying than fun. The gimmick of touching Luigi's face on the bottom screen to interact with the dream world is undercooked, accomplishing nothing that the buttons on the 3DS couldn't handle while also interrupting the flow of gameplay. Even the parts of the dream world that don't require touch controls to navigate are often unnecessarily cumbersome. You will very often need to summon a hoard of Luigis to progress in the dream world. The hoard changes the already underwhelming control scheme that Mario and Luigi have to be slower and more clumsy. The tornado shape that the hoard can take was especially frustrating due to how slowly it moved vertically. The theming of the dream world also felt pretty lackluster, especially when comparing it to the theming of Bowser's insides from BIS, where everything from the blocks, to the enemies, to the walls and floor were designed to match that theme. While most of the enemies in the dream world are unique, nothing about them is "dreamy", and the only thing surreal about the dream world layouts is that there are things floating in the background and foreground. It would have been much cooler to discover things that only existed in Luigi's imagination in the dream world. All that being said, there are a couple things I did like about the dream world. Battles feel very different there compared to the waking world thanks to the exclusivity that special attacks have in the dream/waking world, the quantity of monsters within each encounter being significantly higher in the dream world, and only having one party member while fighting in the dream world. I also really like the Golden Beanie enemy, which is a rare miniboss that can randomly spawn in the dream world and will flee if you fail to counterattack any of its moves, making its combats very exciting.
I can't end this review without mentioning a specific part of the story that was aggravating due to how badly it was written. I've already mentioned that there is too much dialogue in this game, but most of it also feels poorly written. The scene at the top of Pajamja Mountain was especially poorly thought out, and let me explain why. At this point of the game. Mario and Luigi have just caught up to the big bads, Bowser and Antasma, on the peak of Pajamja mountain. Antasma then starts playing music from nearby speakers which your companion, Dreambert, explains to be the Dreambeats, which is a song that will make all who hear it fall asleep. To escape the Dreambeats and avoid leaving their vulnerable unconscious bodies in front of the baddies, Mario and Luigi plan to escape to the dream world. The problem with this solution is that to get into the dream world, Luigi must fall asleep (which is what they are trying to avoid!). This is not addressed and you simply walk a screen to the left and leave Luigi's unconscious body in the overworld as Mario escapes to the dream world. Immediately upon entering the dream world the dream portal closes behind you and your new objective is to escape the dream world. Nothing you do in the dream world is related to Bowser or Antasma at all, leaving this section feeling completely inconsequential, poorly written, and a waste of time. The cherry on top is when you see Bowser (who is covering his ears with his hands to avoid hearing the Dreambeats) talking to Antasma and responding to what he is saying, meaning Bowser can hear what is going on despite not falling asleep. The fact that there is so much dialogue slowing Dream Team down, feels even worse when you realize that the story the game is telling wasn't even given too much thought.
Aside from the easier gameplay, Pi'illo folk, dream world, and extra heaps of dialogue, the rest of the game is pretty much in line with the other Mario and Luigi RPGs. A few extra details about this game that stood out to me are as follows.
- Giant battles return from BIS and overstayed their welcome a bit but were an alright inclusion overall.
- I was pleasantly surprised to find that the 3D effects in this game look amazing, especially in battles!
- Many of the special attacks the bros can preform utilize the gyro sensor on the 3DS, which unlike the touch controls in the dream world, were actually a fun addition that adds novelty to this game and allows its battle system to stand out a bit compared to the other entries of the series.
- The gags in this game are much wordier than the games preceding it and, for me, ended up falling flat much more frequently.
- The locations in this game felt very generic. Plains, desert, mountain, beach, jungle, and lava castle are all very overused settings in Mario games, which the previous Mario and Luigi games had avoided falling back on.
- Badges and gear are much more unique in this game than the games before, boasting many unique effects that are more exciting than simple stat upgrades. Gaining the ability to equip 2 extra pieces of gear through character customization perks is also very cool.
- There is a hard mode that is unlocked after beating the game once. I wish that hard mode were an option from the start because that very likely would have made the game more enjoyable to me, but I am not willing to spend an additional 30 hours playing this game again to see for myself when that won't fix the problems present outside of the games combat.
Overall, Mario and Luigi Dream Team is a disappointing follow up to Bowser's Inside Story and the worst entry in the series up to that point. It constantly feels like the game is wasting your time and talking down to you with lots of dialogue, tutorials, and filler content. It is sad to see, because other aspects of the game, like the art direction, battle systems, and combat are up to par or even improvements on the previous games. Dream Team has its moments, but they are far outnumbered by the rest of the game's mediocre or even straight up bad gameplay. My disappointment with this game leaves me especially trepidatious about the quality of the last installment in this series, Mario and Luigi Paper Jam, which I remember already not really liking when I was a kid. So if I remember Dream Team being good as a kid I can only imagine how bad Paper Jam really is if I already didn't like it when I was younger.
For starters, the demographic for this game was clearly a MUCH younger audience than any of the previous games. I just replayed the 3 previous games in the Mario and Luigi series, and while they are certainly very accessible and sometimes a little overbearing with how much they hold your hand, Dream Team takes things to a new level of insufferableness. The first ~1 hour of the game is a very long """invisible""" tutorial, teaching you how to control a character in a video game from a third person perspective. I cannot overstate how annoying it is that you are forced to spend an hour going through a tutorial that genuinely seems to have been intended for people who have never played a videogame before, with no option to skip it.
The next hour or two after the opening are still not great. In stark contrast to Bowser's Inside Story, the action commands for your standard attacks are very easy to time in this game, which is a real shame. The tight timing for the action commands in BIS were great because it kept me engaged and focused on the combat's moment to moment gameplay. Another thing that became very apparent early on in the game was the excessive amount of dialogue, the opening especially is overflowing with NPCs that want to talk to you and waste your time with meaningless text. Dialogue continues to be a problem through the whole game; after completing an objective, learning a new overworld ability, rescuing a Pi'illo, and so on, you will be assaulted with words upon words that the game would have been much better off without.
Rescuing Pi'illo folk is one of the weakest areas in this game. There are 52 petrified Pi'illos to rescue, each one housing a mini dungeon, so they make up a significant portion of the game's content. To rescue a Pi'illo you must find it in the overworld, enter the dream world, traverse the dream world to find and destroy x number of nightmare chunks, and then exit the dream world. There is nothing wrong with that formula on its own, it would honestly be nice to have Pi'illos act as miniature challenges to complete within the larger objectives, but, the problem with the Pi'illos is their execution. Firstly, the animation for entering and exiting the dream world is way longer than is necessary, which gets old really fast since you will be seeing it each time you rescue a Pi'illo (as well as any other time you enter the dream world). After you've rescued a Pi'illo it will also always speak to you and they never have anything interesting to say. Many Pi'illo in the same area will even say the same thing to you just slightly rephrased, adding to the amount of time that the game wastes. And as for the actual content in each Pi'illo's dream dungeon, I was always underwhelmed by the challenges you must overcome to rescue the optional Pi'illos as well as the challenges for many of the mandatory ones. Most of the time, the challenge will be something exceedingly simple and very short: advance past a few enemy encounters, find ~3 nightmare chunks in an empty room, complete a very small platforming challenge. A few times it even felt like the animation and dialogue surrounding the Pi'illo rescue missions were longer than the missions themselves. Because rescuing Pi'illos was so unrewarding (you don't get anything meaningful unless you rescue all of them) and felt like a waste of time, I decided to ignore any optional Pi'illos about halfway through the game, which made the experience a bit more bearable. Rescuing Pi'illo folk would have been much more compelling if there were less of them and the challenges in the dream world felt more meaningful.
Speaking of the dream world, even outside of the Pi'illo rescue missions, exploring the dreamworld felt more annoying than fun. The gimmick of touching Luigi's face on the bottom screen to interact with the dream world is undercooked, accomplishing nothing that the buttons on the 3DS couldn't handle while also interrupting the flow of gameplay. Even the parts of the dream world that don't require touch controls to navigate are often unnecessarily cumbersome. You will very often need to summon a hoard of Luigis to progress in the dream world. The hoard changes the already underwhelming control scheme that Mario and Luigi have to be slower and more clumsy. The tornado shape that the hoard can take was especially frustrating due to how slowly it moved vertically. The theming of the dream world also felt pretty lackluster, especially when comparing it to the theming of Bowser's insides from BIS, where everything from the blocks, to the enemies, to the walls and floor were designed to match that theme. While most of the enemies in the dream world are unique, nothing about them is "dreamy", and the only thing surreal about the dream world layouts is that there are things floating in the background and foreground. It would have been much cooler to discover things that only existed in Luigi's imagination in the dream world. All that being said, there are a couple things I did like about the dream world. Battles feel very different there compared to the waking world thanks to the exclusivity that special attacks have in the dream/waking world, the quantity of monsters within each encounter being significantly higher in the dream world, and only having one party member while fighting in the dream world. I also really like the Golden Beanie enemy, which is a rare miniboss that can randomly spawn in the dream world and will flee if you fail to counterattack any of its moves, making its combats very exciting.
I can't end this review without mentioning a specific part of the story that was aggravating due to how badly it was written. I've already mentioned that there is too much dialogue in this game, but most of it also feels poorly written. The scene at the top of Pajamja Mountain was especially poorly thought out, and let me explain why. At this point of the game. Mario and Luigi have just caught up to the big bads, Bowser and Antasma, on the peak of Pajamja mountain. Antasma then starts playing music from nearby speakers which your companion, Dreambert, explains to be the Dreambeats, which is a song that will make all who hear it fall asleep. To escape the Dreambeats and avoid leaving their vulnerable unconscious bodies in front of the baddies, Mario and Luigi plan to escape to the dream world. The problem with this solution is that to get into the dream world, Luigi must fall asleep (which is what they are trying to avoid!). This is not addressed and you simply walk a screen to the left and leave Luigi's unconscious body in the overworld as Mario escapes to the dream world. Immediately upon entering the dream world the dream portal closes behind you and your new objective is to escape the dream world. Nothing you do in the dream world is related to Bowser or Antasma at all, leaving this section feeling completely inconsequential, poorly written, and a waste of time. The cherry on top is when you see Bowser (who is covering his ears with his hands to avoid hearing the Dreambeats) talking to Antasma and responding to what he is saying, meaning Bowser can hear what is going on despite not falling asleep. The fact that there is so much dialogue slowing Dream Team down, feels even worse when you realize that the story the game is telling wasn't even given too much thought.
Aside from the easier gameplay, Pi'illo folk, dream world, and extra heaps of dialogue, the rest of the game is pretty much in line with the other Mario and Luigi RPGs. A few extra details about this game that stood out to me are as follows.
- Giant battles return from BIS and overstayed their welcome a bit but were an alright inclusion overall.
- I was pleasantly surprised to find that the 3D effects in this game look amazing, especially in battles!
- Many of the special attacks the bros can preform utilize the gyro sensor on the 3DS, which unlike the touch controls in the dream world, were actually a fun addition that adds novelty to this game and allows its battle system to stand out a bit compared to the other entries of the series.
- The gags in this game are much wordier than the games preceding it and, for me, ended up falling flat much more frequently.
- The locations in this game felt very generic. Plains, desert, mountain, beach, jungle, and lava castle are all very overused settings in Mario games, which the previous Mario and Luigi games had avoided falling back on.
- Badges and gear are much more unique in this game than the games before, boasting many unique effects that are more exciting than simple stat upgrades. Gaining the ability to equip 2 extra pieces of gear through character customization perks is also very cool.
- There is a hard mode that is unlocked after beating the game once. I wish that hard mode were an option from the start because that very likely would have made the game more enjoyable to me, but I am not willing to spend an additional 30 hours playing this game again to see for myself when that won't fix the problems present outside of the games combat.
Overall, Mario and Luigi Dream Team is a disappointing follow up to Bowser's Inside Story and the worst entry in the series up to that point. It constantly feels like the game is wasting your time and talking down to you with lots of dialogue, tutorials, and filler content. It is sad to see, because other aspects of the game, like the art direction, battle systems, and combat are up to par or even improvements on the previous games. Dream Team has its moments, but they are far outnumbered by the rest of the game's mediocre or even straight up bad gameplay. My disappointment with this game leaves me especially trepidatious about the quality of the last installment in this series, Mario and Luigi Paper Jam, which I remember already not really liking when I was a kid. So if I remember Dream Team being good as a kid I can only imagine how bad Paper Jam really is if I already didn't like it when I was younger.