Mario & Luigi: Dream Team is the fourth game in the series of cooperative RPGs starring Nintendo's two main plumber brothers. It was released around the world in July and August of 2013. Dream Team was developed by longtime series developer AlphaDream, which has made every Mario & Luigi game. I have not played any games in this series since Superstar Saga, the first one, but I've heard about how great the two DS games are. So when I picked up my 3DS, I wanted to jump back into the series with the newest entry.

The story of Dream Team is about the team from the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario, Luigi, Peach, Toadsworth, and random Toads, all going on a vacation to Pi'illo Island.  The island was once inhabited by talking pillow people and has now become a wonderful, tourist trap. It turns out that the Pi'illo people have actually been trapped in the Dream World by the evil Antasma. After freeing the Pi'illo Prince, Dreambert, Mario & Luigi go on an adventure around the island to help wake the Pi'illo and stop Antasma and his familiar allies.



Sadly, I may have been better off saving the money I spent on this game and using it for one of the older DS games I missed out on. While I still have not played Partners in Time or Bowser's Inside Story, they are well regarded, while Dream Team is a mixed bag. Dream Team is a disappointment, perhaps for the same reason that mainstream gaming critics complain about Call of Duty's static gameplay from year to year, but still award it high marks for being a great game in its own right. Dream Team is a fantastic game, when it lets you play it...


Every time you start to feel like you're on a roll and you're going to get some serious progress done, the game takes you on a detour, or introduces a new mechanic and spends five minutes explaining how to use it. This may be helpful for the first couple of skills, but when you're 30 hours in and still being told to press "A" at the right time to get this new ability of your's to work (when the other 7 skills you've received in the game all have the same timing and button use), it gets annoying. The game treats you like you're a 3 year-old that's never played a game before, which I find odd coming from Nintendo, the company that was the king of cryptic gameplay and secrets in the 8 and 16-bit days. Back then, they let you discover the game by playing it; however, Dream Team tells you how to play it. You never receive a new ability and are allowed to play around with it.  Instead, you have to sit through an unskippable tutorial explaining a process you've already been through many times before.

The gameplay is varied and utilizes three different battle systems. In the real world, it uses the classic system that goes back to the first game, with Mario and Luigi side-by-side in battle, working together to take down enemies. In the dream world, Dreamy Luigi becomes a part of Mario during battles, which opens up a different set of single group attacks. Dreamy Luigi also has a Godzilla option in the dream world where he grows to be about fifty feet tall and can jump on and hammer massive bosses. Every attack in every battle mode has its own tutorial, and you don't stop learning new skills through the game. But, every awesome spectacle of Dreamy Luigi going all Apache Chief is interrupted by Dreambert going on some tangent about how to use a hammer or how to get Mario to throw mushrooms in his giant brother's mouth.


Really, my only major complaints about this game involve the volume of dialogue and copious use of in-game tutorials. If you've played any of the previous Mario & Luigi games, you know what you're going to be doing most of the time. The game assumes you know nothing (Jon Snow) and uses dialogue in every major location you visit to teach you new things. Since every skill uses the same buttons, it becomes a chore in tedium and monotony more than anything that is helpful. In the end, there is too much dialogue; the overabundance of these tutorials leads to an overuse of dialogue. The dependency between these two elements creates a vicious cycle that has lead to gamer complaints, and has been bad enough to turn people off from the game before they have beaten it. I would not recommend Dream Team as a starting point to the series, and I contend that it may well be the low point of the Mario & Luigi series. I'll be sure to play the others and get back to you on that, since I now have Partners in Time!

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