Not gonna lie, I’ve never liked this game all that much, at least not nearly as much as everyone else seems to. I remember playing it for the first time in high school and being pretty apathetic about it. I played it, I beat it, and thought it was good and nothing more.

I’ve replayed it multiple times since then, and every time my opinion of it deteriorates more and more. This is where the M&L series really starts to go downhill and introduces a bunch of elements that ruined the series for me.

The world and exploring in general is a chore. The Mushroom Kingdom consists of like 4 areas, Peach’s castle, Bowser’s castle, a beach, and a forest. When you’re not in the bland overworld, you’re in Bowser’s insides which all looks samey. 90% of the game takes place in Bowser’s guts from a side scrolling perspective, which is just lame.

Playing as Bowser is interesting at first, but quickly becomes tedious. Since he’s by himself, you only get 1 action per turn, which eventually makes battles a slog. You’re mainly just defending against enemy attacks, many of which can be long and drag out fights. At least this game does make use of the stylus for Bowser’s special attacks, something that Partners in Time didn’t take advantage of, only using it for one small segment where you just scrub dirt off a picture.

Giant Bowser battles are cool conceptually, but in practice they suck. Your stats mean nothing in them, so they end up basically being drawn out minigames. Plus, Fawful Express exists, which might be one of the worst bosses in any video game. A timed boss that gives you little to no room for error and requires you to use the shitty DS microphone makes for an obnoxious battle. Luckily, this time around, I found out that humming into the microphone instead of blowing somehow works better, so instead of a fight that feels overtuned, it ended up being pretty easy, albeit boring.

Battles with Mario and Luigi on the other hand are perfectly fine. Special attacks are no longer items like in Partners in Time, which is definitely an improvement. I do prefer PiT’s special attacks in general, but BIS has some fun ones. Plus they’re balanced a little better. Once you get the infinite Bros. Items in PiT like Copy Flowers the game becomes super easy.

Bosses are also still fun, and while Bowser only has a couple regular bosses, they’re decent too. Enemy variety is severely lacking, especially for Bowser, so you end up fighting the same ones over and over again which gets stale fast.

The overabundance of minigames gets annoying too. They’re all over the place, you have to sit through a boring tutorial for all of them, you have to do many of them multiple times, and none of them are fun. Feels like half of the time when you’re playing as Mario and Luigi, it’s to do another minigame.

The plot and writing doesn’t do much for me either. Fawful is great in Superstar Saga, but here I feel like he doesn’t work as a main villain. His wackiness works well with Cackletta’s slightly more serious and sinister character, but on his own it gets old. Doesn’t help that his partner in crime, Midbus, is about as forgettable as you can get. Unlike the first two M&L games, the plot doesn’t really have any fun twists and turns at all. It’s a bunch of silly things happening (some more fetishy than others), then you have to go and collect 3 things (because all these games have to have an element to them that involves collecting things to form a new thing), then the game is basically over. There are barely any new characters too, and the ones that are there kind of just suck. I really hate that French block guy. I don’t even really know why, I just irrationally hate him.

This may sound somewhat autistic, but this is also the game where the Luigi bullying gets to the point where it stops being funny and starts being annoying. Starlow might be the most unlikable character in the entire Mario franchise. Her entire personality is just “massive bitch.” Some of the slapstick with Luigi is fun, but the amount of times Starlow shits on Luigi is absurd. Like what the fuck have you been doing this whole time, cunt? She does jack shit the entire game. Bring back Stuffwell. He was bland, but at least he wasn’t an asshole.

I’m really ragging on the game, but it’s not even really bad. It’s decent, but is severely lacking compared to most other Mario RPGs. That being said, the music is fantastic, as expected from Shimomura. The artstyle is nice and the spritework and animations are really good. It’s just lacking a lot of the creativity the prior games had. It feels phoned in. Even the ending is lame. You beat the final boss and the game just ends with very little fanfare. Not a bad game at all, but for me a pretty mediocre one, and an extremely overrated one.

While not as good as its predecessors, and considered one of the lesser Mario RPGs by the general public, I can't help but love this game. It came out at the perfect time when I was a 13-year-old, so the slightly darker plot and alien shit appealed to my edgelord mind.

Partners in Time is definitely very different from Superstar Saga. There isn't much in the way of exploration, and it does repeat a lot of the same puzzles over and over again. What it lacks in level design, it makes up for by having extremely fun to fight enemies and bosses. Apparently, a lot of people say the enemies and bosses have HP bloat, but I never really found it that bad. The game throws so many Bros. Items at you, that you should almost never be using your normal attacks anyway. Once you get Copy Flowers and Mix Flowers, you can defeat pretty much anything in one turn. Even the final boss I never had trouble with.

You know what I do have trouble with though? That awful UFO minigame right before the final boss. Unironically what were they thinking? It feels like a complete toss up whether you complete it easily with little effort, or you get destroyed. Gotta love mandatory "battles" that have nothing to do with the game's main mechanics that can still give you a game over.

Partners in Time is weird and definitely has issues, but it's super creative, super fun, and I can't help but enjoy its oddly dark plot, at least compared to most Mario games. I may be the one person who prefers it over Bowser's Inside Story.

A unique, solid metroidvania that unfortunately ends up being a little too meandering for its own good.

Considering so many metroidvanias coming out these days are adopting souls-like mechanics, it's nice to see one that pretty much has no combat whatsoever. Most of this game is solving puzzles with the various tools you find throughout the game, all of which are creative and unlike anything I've seen in a metroidvania. I definitely wasn't expecting to solve puzzles with a slinky.

Biggest issue I had was how little direction the game really has. Oftentimes, I found myself spending what felt like an exorbitant amount of time trying to find ways to progress, only to run into a shortcut or one of the various egg collectibles. Even with the game's fast travel system, the world is big enough that I still ended up running through the same rooms over and over which led to a lot of boredom and frustration.

The game is at the least mostly forgiving. Even if you die, most puzzles you solved will remain complete even after dying and going back to the last phone you saved at. There was one point where I died after completing a series of puzzles and started to get really annoyed, but upon returning to said puzzles, I realized I could get through them extremely quickly. Once you figure out a puzzle, you're really never going to spend that much time resolving it if need be. The worst part of the game in terms of difficulty is running away from the ghost wolf, which really isn't that hard, but is still a pain in the ass to complete. Felt really out of place in a mostly chill game.

Of course, there's also the whole ARG aspect of the game, and let me be real here, I've grown to hate it when games have so much content behind this kind of stuff. What will inevitably happen is a small group of mega-autists will find stuff on a discord or something, figure everything out way more quickly than the developer expected, and everyone else who has an actual life will just look up the answers. Anyone like me will just beat the game's main ending and be done with it, leaving a decent chunk of content undone.

I wouldn't care about this so much if the game wasn't $25. That's quite an asking price for what for me was an approximately 7 hour game. Fez, a similar game that's about the same length, was only $10 in comparison. Hollow Knight, a game that can be anywhere from 25 to 40 hours depending on how much optional content you want to go through, is only $15. Nothing about this game really screams "this is worth $25." I can't help but feel like Dunkey may have pushed for the higher price once he got his hands on it, considering this game was well in development before his publishing company picked it up.

With that being said, the game is good, and I would recommend it. Even with its issues, it's still very creative and worth checking out. Just maybe wait until it's around 40% off before buying.