Mario & Luigi: Dream Team is a fluffy, perky game, at times simultaneously charming and infuriating. It does so many things so well, from the silly little puns stuffed into every line of dialogue to the welcomely tricky enemy attacks, that I couldn't help but fall in love with the game, Luigi-sized warts and all.
Dream Team does a lot of things right, and is a satisfying detour for a franchise that is risking too much predictability it its main guise. It's hard to shake that feeling of a missed opportunity, of a premise not fully realized that therefore exposes some comparative shortcomings.
A portion of a USGamer interview with producers Yoshihiko Maekawa and Akira Ohtani, its director Hiroyuki Kubota and Nate Bihldorff...
USGamer: The visual style is really interesting. There's a whole lot of elegant sprite-ing along with the 3D stuff. What made you decide to go into that?
Maekawa: This is a pretty simple answer, I suppose. I always thought that Alphadream was really good at designing these 2D sprite characters throughout Mario & Luigi series as well as Tomato Adventures. We always want to play to our strengths in designing those sprites and even though on the 3DS we had the opportunity to go in a slightly different direction, we decided to stay with those sprites because of how useful they were for conveying various kinds of comical expressions. We started early before we knew a lot about the hardware but when we found out it was capable of stereoscopic effect, we knew we wanted to challenge ourselves and have that reflected in the environment of the games somehow. And that was the background of what influenced the creation of the visual style of the game you see right now.
USGamer: What kind of prototypes did not make it to the finishing stage. You know, the ones that died on the vine?
Kubota: I think the one idea that really stood out for me was this battle attack in which a lot of Luigis would come together and form a volcano which would then erupt. More Luigis that would then fall on the enemies and damage them. This would have been the Luigi Volcano and we actually did prototype this but we realized it didn't control very well and it wasn't as fun as we hoped it would be.
USGamer: There are definitely some complex stuff in there. However, the game even gives you, like, a tutorial on how to jump. Are you concerned about people that might feel aggrieved about that?
Ohtani: I guess I wonder why people who don't need the tutorial for that don't simply cancel out or skip through them. I feel like it's still important to have a tutorial on something as simple as jumping because the Mario & Luigi series is played by children as young as five years old. In fact, my son is five. When I watched him play, he had some trouble with the jump. It's also important to point out it's not quite the same jumping feel as what you might find in a Mario game from Mr. Miyamoto. So,we feel it's still important to address it and more advanced players can skip it if they like.
Ohtani: Certainly, though, I agree to some fans this must seem too obvious to include a tutorial on something like jumping. But, as it turns out, the timing for the jump tends to change with each installment of the game so I feel it's still a good idea for some people to refresh themselves with a quick course on how the timing has changed from what they may remember. It's a nice way to update your skills and hopefully we've designed it so it's fun.
USGamer: Okay, the next question's a bit meta, I guess. Now, a lot of people talk about how Luigi is the brother who no one really likes. With Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, is all this wish fulfillment on his part or is this possibly a case of the younger brother achieving some case of superiority?
Ohtani: Oh, Luigi always felt pretty major to me!
Maekawa: I don't know if we were reacting so much to the history of player impressions of Luigi though we are certainly aware that players tend to consider him as sort of secondary in comparison to Mario.
I think one of the reasons people have this impression because in multiplayer games Mario was the first player and Luigi was the second player so if you were playing with a friend, you'd be like, 'Well. Okay. You can have this other controller and you can play as Luigi. I guess.' That was kind of the impression. And although we've had our fun with Luigi in the past in the series, I feel like we have taken this opportunity to show him as a much more depth-filled character. We've also tried to show him as an equal to Mario whenever we've had the chance.
Kubota: So, you may be aware of the image of the sleeping Luigi on the screen. If you play with his mustache while he is sleeping, this may actually affect battle and I tend to think of the setting of Luigi's dreams as more of something we needed to justify the gameplay elements we included rather than specifically thinking of it as wish fulfillment for the character.
The official North American website for Mario and Luigi: Dream Team is now open. Again, we've see a lot of footage coming from the European release of this game. If you're not already spoiler-filled, feel free to check out the site!
