Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time Insights

Whenever I start covering a completely new series, to me, I try to go in as blind as possible. But no matter what it is, I'm always going to have- some sort of predisposition, some sort of preformed opinion, and Mario & Luigi is no different. I know that Super Star Saga is a beloved classic, I know that the series supposedly peaks in the middle, and that it, again, supposedly tends to struggle near the end. But aside from that, I do try to make sure I go into each of these games with as much of an open mind and as much of a blank slate of opinions as I can. That way the game can stand on its own merits and the thoughts of people I know and trust don't influence my thought process too much. That was a bit of a task with Superstar Saga, but it was almost effortless with its sequel. I've heard a lot about a lot of these games, but of all of them, the one that's gone the most radio silent, at least in the circles that I frequent, is Partners in Time, and I honestly don't know why. Thanks to Superstar Saga's success being a top 15 bestseller on the GBA, it was obvious that AlphaDream was going to work on creating a sequel. And since the GBA was a relatively short console generation, AlphaDream was going to have to change their focus for their follow-up. To do that, they made the decision to develop the game for Nintendo's next generation handheld, the DS. The DS's hardware influenced the development of basically everything that came to the system, as up to this point there had been nothing else like it in the gaming industry. Partners in Time was no different in this regard. While things like the dual screens and touch screen were influential, honestly the biggest influence on the game itself was having four face buttons. Two buttons on the GBA meant two brothers, and four buttons on the DS means four. I can only imagine how many brothers they'd have to invent for a game on the Switch. The game was released about a year into the DS's lifespan, which all things considered is pretty early, and many of these early titles do often end up being lost in the shuffle. But the fact that the game is an early DS game doesn't really explain how relatively forgotten it is compared to other games. games in the series. I mean, it apparently reviewed well and sold decently even if it was significantly less than Superstar Saga. So there has to be something to the game itself that just isn't as well liked, something that's keeping it from being as beloved. Even Alpha Dream didn't didn't really care about it, when doing their remakes in an attempt to keep their floundering company's doors open, after remaking Superstar Saga, they skipped Partners in Time entirely and went straight to Bowser's Inside Story. There has to be a reason for that, and I'm definitely excited to see exactly what is up with this game. So let's have a look at Mario & Partners in Time. And just before we get started here, if you like what I do and want to help out, maybe think about hitting the like button and subscribing to be notified about future videos. Anyways, let's get started. The game starts out with a bit of narration describing a race of aliens that were searching for a new home. This is a pretty funny bit to start on, as while there are some undertones that suggest that the planet these aliens are from is not doing so great, the narrator just focuses on how creepy they are, just... being creepy and creepily staring out into space and stuff. Pretty rude, but I guess these are going to be the antagonists, so they probably deserve a bit of shade being thrown at them. From there, we then cut to Princess Peach's castle, in the past because why not, where Baby Mario and Luigi have both arrived to play with the princess for a while. Baby Bowser shows up and causes some trouble, but Mario is able to teach him a lesson pretty easily. Then the aliens attacked. Yeah, the place they found to be their new home was in fact the Mushroom Kingdom. and took it upon themselves to raid the castle and take over. We then cut to the present where Professor E. Gadd, being the mad scientist that he is, has invented a time machine, and very intelligently sent Princess Peach back to the past with like two regular toads, and just hoped everything would work out. Obviously the princess doesn't come back, and the time machine instead brings this thing back that Mario has to defeat. Its arrival in the main timeline has messed up the entire space-time continuum, and portals between the two time periods have begun to- appear. Mario decides that the best way to save Peach now that the time machine is broken beyond repair, since its power source, the Cobalt Star, is gone, is to heroically jump into the time portals and find her in the past. Luigi makes the jump first, unintentionally of course, and Mario heads in right after him. They end up on the outskirts of Holly Jolly Village, and we get introduced to our menu here, named Stuffwell, who was sent back in time by E. Gadd to help us out. While I don't mind him that much, like, As a business bag, he tends to get very wordy and very annoying. I'll get into why in a little bit. The brothers make their way to Holly Jolly Village, which is Santa themed for some reason, and the entire town has been destroyed with its inhabitants gone. They're ambushed by the invaders and quickly defeated. The kids see this from overhead in Baby Bowser's cruiser, and Peach convinces Bowser to save them by making the worst sound anyone has ever heard in history. They do, and back aboard the cruiser, they attempt to escape the aliens and regroup at Bowser's castle. Unfortunately, they're shot out of the sky, and the cruiser crashes into the castle. Eventually, all four of the brothers regroup and join forces. Now it seems like a lot of things happened in this first section, and this intro does take about an hour. that's not because there's a ton of substance here. It's entirely because of the tutorials. Partners in Time has some of the worst tutorials I've seen in a very long time, and our buddy Stuffwell here is a big culprit in making them this way. Not only does he pop out all the time to spout off information that we probably already have, thanks to his overly verbose writing that isn't nearly as endearing as I assume the writers would have hoped, The tutorials for everything last so long and are so poorly implemented that I dreaded every single time he popped out to introduce something new. Like in his first tutorial, he goes on for about a minute about the fact that he is the menu and that he can do things like hold items and carry equipment. But using items or equipment are entirely separate long-winded tutorials and these completely halt the game in the opening hours when it's the most important to be doing everything it can to hook the player. This isn't just a problem with Stuffwell though. For instance, at the very start of the game, Toadsworth offers to tell Baby Mario how to do the basic action commands when attacking and defending, which is totally fine, especially since you can skip it. But then, just moments later, when you're playing as adult Mario in the present timeline, the exact same tutorial pops up again! You can still skip it, which is good, but it's just redundant. They could have handled the whole thing a lot more gracefully, with, like, Toadsworth just saying something along the lines of... Remember that the button you use in battle changes depending on who you are, with a quick pointer to the UI now showing A instead of X. Most of these tutorials aren't skippable though, so you just have to deal with whatever nonsense the tutorial giver is spouting off. What's kind of funny is that whether or not a tutorial is skippable seems completely random. Most of the time you just have to deal with the tutorial, but occasionally you'll come across one that offers to skip. Come on, just either make all of your tutorials skippable or make them quick. Unintrusive and to the point. It's not that hard. And Partners in Time does understand this at least at some level. Still in this opening section here just after recruiting the babies the group comes across this obstacle. Stuffwell doesn't pop out here. There's no long-winded tutorial as to what you need to do. You just get a sign that tells you a thing you can do and it's up to you to use that instruction to learn what abilities you have and how to use them. It's not groundbreaking game design or anything, the Mario franchise has been doing these sorts of tutorials for years. Heck, Super Star Saga did this, so I have no idea why a simple, effective tutorial is such a hard thing for partners in time to accomplish. Now, before I move on, I should acknowledge that Super Star Saga had some long, unskippable tutorials as well. And yeah, it would be better if they were all skippable, but at least they were integrated into the world and story a bit more naturally. The tutorial area with the Jellyfish Sisters didn't feel like one of Stuffwell's tutorials because the goal wasn't explicitly just the tutorial. They taught the bros a new technique, wanted something in return, and it just so happened to take place in an area that worked perfectly as a tutorial for those techniques. But yeah, despite the fact that not a lot of things happened in this intro, thanks to all of these tutorials, it drags out so long and feels so slow. Once everyone makes it back to the present by jumping through a time hole in Baby Bowser's room, We get introduced to the main goal of the game, what we'll need to do in order to rescue Princess Peach. We found a piece of the Cobalt Star in Bowser's Castle, and E. Gadd theorized that the star is related to the Shroobs somehow. So it's up to Mario's and Luigi's to head back in time, find all of the pieces of the Cobalt Star, and rescue Princess Peach from the Shroob's invasion force. Speaking of the Shroobs, they do make a pretty compelling villain group. While not being as entertaining as Cackletta and Fawful, thanks to largely not having much personality, they do make up for that with the intimidation factor. We have no idea why they're doing what they do, since while they are intelligent beings, their language is so far beyond what we're familiar with that it's impossible to tell what they're thinking. And that's not even mentioning the sheer impact on the world itself. Their invasion of the Mushroom Kingdom isn't like Cackletta's assault on the Bean Bean Kingdom, where it's cleaned up and solved five minutes after it happens. The effects the Shroobs have had on the kingdom since their takeover has been lasting and severe, and it seriously affects the game's overall tone. Seriously, if you look at anything the Shroobs have done during their conquest, even just a little bit beyond the surface, you'll see how dark this game can get. The first area after the opening, Toadwood Fork, Forest is a perfect example. This is a dark, gloomy forest which isn't too out of the ordinary at first, until you notice that there are toads, likely captured from other parts of the world, that have all been gathered here. and have either been fused to trees to fuel the invasion force through their Vim factory, or are in the process of doing so. These dark undertones are a near constant throughout the game, and once you notice them, it's hard to see the game as just another happy-go-lucky Mario Bros. adventure. It's not that it doesn't attempt, and if I were to try to describe the game's overall feel as being dour or oppressive, I'd be at best exaggerating. While yeah, some of the events that occur in the game are just as dark as, say, Twilight Town's curse from Thousand Year Door, or the genocide of the Samur Kingdom from Super Paper Mario, it never truly lingers on those events, never lets them fully sink in because this is a Mario and Luigi game and we've gotta have some fun around here. Humor was the backbone of Super Star Saga, and it had to be good at that because it really didn't do anything else. And while Partners in Time does take its villains and their actions a bit more seriously, that's pretty much the extent of it. Mario and Luigi are still the same slapstick comedy duo that they were in the first game, with an extra dimension added by bringing in the babies. That being said, the babies themselves don't add that much to the comedy in my opinion. They just end up as being more people to clown on Luigi for being Luigi. It is fine though, although the babies bring more cuteness to the table than anything else. Where a lot of this game's humor starts to falter a bit more is stuff that's not directly related to the brothers. Take this bit with these Hammer Bros that have been mind-controlled by the Shroobs. Subtitles by the Amara.org community Their dialogue is all in leet-speak, which doesn't resonate with me much, but not really for the reasons you'd think. While yes, it pretty much is a how-do-you-do-fellow-kid sort of humor moment, the reason I don't like it so much is pretty much the exact opposite of that. See, I'm a 90s kid. I grew up during the dawn of the Internet as we know it, so I experienced a lot of this number substitution humor stuff firsthand. Heh. Boobies, but having humor that's so pointed and so directly cemented in an era really robs it of some of its impact beyond that point And I know a lot of this stuff was a lot more culturally relevant back then But hearing the hammer bros talk about how cringy leet speak is just reminds me that it was already out of style 18 years ago, and I just start feeling myself crumble away to dust It's not at all terrible though, and this humor does manage to keep the overall tone a lot lighter than it would be otherwise. Similarly, the game's supporting cast does a lot to help with this too. My favorite of these characters is Kylie Koopa, a reporter who's been covering the Shroob invasion and will cross paths with the team several times throughout the game. She's really fun, as she's largely based on characters from these old screwball comedies, with her constant use of old-fashioned slang and her obsession with the next big scoop. She's got a Paige Sinclair sort of feel for those who know Bojack Horseman. Although I'm not really sure how she's able to travel from place to place so quickly. At one moment she's on Yoshi's Island and in the next she's traveled all the way around the world to the Ritzy Desert. Maybe it's a time travel thing. And that brings me to the game's structure since this is something that I don't mesh with nearly as well as I did with Superstar Saga. As I said in my Superstar Saga video, that game was structured a lot more like a Zelda game than a traditional JRPG. The world was fully open and explorable, only being roadblocked by abilities that you'd later find throughout the game. There were even several objectives that you'd be able to do in whatever order you wanted. I adore this sort of design because it makes the world feel so much more like a world and not just a bunch of individual levels that you have to complete in the order that the game wants you to. Partners in Time, however, goes in a completely different direction, being far more linear, and being based around a hub that branches off into the game's individual sections. Within Peach's Castle, the game's hub area, several of these time portals will pop up, each of which will transport the bros back into various places in the past. We get access to each of the game's areas and dungeons this way. It's basically set up like this. Each past section has two halves, the first half being where you explore this new area, learn what the shrewbs are doing, and work towards infiltrating their stronghold. Once you do, you'll enter the second half of the area, which will generally be set up like a dungeon. A bunch of interconnected rooms that you'll need to traverse through in order to make progress, solve some puzzles, and fight a boss. Once the boss is defeated, you get what you came there for, head back to Peach's castle, and unlock the path to the next one. The biggest problem I have with all of this is how repetitive it ends up- feeling. Toadwood Forest doesn't feel any different from Gritsy Desert. They're basically structured identically. First, there's an open area that you have to hit a few switches in, then there's a linear dungeon section with some standard puzzle archetypes ending with a boss. Partners in Time very rarely pulls the rug out from underneath the player with its level design and structure, which I feel for a game like this, where all the levels are accessed linearly one by one and are not directly connected to each other. together is a huge missed opportunity, especially considering how well the Paper Mario games managed to do just that. This overall structure should also sound pretty familiar, since it's basically identical to how Paper Mario handled its progression in the first few games. Now, I know what some of you are probably thinking, but, Scion, don't you love the Paper Mario games if they're set up the same way? How come you like this, but don't like this? Well, a lot of it comes down to framing. I know some people like to say that Thousand Year Door's world isn't actually very interconnected and that all the chapters are just accessed through warp pipes, but that's not actually true. Sure, several are. Half of the game's chapters are reached this way, but the other half, chapters 3, 5, 6, and 8, are all accessed differently via a train, an airship, a watership, and a secret underground entrance. Paper Mario 64 is even more focused on its world interconnectivity, with only chapters 4, 5, and 7 being accessed with some sort of warp, and only 7 with a standard warp pipe. By making these chapter connections so much more unique and tying them directly into the world, it makes progressing into these areas feel so much more impactful, like you're genuinely moving from one place to another in a real fleshed-out world. Partners in Time, by having all of its chapters accessed by a warp through time and space, It can't really create any of these solid connections. There's no exploration here, no finding your way, no gaining or using knowledge of peoples and places to deduce where to go next. These are just a level select. While all of the time portals are shown to be active from the start of the game, you'll never have the ability to go into any later areas before you're explicitly supposed to, at least with any ability to make any sort of progress. Now, to be fair, a lot of what makes progressing from level to level in this game a bit more bland is thanks to Peach's Castle, which, in comparison with other similar hub worlds, is just so dull and unimaginative and has so little to offer. Now, in between chapters here, you'll typically be given a new move that will let you progress to the next one by the two Toadsworths, that, despite very much not being on good terms at the start, put their heads together to make the baby Peach happy while the bros are adventuring. But aside from that, the castle is pretty much a ghost town. Seriously, I've never seen a hub so devoid of things of interest. Yeah, there are some important things that you need to do while here, like visit the shops and, uh, hit a question mark block. But for the most part, that's all you'll be able to do on your own. Honestly, a hub basically being connections between areas isn't that big of a deal. For instance, Chrono Trigger has a hub area for all of its time periods, and I like that perfectly fine. But that hub is also- tiny which makes going from area to area super easy. Peach's castle is absolutely enormous. It's got several floors with nothing in them, lots of rooms that have nothing in them, and lots of doors that you have to open in order to get to the nothing that's on the other side. Now there is a reason the castle was made this excessively large but I'll have to put a pin in that one for a while. For the most part though, Peach's Castle ends up being a mostly pointless stopgap between areas where you get to sit through another tutorial for movement ability. And on that note, let's start talking about that movement, since it's pretty interesting. So, as we saw early on, the basics of the game's movement is very similar to how it was in Superstar Saga. Controlling Mario and Luigi is basically the same, you move with Mario, Luigi follows, but both have individual jump buttons to make platforming a bit more complex. The exact same concept applies to the Baby Brothers, except with the buttons swapped from A and B to X and Y. However, things get very complex very quickly, and I honestly think that overall, this game handles its complexity much more successfully than Superstar Saga did. One of my biggest problems with Superstar Saga was how it handled the game's field techniques. Each brother had several, many of which were variants of the same thing, and what each ability did changed depending on which brother was in front. This led to a lot of fiddling with abilities to get the right one at the right time, and since they were all on a cycle that you couldn't reverse at all, it became pretty tedious. Partners in Time fixes this almost entirely because it focuses on one of my favorite aspects of Superstar Saga's puzzle solving, the sections where Mario and Luigi were separated. However, instead of having two characters that couldn't do much because all the important techniques required on both bros to be together, there are instead two separate teams, babies and adults, that each have their own sets of abilities and can act autonomously to explore dungeons and solve puzzles. By splitting the abilities between these two teams, the developers were able to form forego the menu cycling entirely, remove redundancies, and just make using the techniques, which are as plentiful as they were in Super Star Saga, much more elegant. For example, the abilities Mario and Luigi got from bonking each other with hammers in Super Star Saga have now been given to the babies, and the adults don't get hammers at all. With the hammers, on top of traditional bonking, the babies are able to directly dig underground to get beans on their own, simply by pressing a button to toggle those abilities. And with the help of the adults using their new rolling moves, the babies can now move move the Babies can be flattened to enter lower areas like Mario used to be able to do. Baby Mario also now has Mario's water gorging thing, which is weird. On that note, adult Mario still gets his spin jump ability, which lets him and Mario travel much farther than it did in Superstar Saga. but the high jump ability has been replaced with the ability to toss baby bros up to higher ledges, as well as using the spin jump to send the two even higher up into the air. By segmenting these abilities and making them exclusive to certain characters, it makes navigating through them and using them much more fluid and easy to understand. In Superstar Saga, both Mario and Luigi were able to use hammers, and the functionality of those hammers was identical regardless of who was in front, but changed drastically depending on who was in the back. Partners in Time's choice to not allow switching who's in front and having Baby Mario always swing the hammer in front and Baby Luigi's hammer skill always be the drill doesn't remove anything important thanks to the other team's existence, but makes using hammers so much simpler and easier to understand. The same can be said about the adult abilities. Spin jump and ball are a lot simpler to pull off since it's just a matter of pressing L and then the appropriate button for the technique you want. They even went out of their way to make the spin jump a lot less tedious to use properly as well. In Superstar Saga, when you selected the spin or high jump, you were just stuck there until you did the jump you selected or changed back to a regular jump. You couldn't move to properly position yourself at all. But in Partners in Time, the bros can actually walk around a bit before doing a spin jump to let them get the most distance out of it. And it's not. not even super tedious to do, which I'm super thankful for. And on top of making these field techniques a lot easier and simpler to use, the game uses these abilities to their fullest since for basically every puzzle you come across, you will need to take control of either the adults or the babies, utilize their unique skills to find secrets, reach new places, or open new paths forward. Many of these puzzles are even designed in a way that you can use either team to make that new path, both being viable options and both having their own solutions. But there is a bit of a cop-out with this system. While yes, you can often use either team, but more often than not, the best option is to just use one, and then summon the other to your location with these pipe blocks. No matter where you are or what obstacle is in your way, if you reach a pipe block with one team, just hit it and the other will immediately show up, letting you regroup. I do understand the need for this, they can't design literally every puzzle to be solvable by either group, especially since most people will only be playing the game once and will only come across that one solution, but for others, it does kind of feel like the game is letting players know engage with some of the puzzles. Take this for example, it's not a major puzzle or anything, just an obstacle. You can use the spin jump to send the babies into the air so they can cross this platform and get some coins and stuff along the way, but you can also just use the adult bros, roll them into a ball and get to the other side without grabbing these coins. This is a nice little obstacle, but no matter what group you choose to cross with, you don't need to do anything with the other, since there's a pipe block immediately afterwards, so you just need to hit that rather than engage with the obstacle. To be perfectly clear, I like that there are options here. I don't necessarily think that forcing people into solving every puzzle, every way, every time would be the right way to design the game. But I also think they put in a few too many get-out-of-playing-the-game cards, since I think the platforming and puzzle solving here is strong enough that it it could have been cool if they leaned a bit further into it, but that is a very small complaint that doesn't really negatively affect the whole game. On the whole, I feel like Partners in Time does use its platforming abilities and mechanics way better than Super Star Saga did. But while I do feel that the platforming and overall exploration mechanics are genuinely improved, there was something that was lost along the way. In its heavier focus on puzzles and dungeon crawling, one of the smallest, yet most important parts of Superstar Saga fell by the wayside. While exploration and stuff was fun in Superstar Saga on its own, what made the moment-to-moment gameplay that much more entertaining was the fact that little mini-games were stuffed into every nook and cranny, so no matter where you were or what you were doing, there was always something to look forward to. always something around to keep things fun and breezy. Partners in Time scrapped most of these. All of the block minigames from Superstar Saga are gone for some reason, which is particularly baffling. These were a stroke of genius, turning something incredibly mundane from the Mario universe into something engaging and fun every time. But in Partners in Time, aside from this one where you just Simon Says the Right Block to Get Coins, which happens a few times throughout the game, there's basically none of that. In their place are these M and L blocks, which I kind of understand existing as a tutorial method to explain jumping with different buttons through gameplay, but outside of that I just don't understand why they exist. It's not like in Superstar Saga where you could just go into specific places with just Mario or just Luigi where these sorts of blocks could have encouraged returning to previous places with newer abilities. or solving puzzles in different ways. No matter what you're doing, you will always have both a Mario and a Luigi with you. Sure, some of them are a bit too high for the babies to reach, but those higher blocks are usually only found in places you won't be wanting to separate regardless. Although it's not like the game is devoid of minigames or anything, there's still plenty. Although fewer in number than Superstar Saga, I feel like the minigames in Partners in Time are typically more fun than they were in its predecessor. From the Thwomp Bros minigames in Thwomp Volcano, to the various rolling minigames that have Mario and Luigi rolling around an obstacle course to reach a goal in time, these games are a ton of fun. And I'm going to be generous and consider the Dark Rooms a minigame as well, where the babies have to navigate a maze while the adults hit a block that will temporarily let them through. light their way, knocking the babies back to the start if the wrong brother hits the block. And speaking of minigames, that's something that the combat actually leans a lot more heavily into, so we should probably start talking about that. So on the surface, especially when just fighting with Mario at the start of the game, the battle system seems basically identical to Superstar Saga. You control a character with a specific button where you can attack, use items, run away, that sort of thing. And just like with those games, there are action commands that will power up your moves by timing your hits right, and will let you dodge enemy attacks by once again timing the input properly. And yeah, that's all very similar to how things were handled in Superstar Saga. Even the stat distribution is all the same. You have your HP, power, defense, speed, and stash. Wait, huh? Where's bros points? Yeah, there's no bros points anymore, because unlike in Superstar Saga, special attacks are no longer inherent techniques that the brothers learn. They're now consumable items that they have to buy, which is great. Yeah, it's no secret that I am typically not a fan of any RPG battle system that makes attacks single-use items for a few reasons. One is that it limits strategy, as what options you have can be arbitrarily limited by the game since running out of stock of an attack. means not being able to use it again until you restock, regardless of the attack's strength. And another issue is that making attacks arbitrarily limited like this, it causes too-good-to-use syndrome, where no matter how many attacks I have, I want to conserve because I may need it in the future. Thankfully, the game seemingly sidesteps this issue, since by time I reached the midpoint of the game I had so many of these attacks that I felt that there was no way I'd be able to run out, regardless of what I did, so I started using them more frequently. I mean, there's no way that could come back to bite me, right? Anyways, the attacks being consumable items changes how they work in-game as well. Superstar Saga's incredibly clever system that involved technique levels to either make attacks easier or stronger is completely gone, and the commands that these moves moves now have are significantly simplified, conceptually at least. They're almost all some variant of press the button of the brother about to attack to do damage, but there is enough variety here that each of them feels like a miniature version of a Mario Party minigame. I especially like the copy flower attack since that can do extreme damage to enemies you use it on, but it can be very hard to get that full potential out of. On that note, that's kind of how Partners in Time attempts to solve the difficulty issue from Superstar Saga. While the game is largely largely the same, where once you know an enemy's attack patterns, they can be very easy to completely avoid and take nearly no damage. Conversely though, it can be extremely difficult to max out your damage because the highest damaging bros items have crazy execution requirements. Back to the copy flower, you need to press either A, B, X, or Y depending on which brother is going to jump next. While this starts out pretty simple, it gets to go very fast and with the amount of time you have to react to each new jump, I've literally only only ever done a copy flower for full damage once out of the dozens of times I've used it. I'm more likely to make a mistake and try to jump as baby Luigi instead of Luigi right near the start of the move than I am to make it near the end. But on the other hand, and while I definitely can't substantiate this at all, it really feels like the timing windows for things like basic action commands and evasions have been widened leading to generally easier fights. While that probably doesn't seem like a big deal, opening that window up really does make the game a lot easier. Leniency in general is far higher for counterattacks, especially for hammers, since in Superstar Saga, without the special badge, you'd only have a few seconds to hold the hammer before swinging, but in Partners in Time, you can basically hold on forever, or at least long enough that the timer very rarely ever ended up mattering. Ultimately, it's overall a bit easier, but at least it doesn't feel like a steep difficulty drop-off like Superstar Saga did. Another thing that gets a lot easier are bosses, but here I don't really mind because that's inherent to any sort of puzzle. Yeah, where Superstar Saga bosses were basically just big enemies with bigger attacks and health, Partners in Time adds another wrinkle to most of the game's bosses by having a unique mechanic that you need to figure out in order to exploit it to defeat them more effectively. A gimmick, if you will. For instance, this- Boss, Sunnyside, amazing name by the way, lines a bunch of Yoshi eggs up in front of the bros. If you just attack the boss, nothing will really happen, it won't take much damage, and it'll have more ammunition for its own attacks. But by realizing that they are in fact Yoshi eggs and attacking them, you'll free these Yoshis who will then start to roll a boulder overhead, a callback to the dungeon's main progression puzzles. Free enough Yoshis and the boulder will fall on Sunnyside, opening it up to big damage by the bros. Most bosses have these sorts of little things. little puzzles and I had a ton of fun figuring them out. But I'm getting a bit off track here, I haven't even explained the basics of battling with both the adults and babies, so let's get into that. So when you enter a battle, Mario's and Luigi's will be lined up just like how they were in Superstar Saga, except the babies will piggyback on the adults. This does a few pretty cool things. First, it lets you use the babies in your attacks, so when you jump with the bros, you'll be able to do a smaller initial jump with the baby by pressing their button and finish the jump off with a bigger damage one. one by the adult, but it's more interesting when you get to the hammers. Remember how I said that the main Mario Bros don't get hammers in this game? Well that translates to battles as well. If you were to enter a battle with just Mario and Luigi, you don't get the option to swing hammers because they don't have them. However, go into a battle with the two babies as well, and suddenly you can. Similarly to the jump attack, you'll have to press the right button with the adult to raise the baby up, then swing with their button for max damage. But that's not the only thing that the babies bring to the table. table. Since you can control them separately, they have to be their own full characters, and that very occasionally can come into play in battles. While when in battles the stats primarily used are from the adults, the babies do slightly affect damage done and taken. But what's more interesting is what happens when the bro's HP hits zero. In the previous game, if a bro gets KO'd, the remaining brother would jump to the rescue and attempt to perform defensive action commands with the other in tow, making them much more difficult and causing a bit of a negative feedback. feedback loop, where if you're doing poorly and a bro goes down, you're much more likely to get wiped because of how much harder things get. Partners in Time technically still has this, which can happen if you're fighting while the teams are separated, but in most battles you simply won't have that happen. If a bro goes down, the baby picks them up and tosses them into a nearby trash can, then takes their place. You don't even lose a turn this way, so you can immediately revive the dead brother with a 1-up shroom and continue the battle no worse for wear. This kind of feels like a mechanic they just had to include, not something that necessarily makes the system any better. Like, both the bros and babies are full characters, so it wouldn't make logical sense for the fully healthy baby bro to just poof out of existence when the adult goes down, but it also radically changes the flow of more difficult fights. Whereas in Superstar Saga, you'd have to be a lot more attentive to HP and make sure you never hit zero because of how punishing that game could be, in Partners in Time, it doesn't really matter. If you get KO'd, well, whatever, just one-up super next turn and it's like it never happened. Not paying attention to the battle and getting beat up isn't a catastrophe, it's a minor annoyance that just requires a different color mushroom to completely negate and makes an already pretty easy game even less stressful than it already was. But like I said, entering battles while separated can be a bit more challenging, and it can be especially tenuous for the babies. Battling with just the babies doesn't strip you of any options, aside from the bros items that require all four characters. characters, but it limits you in other ways since the baby's stats are going to be far lower than their adult counterparts. The babies are typically going to be moving first thanks to their much higher speed, but their absolutely pitiful power, defense, stash, and HP compared to their older counterparts makes battling with them feel so much worse than normal. I would typically try to avoid battles with the babies as much as possible because of this, even though some enemies actually have unique formations when it's just the babies around. Speaking of the stats, the level up mechanics are pretty good. The mechanics are very similar to how they were in Superstar Saga as well, but a few changes lead to the experience of leveling up feeling way different. In Superstar Saga, you'd choose the stat you wanted to upgrade, roll the roulette, and go on with your life. You didn't have a ton of control over what stats you got, so I never really sweat what bonuses I got. It led to slightly different stats over the course of the game, but it never really ended up mattering all that much. But in Partners in Time, this roulette is a big deal. First is you can actually control what you want to do. what bonus you're getting. Rather than slowing to a stop, the roulette stops immediately on the number you press on, and since the roulette has set numbers for each stat that rotate consistently, you can, theoretically, always end up with the max stat boost every time. This ends up being more impactful since the stat bonuses change for each level, and can go from a meager 1-3 bonus to a massive plus 6 in a given stat. Add on the fact that you can back out of the roulette to see what bonuses other stats have, You have a level up system that can be gamed to give huge stats bonuses every level up, bonuses that can even rival a full level's worth of stat buffs. This is a kind of double-edged sword, since these stats are really impactful. Remember Sunnyside? In my second playthrough, I was able to break Yoshi Eggs with one attack, making the fight go very smoothly. However, in my first playthrough, since my stat rolls weren't optimal and I hadn't tried to choose the best option for every situation, Yoshi Eggs took two attacks to break, not only lengthening the fight on its own... but it also took much longer for me to figure out its gimmick since he'd throw the Yoshi eggs I'd attacked away before I had a chance to hit them again. On the other side of things, the fact that you can game stats and get such huge stat swings depending on your execution, it made leveling up pretty frustrating since despite thinking I timed a 6 stat boost properly, it would usually always end up a few frames slower, leading to a 1. It just made leveling up feel less fun than it did in Superstar Saga, since there, a bonus was a bonus and there's no use crying over missed stats since you didn't really have a ton of control over it. And if you want your stats to be as high as possible, you're going to have to only fight enemies as a full team and avoid fighting while split up, if possible. Since all the bros are full characters, they all gain XP separately. And of course, if you're not battling with one group, that group won't get any of the experience. So if you want to maximize your stats and exp, XP gain, your best bet is to fight as a group. Equipment works pretty similarly to how it did in Superstar Saga, except Partners in Time does a better job of differentiating clothing and badges. In this game, badges will not give any stat buffs, only having their unique effects, and clothing will never have any unique effects, only increasing the party's stats. This is definitely the better way to handle things compared to Superstar Saga, where clothing and badges were basically just the same thing, just boosting a different stat. Some of these badges Badges are incredibly powerful as well, with the most interesting ones coming directly from Fawful's shop. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, Fawful is back. You meet him down in the sewers underneath the castle, where he rants about fury and stuff and then sells you badges. The badges he sells aren't just the standard do more damage or make more money sorts of things, even though he does have those, but he carries the badge that lets you steal items from enemies, gives you a chance to OHKO enemies by first striking with a hammer, which is the only way to make first strikes. striking with a hammer matter, like, at all, and he also sells the badge that lets one brother use an infinite amount of bros items, but at 90 beans, it will take a while to get. Beans are collected pretty much the same way as they were in Superstar Saga, by the way. Ultimately, I feel like this battle system is a slight downgrade from Superstar Sagas. While there are some really cool additions, I really like the added action commands from the babies, and conceptually, I think having them being separate characters could have added a ton to the overall experience, but the slight The slightly clunky way the babies were implemented, the overall easier difficulty, the removal of Superstar Saga's best mechanic, the bros moves, and replacing them with consumable items really brings it down for me. And now there's just a few more things we have left to talk about before we start heading back towards the story, so let's get through that, starting with the presentation. So Partners in Time largely looks like a very slightly upgraded Superstar Saga. The sprites look really good, although I do really miss how fun and bouncy the battle sprites were in Superstar Saga. They're much more subdued by comparison in Partners in Time, which is unfortunate. Bowser looks a lot better here though, and the other Mario staple characters that show up like the Yoshis and Petey Piranha also look really great. The backgrounds in particular are a huge jump in quality. Superstar Sagas were good, don't get me wrong, but they were very simple and used a lot of flat texturing and colors to fill out space. Partners in Time's backgrounds, especially in a lot of their dungeons, are just so much more detailed and really establish a much better outcome. atmosphere. And this game is the first in the series to use the dual screen setup, which for the most part is fine. Out in the overworld and in the dungeons, the bottom screen has all the main action, and the upper screen is just used for the map. This is a good setup, but man, this map is horrible. It actually makes navigating harder sometimes. Peach's Castle in particular is bad for this. There are a ton of rooms close together that connect with others in weird ways, and the map only shows what room you're in. It never shows you where you are in that room. So if you're relying on the map to get around it's super easy to get lost because you're not actually being guided anywhere I'm also not a huge fan of how the game handles its cutscenes It's the DS so obviously the game has to use both for its cutscenes Even if it doesn't make any sense and they're really just inconsistent Sometimes the cutscene will play on both screens the scene being shown on both Sometimes the cutscene will swap between screens sometimes it'll only show on the bottom screen with the map on top Sometimes it'll only show on the top screen with just text on the bottom screen. It's so inconsistent that it really makes me feel like the developers had absolutely no idea how to... properly use the screen for cutscenes, so they just threw everything at the wall to see what stuck. Thankfully, the music is a lot more consistently good. Yoko Shimomura returned to compose this game's music, and she did a great job of changing her focus to match this game's tone. Superstar Saga's music was very fun and jingly, being super catchy and upbeat to go hand-in-hand with the game's goofy atmosphere. Her music and partners in time is quite different. Area tracks like Toad Town Ruins... Really show what I mean. This soundtrack is much more atmospheric and moody, less focused on catchy hooks, and is more set on immersing the player in the areas they're in. Although that energy is still there where it matters in the battle tracks. Songs like Bowser Battle... And especially Elder Shroob Battle. A great job of hyping up the battles they accompany on top of establishing some amazing atmosphere. So now we're going to start talking about the actual plot. So just like every other video, there's going to be a timestamp somewhere around here if you want to skip it. And there really is quite a few- twists and turns in this game so if you haven't played it and you really want to I do suggest skipping so here we go so where we left off the bros were about to head off on their journey to find the cobalt star shards in order to save Princess Peach this takes them through through the aforementioned Toadwood Forest where they gather their second shard, but unfortunately for them, Bowser shows up and swallows the shards and flies off before the bros can even know what really went wrong. Conveniently, the next portal sends them right to where Bowser and Kamek are hiding out, on Yoshi's Island. The island is being terrorized by Yube, a giant Yoshi-Shroob hybrid monster, and while the Marios and Luigis are confronting Bowser about the shards, Yube swallows them all up. After taking a delightful trip through Yube's digestive tract, exiting exactly where you'd expect, Bowser barfs up both of the shards and we're back on track towards the goal. The next destination is the Gritzy Desert where the bros make their way into the Koopa-seum where they see the shrewbs are holding an event. Here we see Peach being swallowed up by Petey Piranha so they immediately confront the shrewbs and chase Petey down into the depths below the desert. They eventually track him down and beat him, finding Peach as well, although there's something a little different about her. Although I can't really put my finger on what's but that's great. Peach is safe, she's brought back to the present, and the game is over. Or it would be, but our buddy Adult Bowser is up to his old tricks again, and has decided at this very moment to visit the castle and kidnap Peach again. And wouldn't you know, while evading capture by Baby Peach, Bowser jumps, breaks the bridge he's on, and falls down into another time hole, the princess joining a few seconds later. Crap. So yeah, back to the past we go, and in this area, Thwomp Mountain, the bros meet a younger E. Gadd and cause a time paradox, but we're told just to not think about it, so I guess we won't, and head down into the volcano to hopefully save Peach from Bowser. At the bottom of the volcano, the bros find that Bowser and his younger self have teamed up, although neither of them are smart enough to realize exactly what's going on, and we have a boss fight. After the fight, both Bowsers are flung into the air by a thwomp, and the Shroob mothership arrives and abducts everyone. Eventually, the bros make their way to the bridge, where it's revealed that the Princess Peach they had saved by Petey was never actually Peach. It was the Shroob's leader, Princess Shroob, all along. Luckily, just before they're all zapped, Kiley Koopa shows up to save the day and give the team a bit of a respite. They discuss what has been happening, and Kiley posits that the reason Princess Shroob was impersonating Peach was so she could conquer the present Mushroom Kingdom, not just the past. But that raises another question. Isn't the fact that the Shroobs failed to conquer the Mushroom Kingdom in the present mean that they are guaranteed to have failed in the past? Or is this some sort of Dragon Ball situation where there's different timelines that split off at different nexuses? I don't know, it's all time travel stuff, it's impossible to make these sorts of stories make any sense. I guess unintentionally, Bowser is the hero of the Mushroom Kingdom, and his bull in a china shop style of kidnapping. The princess wound up bringing Princess Shroob back into the past, thwarting those future plans. But this all also means that Princess Peach was never saved, so with no other options and no other leads, the bros, after narrowly escaping the Shroob mothership, continue their search for the last two Cobalt Star shards. Oh, and Baby Bowser's on the mothership now. That's gonna be important later. The next destination is the ruined Toad Town, which is really just a stopgap to their next real stop. Star Hill, another great callback to Super Mario RPG. At the top of Star Hill, the Cobalt Star is able to communicate with the bros, and explains that in order to reach the Shroob Stronghold, they'll need five of its shards, which only strengthens the team's resolve to find the last two. The bros make their way towards the Star Shrine, where this door guards the path forward. It examines Mario and dubs him to be purer, aside from the fact that he needs to cut down on the pizza and exercise more. I'm a-lurkin'on it. I bought this specifically for this gang. It was not worth it. Everything is going really well until the door takes a good long look at Luigi's internet search history and decides that he's just too impure to be let through, at least not without another test. After passing the test and the door saying that it was totally joking and stuff, the bros make their way into the star shrine where another big bombshell goes off. In the shrine, the cobalt star shards that the bros have fly off on their own after warning of an apparent danger. The bros then find Kylie and Toadbert, who we first saw on Yo- Yoshi's Island. He gave us a sketch there, but we really didn't think too much about it until now. But here, he asks us to clean the sketch off, and we do, which is actually the only time the game ever uses the touchscreen for anything. By cleaning the sketch, we see something horrible. It doesn't just show one true princess, but two. But before that can even sink in, the group is attacked by another shrewd monster which turns Toad Bird and Kylie into mushrooms. After the fight, the final two Kobold Star shards join the three that the team has, and with all five, but no Peach, they realize the only thing they they have left to do is infiltrate the Shroob stronghold and save her. Upon going to the final portal, the Cobalt Star opens the gate just like it said it would, and we can enter the game's final dungeon, Shroob Castle. This is why Peach's Castle is so absurdly large and empty, it had to be the basis for the final dungeon, and there's no way a big endgame dungeon could work if Peach's Castle was any less huge. Definitely not, it just couldn't happen. Anyways, I do really like this dungeon. It's got a lot of really cool aspects that all work together really well. First, it's got similar mechanics to the Gritzy Desert where you have to activate two opposite statues at the same time. It's got a cool underground section with a puzzle boss chomp, it's got a section where the babies will have to go out on their own on ledges that surround the standard rooms to reach specific areas, and it has two really fun minigame sections where you need to take control of a shrewd spaceship to fight off enemies. Eventually, we reach the top of the castle. where Peach is being held. Here, after fighting off Princess Shroob's mothership and freeing Peach, we start the final battle with Princess Shroob. This is a pretty fun fight, not too difficult, but she's got some fun moves and has a shield every few turns that makes the fight last longer than it would have otherwise. But after a few minutes, she goes down. As they're about to escape, the Cobalt Star shows up, and Peach is apprehensive about putting it back together for some reason. But just before she can explain why, Bowser shows up, grabs the middle piece of the star. harp and puts it back together, releasing Princess Shroob's older sister and the game's true final boss, Elder Princess Shroob. This fight is absolutely grueling, and funnily enough it's for complete opposite reasons from Cackletta's Soul. That fight was super unfair because you needed to know how to beat the boss before you entered it, leading to a ton of immediate deaths. This fight, if you're not completely prepared for everything it'll throw at you, can effectively just lead to a stalemate until you just make enough mistakes to lose. lose. No joke, during my first playthrough I ended up losing this fight after about an hour of fighting her. See, I really should have suffered from too good to use syndrome a lot more, since you need to unload every single bit of damage you possibly can muster to break through her. Okay, I should probably explain this fight and how it all works. Phase 1 isn't that bad, aside from the fact that she has 3000 HP, which is a lot. It's phase 2 where things start to get a little more overwhelming. Normally, Elder Shroob is completely invulnerable to any attack throw directly at her. No matter what you do, she'll take one damage. In order to break her barrier, you'll need to do at least 200 damage to her crown. But because she's so tall, you can't actually target her crown right away. You need to destroy her feet, which also takes hundreds of damage to break. But just like Cackletta's soul, her various appendages and stuff all revive after a few turns, including her crown, so you need to do this stuff quick. But if you go into the fight like I did, which I honestly wouldn't even consider unprepared, for any other situation like ever, you're going to have a bad time because eventually when you run out of high power bros items, thanks again for making them consumable Alpha Dream, you'll likely end up in a situation where you'll be stuck in a loop where you won't be able to remove her dangerous tentacle attacks and since it'll take so much longer to damage both the legs and the crown, the number of chances you'll get to actually hurt Elder Shrew will be like every 10 or 15 turns. It's not like it's impossible. Heck, you can even probably beat her without damaging her crown at all if you want to take like 500 turns, but that doesn't really seem like it would be a lot of fun. Thus, I had to go grind, which added about two hours to my playtime and definitely put a damper on the game's climax. This is why a good difficulty curve is so important. If it shoots up so starkly like this at just the wrong time, it can really interrupt the game's tone and atmosphere. Instead of valiantly facing off against the villain at the end of the adventure, the hero just has to go around and do busy work so their numbers are high enough to make the bad guy's numbers go to zero. I know that's kind of the point of an RPG, but smart design can mitigate or even remove this problem altogether. Thankfully, during my second playthrough, I prepared early by equipping the extra XP and money badges for most of the game, and by using all of my beams to buy the ulti-free badge, meaning Mario was always able to throw powerful bros attacks for free. This made the fight go a lot smoother, as I was able to do enough damage to the feet and crown within a few turns, and could then unload onto Elder Shroob with little trouble. And even then, it still took me a good 25 minutes to get through the whole thing. It really is a super climactic fight that- that does deserve its length. The atmosphere is incredible and like you heard earlier, the music in this fight is crazy good. But eventually she does go down and she just poofs into a regular old mushroom which is sure. But just because the shroobs are defeated doesn't mean everything is back to normal. Everyone is still suffering from the horrors the shroobs put them through. There's still the body horror lichen in the forest. There's still people turned into mushrooms. That stuff isn't fixed just bec-oh. Thanks to baby Bowser we find out that baby tears can somehow rev- reverse all of the things the Shroobs did in a nice little reference to War of the Worlds. So E. Gadd builds a machine that pours baby tears, or at least a very similar concoction to them, all over the past Mushroom Kingdom, curing everyone of their mutations and at least slightly letting people finally see a bit of hope for the future. So there we go, the day is saved, everyone is back in the present celebrating their victory over the Shroobs, it's a nice ending if a little cliche. Except not quite, since when the group finds Bowser on the floor of the castle, he's the mushroom that was once Elder Princess Shroob starts moving on its own and the collapsed Bowser swallows it, allowing him to be possessed by the ghost of the Elder Shroob. This triggers one final fight where the bros have to fend off Bowser's attacks while not attacking him back, with each dodged move doing damage to the Elder Shroob's apparition. This is a pretty clever fight, one that I absolutely did not see coming at all. But once we do enough damage, the Shroobs are finally completely eradicated once and for all. And it's here that we get our final- final, actual ending, where the two time periods say goodbye to each other and the past group heads back to their time, of course after the babies give the hammers to their adult selves, since babies definitely do not need hammers. And that was Mario & Luigi Partners in Time. Honestly I do see why it is a little less beloved, at least compared to Superstar Saga. It's definitely more bloated, repetitive, and formulaic than Superstar Saga was, and it doesn't really have the same charm that game had. Not to say that there isn't charm here, I feel like if you're a big If you're a big fan of Z grade sci-fi and horror movies, you'll be right at home in the surprisingly dark, yet pulpy world that the game tries to create. But I do feel like Superstar Saga is a much more concise, consistent package that nails everything it's trying to do, whereas Partners in Time does stumble every once in a while. I still had a great time playing it and think it is a really good game. It's just one of those situations where its predecessor was just such a tough act to follow, and while Partners in Time did do enough different to make it stand out as unique, I don't really think it did quite enough to make it stand out as better. I'm not sure I'd say it deserves the relative obscurity though. Heck, AlphaDream didn't even think it deserved a remake and that kind of sucks. It definitely is a mixed bag though. For every improvement it made over Superstar Saga, it also took one step back, and in my opinion, the negatives do outweigh the positives here. Battling especially was not nearly as fun, which is unfortunate, since battling is a pretty important part of these sorts of games. But apparently, whatever criticisms AlphaDream got for this game were definitely taken to heart, and four years later would release the game that many people would call their magnum opus, the game that I've been looking forward to playing the most in this entire retrospective. But we'll get into that in the next video. Thank you all so much for watching. And just before the video ends, I want to shout out my patrons, R.A. Miller and Anon42. You're the best. I can't thank you enough.

That was a bit of a task with Superstar Saga, but it was almost effortless with its sequel. I've heard a lot about a lot of these games, but of all of them, the one that's gone the most radio silent, at least in the circles that I frequent, is Partners in Time, and I honestly don't know why. Thanks to Superstar Saga's success being a top 15 bestseller on the GBA, it was obvious that AlphaDream was going to work on creating a sequel. And since the GBA was a relatively short console generation, AlphaDream was going to have to change their focus for their follow-up.

To do that, they made the decision to develop the game for Nintendo's next generation handheld, the DS. The DS's hardware influenced the development of basically everything that came to the system, as up to this point there had been nothing else like it in the gaming industry. Partners in Time was no different in this regard. While things like the dual screens and touch screen were influential, honestly the biggest influence on the game itself was having four face buttons. Two buttons on the GBA meant two brothers, and four buttons on the DS means four.

I can only imagine how many brothers they'd have to invent for a game on the Switch. The game was released about a year into the DS's lifespan, which all things considered is pretty early, and many of these early titles do often end up being lost in the shuffle. But the fact that the game is an early DS game doesn't really explain how relatively forgotten it is compared to other games.

games in the series. I mean, it apparently reviewed well and sold decently even if it was significantly less than Superstar Saga. So there has to be something to the game itself that just isn't as well liked, something that's keeping it from being as beloved. Even Alpha Dream didn't didn't really care about it, when doing their remakes in an attempt to keep their floundering company's doors open, after remaking Superstar Saga, they skipped Partners in Time entirely and went straight to Bowser's Inside Story. There has to be a reason for that, and I'm definitely excited to see exactly what is up with this game.

So let's have a look at Mario & Partners in Time. And just before we get started here, if you like what I do and want to help out, maybe think about hitting the like button and subscribing to be notified about future videos. Anyways, let's get started. The game starts out with a bit of narration describing a race of aliens that were searching for a new home.

This is a pretty funny bit to start on, as while there are some undertones that suggest that the planet these aliens are from is not doing so great, the narrator just focuses on how creepy they are, just... being creepy and creepily staring out into space and stuff. Pretty rude, but I guess these are going to be the antagonists, so they probably deserve a bit of shade being thrown at them. From there, we then cut to Princess Peach's castle, in the past because why not, where Baby Mario and Luigi have both arrived to play with the princess for a while.

Baby Bowser shows up and causes some trouble, but Mario is able to teach him a lesson pretty easily. Then the aliens attacked. Yeah, the place they found to be their new home was in fact the Mushroom Kingdom.

and took it upon themselves to raid the castle and take over. We then cut to the present where Professor E. Gadd, being the mad scientist that he is, has invented a time machine, and very intelligently sent Princess Peach back to the past with like two regular toads, and just hoped everything would work out. Obviously the princess doesn't come back, and the time machine instead brings this thing back that Mario has to defeat. Its arrival in the main timeline has messed up the entire space-time continuum, and portals between the two time periods have begun to- appear.

Mario decides that the best way to save Peach now that the time machine is broken beyond repair, since its power source, the Cobalt Star, is gone, is to heroically jump into the time portals and find her in the past. Luigi makes the jump first, unintentionally of course, and Mario heads in right after him. They end up on the outskirts of Holly Jolly Village, and we get introduced to our menu here, named Stuffwell, who was sent back in time by E. Gadd to help us out. While I don't mind him that much, like, As a business bag, he tends to get very wordy and very annoying.

I'll get into why in a little bit. The brothers make their way to Holly Jolly Village, which is Santa themed for some reason, and the entire town has been destroyed with its inhabitants gone. They're ambushed by the invaders and quickly defeated. The kids see this from overhead in Baby Bowser's cruiser, and Peach convinces Bowser to save them by making the worst sound anyone has ever heard in history.

They do, and back aboard the cruiser, they attempt to escape the aliens and regroup at Bowser's castle. Unfortunately, they're shot out of the sky, and the cruiser crashes into the castle. Eventually, all four of the brothers regroup and join forces.

Now it seems like a lot of things happened in this first section, and this intro does take about an hour. that's not because there's a ton of substance here. It's entirely because of the tutorials.

Partners in Time has some of the worst tutorials I've seen in a very long time, and our buddy Stuffwell here is a big culprit in making them this way. Not only does he pop out all the time to spout off information that we probably already have, thanks to his overly verbose writing that isn't nearly as endearing as I assume the writers would have hoped, The tutorials for everything last so long and are so poorly implemented that I dreaded every single time he popped out to introduce something new. Like in his first tutorial, he goes on for about a minute about the fact that he is the menu and that he can do things like hold items and carry equipment. But using items or equipment are entirely separate long-winded tutorials and these completely halt the game in the opening hours when it's the most important to be doing everything it can to hook the player. This isn't just a problem with Stuffwell though.

For instance, at the very start of the game, Toadsworth offers to tell Baby Mario how to do the basic action commands when attacking and defending, which is totally fine, especially since you can skip it. But then, just moments later, when you're playing as adult Mario in the present timeline, the exact same tutorial pops up again! You can still skip it, which is good, but it's just redundant. They could have handled the whole thing a lot more gracefully, with, like, Toadsworth just saying something along the lines of... Remember that the button you use in battle changes depending on who you are, with a quick pointer to the UI now showing A instead of X.

Most of these tutorials aren't skippable though, so you just have to deal with whatever nonsense the tutorial giver is spouting off. What's kind of funny is that whether or not a tutorial is skippable seems completely random. Most of the time you just have to deal with the tutorial, but occasionally you'll come across one that offers to skip. Come on, just either make all of your tutorials skippable or make them quick.

Unintrusive and to the point. It's not that hard. And Partners in Time does understand this at least at some level. Still in this opening section here just after recruiting the babies the group comes across this obstacle. Stuffwell doesn't pop out here.

There's no long-winded tutorial as to what you need to do. You just get a sign that tells you a thing you can do and it's up to you to use that instruction to learn what abilities you have and how to use them. It's not groundbreaking game design or anything, the Mario franchise has been doing these sorts of tutorials for years. Heck, Super Star Saga did this, so I have no idea why a simple, effective tutorial is such a hard thing for partners in time to accomplish.

Now, before I move on, I should acknowledge that Super Star Saga had some long, unskippable tutorials as well. And yeah, it would be better if they were all skippable, but at least they were integrated into the world and story a bit more naturally. The tutorial area with the Jellyfish Sisters didn't feel like one of Stuffwell's tutorials because the goal wasn't explicitly just the tutorial.

They taught the bros a new technique, wanted something in return, and it just so happened to take place in an area that worked perfectly as a tutorial for those techniques. But yeah, despite the fact that not a lot of things happened in this intro, thanks to all of these tutorials, it drags out so long and feels so slow. Once everyone makes it back to the present by jumping through a time hole in Baby Bowser's room, We get introduced to the main goal of the game, what we'll need to do in order to rescue Princess Peach.

We found a piece of the Cobalt Star in Bowser's Castle, and E. Gadd theorized that the star is related to the Shroobs somehow. So it's up to Mario's and Luigi's to head back in time, find all of the pieces of the Cobalt Star, and rescue Princess Peach from the Shroob's invasion force.

Speaking of the Shroobs, they do make a pretty compelling villain group. While not being as entertaining as Cackletta and Fawful, thanks to largely not having much personality, they do make up for that with the intimidation factor. We have no idea why they're doing what they do, since while they are intelligent beings, their language is so far beyond what we're familiar with that it's impossible to tell what they're thinking. And that's not even mentioning the sheer impact on the world itself. Their invasion of the Mushroom Kingdom isn't like Cackletta's assault on the Bean Bean Kingdom, where it's cleaned up and solved five minutes after it happens.

The effects the Shroobs have had on the kingdom since their takeover has been lasting and severe, and it seriously affects the game's overall tone. Seriously, if you look at anything the Shroobs have done during their conquest, even just a little bit beyond the surface, you'll see how dark this game can get. The first area after the opening, Toadwood Fork, Forest is a perfect example.

This is a dark, gloomy forest which isn't too out of the ordinary at first, until you notice that there are toads, likely captured from other parts of the world, that have all been gathered here. and have either been fused to trees to fuel the invasion force through their Vim factory, or are in the process of doing so. These dark undertones are a near constant throughout the game, and once you notice them, it's hard to see the game as just another happy-go-lucky Mario Bros. adventure. It's not that it doesn't attempt, and if I were to try to describe the game's overall feel as being dour or oppressive, I'd be at best exaggerating.

While yeah, some of the events that occur in the game are just as dark as, say, Twilight Town's curse from Thousand Year Door, or the genocide of the Samur Kingdom from Super Paper Mario, it never truly lingers on those events, never lets them fully sink in because this is a Mario and Luigi game and we've gotta have some fun around here. Humor was the backbone of Super Star Saga, and it had to be good at that because it really didn't do anything else. And while Partners in Time does take its villains and their actions a bit more seriously, that's pretty much the extent of it. Mario and Luigi are still the same slapstick comedy duo that they were in the first game, with an extra dimension added by bringing in the babies.

That being said, the babies themselves don't add that much to the comedy in my opinion. They just end up as being more people to clown on Luigi for being Luigi. It is fine though, although the babies bring more cuteness to the table than anything else.

Where a lot of this game's humor starts to falter a bit more is stuff that's not directly related to the brothers. Take this bit with these Hammer Bros that have been mind-controlled by the Shroobs. Subtitles by the Amara.org community Their dialogue is all in leet-speak, which doesn't resonate with me much, but not really for the reasons you'd think.

While yes, it pretty much is a how-do-you-do-fellow-kid sort of humor moment, the reason I don't like it so much is pretty much the exact opposite of that. See, I'm a 90s kid. I grew up during the dawn of the Internet as we know it, so I experienced a lot of this number substitution humor stuff firsthand.

Heh. Boobies, but having humor that's so pointed and so directly cemented in an era really robs it of some of its impact beyond that point And I know a lot of this stuff was a lot more culturally relevant back then But hearing the hammer bros talk about how cringy leet speak is just reminds me that it was already out of style 18 years ago, and I just start feeling myself crumble away to dust It's not at all terrible though, and this humor does manage to keep the overall tone a lot lighter than it would be otherwise. Similarly, the game's supporting cast does a lot to help with this too. My favorite of these characters is Kylie Koopa, a reporter who's been covering the Shroob invasion and will cross paths with the team several times throughout the game. She's really fun, as she's largely based on characters from these old screwball comedies, with her constant use of old-fashioned slang and her obsession with the next big scoop.

She's got a Paige Sinclair sort of feel for those who know Bojack Horseman. Although I'm not really sure how she's able to travel from place to place so quickly. At one moment she's on Yoshi's Island and in the next she's traveled all the way around the world to the Ritzy Desert. Maybe it's a time travel thing. And that brings me to the game's structure since this is something that I don't mesh with nearly as well as I did with Superstar Saga.

As I said in my Superstar Saga video, that game was structured a lot more like a Zelda game than a traditional JRPG. The world was fully open and explorable, only being roadblocked by abilities that you'd later find throughout the game. There were even several objectives that you'd be able to do in whatever order you wanted. I adore this sort of design because it makes the world feel so much more like a world and not just a bunch of individual levels that you have to complete in the order that the game wants you to. Partners in Time, however, goes in a completely different direction, being far more linear, and being based around a hub that branches off into the game's individual sections.

Within Peach's Castle, the game's hub area, several of these time portals will pop up, each of which will transport the bros back into various places in the past. We get access to each of the game's areas and dungeons this way. It's basically set up like this.

Each past section has two halves, the first half being where you explore this new area, learn what the shrewbs are doing, and work towards infiltrating their stronghold. Once you do, you'll enter the second half of the area, which will generally be set up like a dungeon. A bunch of interconnected rooms that you'll need to traverse through in order to make progress, solve some puzzles, and fight a boss. Once the boss is defeated, you get what you came there for, head back to Peach's castle, and unlock the path to the next one.

The biggest problem I have with all of this is how repetitive it ends up- feeling. Toadwood Forest doesn't feel any different from Gritsy Desert. They're basically structured identically. First, there's an open area that you have to hit a few switches in, then there's a linear dungeon section with some standard puzzle archetypes ending with a boss. Partners in Time very rarely pulls the rug out from underneath the player with its level design and structure, which I feel for a game like this, where all the levels are accessed linearly one by one and are not directly connected to each other.

together is a huge missed opportunity, especially considering how well the Paper Mario games managed to do just that. This overall structure should also sound pretty familiar, since it's basically identical to how Paper Mario handled its progression in the first few games. Now, I know what some of you are probably thinking, but, Scion, don't you love the Paper Mario games if they're set up the same way? How come you like this, but don't like this?

Well, a lot of it comes down to framing. I know some people like to say that Thousand Year Door's world isn't actually very interconnected and that all the chapters are just accessed through warp pipes, but that's not actually true. Sure, several are. Half of the game's chapters are reached this way, but the other half, chapters 3, 5, 6, and 8, are all accessed differently via a train, an airship, a watership, and a secret underground entrance.

Paper Mario 64 is even more focused on its world interconnectivity, with only chapters 4, 5, and 7 being accessed with some sort of warp, and only 7 with a standard warp pipe. By making these chapter connections so much more unique and tying them directly into the world, it makes progressing into these areas feel so much more impactful, like you're genuinely moving from one place to another in a real fleshed-out world. Partners in Time, by having all of its chapters accessed by a warp through time and space, It can't really create any of these solid connections. There's no exploration here, no finding your way, no gaining or using knowledge of peoples and places to deduce where to go next.

These are just a level select. While all of the time portals are shown to be active from the start of the game, you'll never have the ability to go into any later areas before you're explicitly supposed to, at least with any ability to make any sort of progress. Now, to be fair, a lot of what makes progressing from level to level in this game a bit more bland is thanks to Peach's Castle, which, in comparison with other similar hub worlds, is just so dull and unimaginative and has so little to offer.

Now, in between chapters here, you'll typically be given a new move that will let you progress to the next one by the two Toadsworths, that, despite very much not being on good terms at the start, put their heads together to make the baby Peach happy while the bros are adventuring. But aside from that, the castle is pretty much a ghost town. Seriously, I've never seen a hub so devoid of things of interest.

Yeah, there are some important things that you need to do while here, like visit the shops and, uh, hit a question mark block. But for the most part, that's all you'll be able to do on your own. Honestly, a hub basically being connections between areas isn't that big of a deal. For instance, Chrono Trigger has a hub area for all of its time periods, and I like that perfectly fine.

But that hub is also- tiny which makes going from area to area super easy. Peach's castle is absolutely enormous. It's got several floors with nothing in them, lots of rooms that have nothing in them, and lots of doors that you have to open in order to get to the nothing that's on the other side.

Now there is a reason the castle was made this excessively large but I'll have to put a pin in that one for a while. For the most part though, Peach's Castle ends up being a mostly pointless stopgap between areas where you get to sit through another tutorial for movement ability. And on that note, let's start talking about that movement, since it's pretty interesting.

So, as we saw early on, the basics of the game's movement is very similar to how it was in Superstar Saga. Controlling Mario and Luigi is basically the same, you move with Mario, Luigi follows, but both have individual jump buttons to make platforming a bit more complex. The exact same concept applies to the Baby Brothers, except with the buttons swapped from A and B to X and Y.

However, things get very complex very quickly, and I honestly think that overall, this game handles its complexity much more successfully than Superstar Saga did. One of my biggest problems with Superstar Saga was how it handled the game's field techniques. Each brother had several, many of which were variants of the same thing, and what each ability did changed depending on which brother was in front. This led to a lot of fiddling with abilities to get the right one at the right time, and since they were all on a cycle that you couldn't reverse at all, it became pretty tedious. Partners in Time fixes this almost entirely because it focuses on one of my favorite aspects of Superstar Saga's puzzle solving, the sections where Mario and Luigi were separated.

However, instead of having two characters that couldn't do much because all the important techniques required on both bros to be together, there are instead two separate teams, babies and adults, that each have their own sets of abilities and can act autonomously to explore dungeons and solve puzzles. By splitting the abilities between these two teams, the developers were able to form forego the menu cycling entirely, remove redundancies, and just make using the techniques, which are as plentiful as they were in Super Star Saga, much more elegant. For example, the abilities Mario and Luigi got from bonking each other with hammers in Super Star Saga have now been given to the babies, and the adults don't get hammers at all.

With the hammers, on top of traditional bonking, the babies are able to directly dig underground to get beans on their own, simply by pressing a button to toggle those abilities. And with the help of the adults using their new rolling moves, the babies can now move move the Babies can be flattened to enter lower areas like Mario used to be able to do. Baby Mario also now has Mario's water gorging thing, which is weird.

On that note, adult Mario still gets his spin jump ability, which lets him and Mario travel much farther than it did in Superstar Saga. but the high jump ability has been replaced with the ability to toss baby bros up to higher ledges, as well as using the spin jump to send the two even higher up into the air. By segmenting these abilities and making them exclusive to certain characters, it makes navigating through them and using them much more fluid and easy to understand. In Superstar Saga, both Mario and Luigi were able to use hammers, and the functionality of those hammers was identical regardless of who was in front, but changed drastically depending on who was in the back.

Partners in Time's choice to not allow switching who's in front and having Baby Mario always swing the hammer in front and Baby Luigi's hammer skill always be the drill doesn't remove anything important thanks to the other team's existence, but makes using hammers so much simpler and easier to understand. The same can be said about the adult abilities. Spin jump and ball are a lot simpler to pull off since it's just a matter of pressing L and then the appropriate button for the technique you want. They even went out of their way to make the spin jump a lot less tedious to use properly as well. In Superstar Saga, when you selected the spin or high jump, you were just stuck there until you did the jump you selected or changed back to a regular jump.

You couldn't move to properly position yourself at all. But in Partners in Time, the bros can actually walk around a bit before doing a spin jump to let them get the most distance out of it. And it's not.

not even super tedious to do, which I'm super thankful for. And on top of making these field techniques a lot easier and simpler to use, the game uses these abilities to their fullest since for basically every puzzle you come across, you will need to take control of either the adults or the babies, utilize their unique skills to find secrets, reach new places, or open new paths forward. Many of these puzzles are even designed in a way that you can use either team to make that new path, both being viable options and both having their own solutions. But there is a bit of a cop-out with this system.

While yes, you can often use either team, but more often than not, the best option is to just use one, and then summon the other to your location with these pipe blocks. No matter where you are or what obstacle is in your way, if you reach a pipe block with one team, just hit it and the other will immediately show up, letting you regroup. I do understand the need for this, they can't design literally every puzzle to be solvable by either group, especially since most people will only be playing the game once and will only come across that one solution, but for others, it does kind of feel like the game is letting players know engage with some of the puzzles. Take this for example, it's not a major puzzle or anything, just an obstacle.

You can use the spin jump to send the babies into the air so they can cross this platform and get some coins and stuff along the way, but you can also just use the adult bros, roll them into a ball and get to the other side without grabbing these coins. This is a nice little obstacle, but no matter what group you choose to cross with, you don't need to do anything with the other, since there's a pipe block immediately afterwards, so you just need to hit that rather than engage with the obstacle. To be perfectly clear, I like that there are options here. I don't necessarily think that forcing people into solving every puzzle, every way, every time would be the right way to design the game. But I also think they put in a few too many get-out-of-playing-the-game cards, since I think the platforming and puzzle solving here is strong enough that it it could have been cool if they leaned a bit further into it, but that is a very small complaint that doesn't really negatively affect the whole game.

On the whole, I feel like Partners in Time does use its platforming abilities and mechanics way better than Super Star Saga did. But while I do feel that the platforming and overall exploration mechanics are genuinely improved, there was something that was lost along the way. In its heavier focus on puzzles and dungeon crawling, one of the smallest, yet most important parts of Superstar Saga fell by the wayside. While exploration and stuff was fun in Superstar Saga on its own, what made the moment-to-moment gameplay that much more entertaining was the fact that little mini-games were stuffed into every nook and cranny, so no matter where you were or what you were doing, there was always something to look forward to. always something around to keep things fun and breezy.

Partners in Time scrapped most of these. All of the block minigames from Superstar Saga are gone for some reason, which is particularly baffling. These were a stroke of genius, turning something incredibly mundane from the Mario universe into something engaging and fun every time.

But in Partners in Time, aside from this one where you just Simon Says the Right Block to Get Coins, which happens a few times throughout the game, there's basically none of that. In their place are these M and L blocks, which I kind of understand existing as a tutorial method to explain jumping with different buttons through gameplay, but outside of that I just don't understand why they exist. It's not like in Superstar Saga where you could just go into specific places with just Mario or just Luigi where these sorts of blocks could have encouraged returning to previous places with newer abilities. or solving puzzles in different ways. No matter what you're doing, you will always have both a Mario and a Luigi with you.

Sure, some of them are a bit too high for the babies to reach, but those higher blocks are usually only found in places you won't be wanting to separate regardless. Although it's not like the game is devoid of minigames or anything, there's still plenty. Although fewer in number than Superstar Saga, I feel like the minigames in Partners in Time are typically more fun than they were in its predecessor.

From the Thwomp Bros minigames in Thwomp Volcano, to the various rolling minigames that have Mario and Luigi rolling around an obstacle course to reach a goal in time, these games are a ton of fun. And I'm going to be generous and consider the Dark Rooms a minigame as well, where the babies have to navigate a maze while the adults hit a block that will temporarily let them through. light their way, knocking the babies back to the start if the wrong brother hits the block.

And speaking of minigames, that's something that the combat actually leans a lot more heavily into, so we should probably start talking about that. So on the surface, especially when just fighting with Mario at the start of the game, the battle system seems basically identical to Superstar Saga. You control a character with a specific button where you can attack, use items, run away, that sort of thing.

And just like with those games, there are action commands that will power up your moves by timing your hits right, and will let you dodge enemy attacks by once again timing the input properly. And yeah, that's all very similar to how things were handled in Superstar Saga. Even the stat distribution is all the same.

You have your HP, power, defense, speed, and stash. Wait, huh? Where's bros points?

Yeah, there's no bros points anymore, because unlike in Superstar Saga, special attacks are no longer inherent techniques that the brothers learn. They're now consumable items that they have to buy, which is great. Yeah, it's no secret that I am typically not a fan of any RPG battle system that makes attacks single-use items for a few reasons.

One is that it limits strategy, as what options you have can be arbitrarily limited by the game since running out of stock of an attack. means not being able to use it again until you restock, regardless of the attack's strength. And another issue is that making attacks arbitrarily limited like this, it causes too-good-to-use syndrome, where no matter how many attacks I have, I want to conserve because I may need it in the future.

Thankfully, the game seemingly sidesteps this issue, since by time I reached the midpoint of the game I had so many of these attacks that I felt that there was no way I'd be able to run out, regardless of what I did, so I started using them more frequently. I mean, there's no way that could come back to bite me, right? Anyways, the attacks being consumable items changes how they work in-game as well.

Superstar Saga's incredibly clever system that involved technique levels to either make attacks easier or stronger is completely gone, and the commands that these moves moves now have are significantly simplified, conceptually at least. They're almost all some variant of press the button of the brother about to attack to do damage, but there is enough variety here that each of them feels like a miniature version of a Mario Party minigame. I especially like the copy flower attack since that can do extreme damage to enemies you use it on, but it can be very hard to get that full potential out of. On that note, that's kind of how Partners in Time attempts to solve the difficulty issue from Superstar Saga.

While the game is largely largely the same, where once you know an enemy's attack patterns, they can be very easy to completely avoid and take nearly no damage. Conversely though, it can be extremely difficult to max out your damage because the highest damaging bros items have crazy execution requirements. Back to the copy flower, you need to press either A, B, X, or Y depending on which brother is going to jump next. While this starts out pretty simple, it gets to go very fast and with the amount of time you have to react to each new jump, I've literally only only ever done a copy flower for full damage once out of the dozens of times I've used it.

I'm more likely to make a mistake and try to jump as baby Luigi instead of Luigi right near the start of the move than I am to make it near the end. But on the other hand, and while I definitely can't substantiate this at all, it really feels like the timing windows for things like basic action commands and evasions have been widened leading to generally easier fights. While that probably doesn't seem like a big deal, opening that window up really does make the game a lot easier. Leniency in general is far higher for counterattacks, especially for hammers, since in Superstar Saga, without the special badge, you'd only have a few seconds to hold the hammer before swinging, but in Partners in Time, you can basically hold on forever, or at least long enough that the timer very rarely ever ended up mattering. Ultimately, it's overall a bit easier, but at least it doesn't feel like a steep difficulty drop-off like Superstar Saga did.

Another thing that gets a lot easier are bosses, but here I don't really mind because that's inherent to any sort of puzzle. Yeah, where Superstar Saga bosses were basically just big enemies with bigger attacks and health, Partners in Time adds another wrinkle to most of the game's bosses by having a unique mechanic that you need to figure out in order to exploit it to defeat them more effectively. A gimmick, if you will. For instance, this- Boss, Sunnyside, amazing name by the way, lines a bunch of Yoshi eggs up in front of the bros.

If you just attack the boss, nothing will really happen, it won't take much damage, and it'll have more ammunition for its own attacks. But by realizing that they are in fact Yoshi eggs and attacking them, you'll free these Yoshis who will then start to roll a boulder overhead, a callback to the dungeon's main progression puzzles. Free enough Yoshis and the boulder will fall on Sunnyside, opening it up to big damage by the bros.

Most bosses have these sorts of little things. little puzzles and I had a ton of fun figuring them out. But I'm getting a bit off track here, I haven't even explained the basics of battling with both the adults and babies, so let's get into that. So when you enter a battle, Mario's and Luigi's will be lined up just like how they were in Superstar Saga, except the babies will piggyback on the adults.

This does a few pretty cool things. First, it lets you use the babies in your attacks, so when you jump with the bros, you'll be able to do a smaller initial jump with the baby by pressing their button and finish the jump off with a bigger damage one. one by the adult, but it's more interesting when you get to the hammers.

Remember how I said that the main Mario Bros don't get hammers in this game? Well that translates to battles as well. If you were to enter a battle with just Mario and Luigi, you don't get the option to swing hammers because they don't have them. However, go into a battle with the two babies as well, and suddenly you can. Similarly to the jump attack, you'll have to press the right button with the adult to raise the baby up, then swing with their button for max damage.

But that's not the only thing that the babies bring to the table. table. Since you can control them separately, they have to be their own full characters, and that very occasionally can come into play in battles. While when in battles the stats primarily used are from the adults, the babies do slightly affect damage done and taken. But what's more interesting is what happens when the bro's HP hits zero.

In the previous game, if a bro gets KO'd, the remaining brother would jump to the rescue and attempt to perform defensive action commands with the other in tow, making them much more difficult and causing a bit of a negative feedback. feedback loop, where if you're doing poorly and a bro goes down, you're much more likely to get wiped because of how much harder things get. Partners in Time technically still has this, which can happen if you're fighting while the teams are separated, but in most battles you simply won't have that happen. If a bro goes down, the baby picks them up and tosses them into a nearby trash can, then takes their place.

You don't even lose a turn this way, so you can immediately revive the dead brother with a 1-up shroom and continue the battle no worse for wear. This kind of feels like a mechanic they just had to include, not something that necessarily makes the system any better. Like, both the bros and babies are full characters, so it wouldn't make logical sense for the fully healthy baby bro to just poof out of existence when the adult goes down, but it also radically changes the flow of more difficult fights. Whereas in Superstar Saga, you'd have to be a lot more attentive to HP and make sure you never hit zero because of how punishing that game could be, in Partners in Time, it doesn't really matter. If you get KO'd, well, whatever, just one-up super next turn and it's like it never happened.

Not paying attention to the battle and getting beat up isn't a catastrophe, it's a minor annoyance that just requires a different color mushroom to completely negate and makes an already pretty easy game even less stressful than it already was. But like I said, entering battles while separated can be a bit more challenging, and it can be especially tenuous for the babies. Battling with just the babies doesn't strip you of any options, aside from the bros items that require all four characters. characters, but it limits you in other ways since the baby's stats are going to be far lower than their adult counterparts. The babies are typically going to be moving first thanks to their much higher speed, but their absolutely pitiful power, defense, stash, and HP compared to their older counterparts makes battling with them feel so much worse than normal.

I would typically try to avoid battles with the babies as much as possible because of this, even though some enemies actually have unique formations when it's just the babies around. Speaking of the stats, the level up mechanics are pretty good. The mechanics are very similar to how they were in Superstar Saga as well, but a few changes lead to the experience of leveling up feeling way different. In Superstar Saga, you'd choose the stat you wanted to upgrade, roll the roulette, and go on with your life. You didn't have a ton of control over what stats you got, so I never really sweat what bonuses I got.

It led to slightly different stats over the course of the game, but it never really ended up mattering all that much. But in Partners in Time, this roulette is a big deal. First is you can actually control what you want to do.

what bonus you're getting. Rather than slowing to a stop, the roulette stops immediately on the number you press on, and since the roulette has set numbers for each stat that rotate consistently, you can, theoretically, always end up with the max stat boost every time. This ends up being more impactful since the stat bonuses change for each level, and can go from a meager 1-3 bonus to a massive plus 6 in a given stat.

Add on the fact that you can back out of the roulette to see what bonuses other stats have, You have a level up system that can be gamed to give huge stats bonuses every level up, bonuses that can even rival a full level's worth of stat buffs. This is a kind of double-edged sword, since these stats are really impactful. Remember Sunnyside? In my second playthrough, I was able to break Yoshi Eggs with one attack, making the fight go very smoothly.

However, in my first playthrough, since my stat rolls weren't optimal and I hadn't tried to choose the best option for every situation, Yoshi Eggs took two attacks to break, not only lengthening the fight on its own... but it also took much longer for me to figure out its gimmick since he'd throw the Yoshi eggs I'd attacked away before I had a chance to hit them again. On the other side of things, the fact that you can game stats and get such huge stat swings depending on your execution, it made leveling up pretty frustrating since despite thinking I timed a 6 stat boost properly, it would usually always end up a few frames slower, leading to a 1. It just made leveling up feel less fun than it did in Superstar Saga, since there, a bonus was a bonus and there's no use crying over missed stats since you didn't really have a ton of control over it.

And if you want your stats to be as high as possible, you're going to have to only fight enemies as a full team and avoid fighting while split up, if possible. Since all the bros are full characters, they all gain XP separately. And of course, if you're not battling with one group, that group won't get any of the experience.

So if you want to maximize your stats and exp, XP gain, your best bet is to fight as a group. Equipment works pretty similarly to how it did in Superstar Saga, except Partners in Time does a better job of differentiating clothing and badges. In this game, badges will not give any stat buffs, only having their unique effects, and clothing will never have any unique effects, only increasing the party's stats. This is definitely the better way to handle things compared to Superstar Saga, where clothing and badges were basically just the same thing, just boosting a different stat. Some of these badges Badges are incredibly powerful as well, with the most interesting ones coming directly from Fawful's shop.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, Fawful is back. You meet him down in the sewers underneath the castle, where he rants about fury and stuff and then sells you badges. The badges he sells aren't just the standard do more damage or make more money sorts of things, even though he does have those, but he carries the badge that lets you steal items from enemies, gives you a chance to OHKO enemies by first striking with a hammer, which is the only way to make first strikes. striking with a hammer matter, like, at all, and he also sells the badge that lets one brother use an infinite amount of bros items, but at 90 beans, it will take a while to get.

Beans are collected pretty much the same way as they were in Superstar Saga, by the way. Ultimately, I feel like this battle system is a slight downgrade from Superstar Sagas. While there are some really cool additions, I really like the added action commands from the babies, and conceptually, I think having them being separate characters could have added a ton to the overall experience, but the slight The slightly clunky way the babies were implemented, the overall easier difficulty, the removal of Superstar Saga's best mechanic, the bros moves, and replacing them with consumable items really brings it down for me. And now there's just a few more things we have left to talk about before we start heading back towards the story, so let's get through that, starting with the presentation. So Partners in Time largely looks like a very slightly upgraded Superstar Saga.

The sprites look really good, although I do really miss how fun and bouncy the battle sprites were in Superstar Saga. They're much more subdued by comparison in Partners in Time, which is unfortunate. Bowser looks a lot better here though, and the other Mario staple characters that show up like the Yoshis and Petey Piranha also look really great.

The backgrounds in particular are a huge jump in quality. Superstar Sagas were good, don't get me wrong, but they were very simple and used a lot of flat texturing and colors to fill out space. Partners in Time's backgrounds, especially in a lot of their dungeons, are just so much more detailed and really establish a much better outcome.

atmosphere. And this game is the first in the series to use the dual screen setup, which for the most part is fine. Out in the overworld and in the dungeons, the bottom screen has all the main action, and the upper screen is just used for the map. This is a good setup, but man, this map is horrible.

It actually makes navigating harder sometimes. Peach's Castle in particular is bad for this. There are a ton of rooms close together that connect with others in weird ways, and the map only shows what room you're in. It never shows you where you are in that room.

So if you're relying on the map to get around it's super easy to get lost because you're not actually being guided anywhere I'm also not a huge fan of how the game handles its cutscenes It's the DS so obviously the game has to use both for its cutscenes Even if it doesn't make any sense and they're really just inconsistent Sometimes the cutscene will play on both screens the scene being shown on both Sometimes the cutscene will swap between screens sometimes it'll only show on the bottom screen with the map on top Sometimes it'll only show on the top screen with just text on the bottom screen. It's so inconsistent that it really makes me feel like the developers had absolutely no idea how to... properly use the screen for cutscenes, so they just threw everything at the wall to see what stuck.

Thankfully, the music is a lot more consistently good. Yoko Shimomura returned to compose this game's music, and she did a great job of changing her focus to match this game's tone. Superstar Saga's music was very fun and jingly, being super catchy and upbeat to go hand-in-hand with the game's goofy atmosphere.

Her music and partners in time is quite different. Area tracks like Toad Town Ruins... Really show what I mean.

This soundtrack is much more atmospheric and moody, less focused on catchy hooks, and is more set on immersing the player in the areas they're in. Although that energy is still there where it matters in the battle tracks. Songs like Bowser Battle... And especially Elder Shroob Battle. A great job of hyping up the battles they accompany on top of establishing some amazing atmosphere.

So now we're going to start talking about the actual plot. So just like every other video, there's going to be a timestamp somewhere around here if you want to skip it. And there really is quite a few- twists and turns in this game so if you haven't played it and you really want to I do suggest skipping so here we go so where we left off the bros were about to head off on their journey to find the cobalt star shards in order to save Princess Peach this takes them through through the aforementioned Toadwood Forest where they gather their second shard, but unfortunately for them, Bowser shows up and swallows the shards and flies off before the bros can even know what really went wrong. Conveniently, the next portal sends them right to where Bowser and Kamek are hiding out, on Yoshi's Island. The island is being terrorized by Yube, a giant Yoshi-Shroob hybrid monster, and while the Marios and Luigis are confronting Bowser about the shards, Yube swallows them all up.

After taking a delightful trip through Yube's digestive tract, exiting exactly where you'd expect, Bowser barfs up both of the shards and we're back on track towards the goal. The next destination is the Gritzy Desert where the bros make their way into the Koopa-seum where they see the shrewbs are holding an event. Here we see Peach being swallowed up by Petey Piranha so they immediately confront the shrewbs and chase Petey down into the depths below the desert. They eventually track him down and beat him, finding Peach as well, although there's something a little different about her. Although I can't really put my finger on what's but that's great.

Peach is safe, she's brought back to the present, and the game is over. Or it would be, but our buddy Adult Bowser is up to his old tricks again, and has decided at this very moment to visit the castle and kidnap Peach again. And wouldn't you know, while evading capture by Baby Peach, Bowser jumps, breaks the bridge he's on, and falls down into another time hole, the princess joining a few seconds later. Crap.

So yeah, back to the past we go, and in this area, Thwomp Mountain, the bros meet a younger E. Gadd and cause a time paradox, but we're told just to not think about it, so I guess we won't, and head down into the volcano to hopefully save Peach from Bowser. At the bottom of the volcano, the bros find that Bowser and his younger self have teamed up, although neither of them are smart enough to realize exactly what's going on, and we have a boss fight. After the fight, both Bowsers are flung into the air by a thwomp, and the Shroob mothership arrives and abducts everyone.

Eventually, the bros make their way to the bridge, where it's revealed that the Princess Peach they had saved by Petey was never actually Peach. It was the Shroob's leader, Princess Shroob, all along. Luckily, just before they're all zapped, Kiley Koopa shows up to save the day and give the team a bit of a respite.

They discuss what has been happening, and Kiley posits that the reason Princess Shroob was impersonating Peach was so she could conquer the present Mushroom Kingdom, not just the past. But that raises another question. Isn't the fact that the Shroobs failed to conquer the Mushroom Kingdom in the present mean that they are guaranteed to have failed in the past? Or is this some sort of Dragon Ball situation where there's different timelines that split off at different nexuses? I don't know, it's all time travel stuff, it's impossible to make these sorts of stories make any sense.

I guess unintentionally, Bowser is the hero of the Mushroom Kingdom, and his bull in a china shop style of kidnapping. The princess wound up bringing Princess Shroob back into the past, thwarting those future plans. But this all also means that Princess Peach was never saved, so with no other options and no other leads, the bros, after narrowly escaping the Shroob mothership, continue their search for the last two Cobalt Star shards.

Oh, and Baby Bowser's on the mothership now. That's gonna be important later. The next destination is the ruined Toad Town, which is really just a stopgap to their next real stop.

Star Hill, another great callback to Super Mario RPG. At the top of Star Hill, the Cobalt Star is able to communicate with the bros, and explains that in order to reach the Shroob Stronghold, they'll need five of its shards, which only strengthens the team's resolve to find the last two. The bros make their way towards the Star Shrine, where this door guards the path forward.

It examines Mario and dubs him to be purer, aside from the fact that he needs to cut down on the pizza and exercise more. I'm a-lurkin'on it. I bought this specifically for this gang. It was not worth it.

Everything is going really well until the door takes a good long look at Luigi's internet search history and decides that he's just too impure to be let through, at least not without another test. After passing the test and the door saying that it was totally joking and stuff, the bros make their way into the star shrine where another big bombshell goes off. In the shrine, the cobalt star shards that the bros have fly off on their own after warning of an apparent danger. The bros then find Kylie and Toadbert, who we first saw on Yo- Yoshi's Island. He gave us a sketch there, but we really didn't think too much about it until now.

But here, he asks us to clean the sketch off, and we do, which is actually the only time the game ever uses the touchscreen for anything. By cleaning the sketch, we see something horrible. It doesn't just show one true princess, but two. But before that can even sink in, the group is attacked by another shrewd monster which turns Toad Bird and Kylie into mushrooms. After the fight, the final two Kobold Star shards join the three that the team has, and with all five, but no Peach, they realize the only thing they they have left to do is infiltrate the Shroob stronghold and save her.

Upon going to the final portal, the Cobalt Star opens the gate just like it said it would, and we can enter the game's final dungeon, Shroob Castle. This is why Peach's Castle is so absurdly large and empty, it had to be the basis for the final dungeon, and there's no way a big endgame dungeon could work if Peach's Castle was any less huge. Definitely not, it just couldn't happen. Anyways, I do really like this dungeon.

It's got a lot of really cool aspects that all work together really well. First, it's got similar mechanics to the Gritzy Desert where you have to activate two opposite statues at the same time. It's got a cool underground section with a puzzle boss chomp, it's got a section where the babies will have to go out on their own on ledges that surround the standard rooms to reach specific areas, and it has two really fun minigame sections where you need to take control of a shrewd spaceship to fight off enemies. Eventually, we reach the top of the castle. where Peach is being held.

Here, after fighting off Princess Shroob's mothership and freeing Peach, we start the final battle with Princess Shroob. This is a pretty fun fight, not too difficult, but she's got some fun moves and has a shield every few turns that makes the fight last longer than it would have otherwise. But after a few minutes, she goes down.

As they're about to escape, the Cobalt Star shows up, and Peach is apprehensive about putting it back together for some reason. But just before she can explain why, Bowser shows up, grabs the middle piece of the star. harp and puts it back together, releasing Princess Shroob's older sister and the game's true final boss, Elder Princess Shroob. This fight is absolutely grueling, and funnily enough it's for complete opposite reasons from Cackletta's Soul. That fight was super unfair because you needed to know how to beat the boss before you entered it, leading to a ton of immediate deaths.

This fight, if you're not completely prepared for everything it'll throw at you, can effectively just lead to a stalemate until you just make enough mistakes to lose. lose. No joke, during my first playthrough I ended up losing this fight after about an hour of fighting her.

See, I really should have suffered from too good to use syndrome a lot more, since you need to unload every single bit of damage you possibly can muster to break through her. Okay, I should probably explain this fight and how it all works. Phase 1 isn't that bad, aside from the fact that she has 3000 HP, which is a lot. It's phase 2 where things start to get a little more overwhelming. Normally, Elder Shroob is completely invulnerable to any attack throw directly at her.

No matter what you do, she'll take one damage. In order to break her barrier, you'll need to do at least 200 damage to her crown. But because she's so tall, you can't actually target her crown right away. You need to destroy her feet, which also takes hundreds of damage to break.

But just like Cackletta's soul, her various appendages and stuff all revive after a few turns, including her crown, so you need to do this stuff quick. But if you go into the fight like I did, which I honestly wouldn't even consider unprepared, for any other situation like ever, you're going to have a bad time because eventually when you run out of high power bros items, thanks again for making them consumable Alpha Dream, you'll likely end up in a situation where you'll be stuck in a loop where you won't be able to remove her dangerous tentacle attacks and since it'll take so much longer to damage both the legs and the crown, the number of chances you'll get to actually hurt Elder Shrew will be like every 10 or 15 turns. It's not like it's impossible. Heck, you can even probably beat her without damaging her crown at all if you want to take like 500 turns, but that doesn't really seem like it would be a lot of fun.

Thus, I had to go grind, which added about two hours to my playtime and definitely put a damper on the game's climax. This is why a good difficulty curve is so important. If it shoots up so starkly like this at just the wrong time, it can really interrupt the game's tone and atmosphere. Instead of valiantly facing off against the villain at the end of the adventure, the hero just has to go around and do busy work so their numbers are high enough to make the bad guy's numbers go to zero.

I know that's kind of the point of an RPG, but smart design can mitigate or even remove this problem altogether. Thankfully, during my second playthrough, I prepared early by equipping the extra XP and money badges for most of the game, and by using all of my beams to buy the ulti-free badge, meaning Mario was always able to throw powerful bros attacks for free. This made the fight go a lot smoother, as I was able to do enough damage to the feet and crown within a few turns, and could then unload onto Elder Shroob with little trouble.

And even then, it still took me a good 25 minutes to get through the whole thing. It really is a super climactic fight that- that does deserve its length. The atmosphere is incredible and like you heard earlier, the music in this fight is crazy good.

But eventually she does go down and she just poofs into a regular old mushroom which is sure. But just because the shroobs are defeated doesn't mean everything is back to normal. Everyone is still suffering from the horrors the shroobs put them through.

There's still the body horror lichen in the forest. There's still people turned into mushrooms. That stuff isn't fixed just bec-oh. Thanks to baby Bowser we find out that baby tears can somehow rev- reverse all of the things the Shroobs did in a nice little reference to War of the Worlds. So E. Gadd builds a machine that pours baby tears, or at least a very similar concoction to them, all over the past Mushroom Kingdom, curing everyone of their mutations and at least slightly letting people finally see a bit of hope for the future.

So there we go, the day is saved, everyone is back in the present celebrating their victory over the Shroobs, it's a nice ending if a little cliche. Except not quite, since when the group finds Bowser on the floor of the castle, he's the mushroom that was once Elder Princess Shroob starts moving on its own and the collapsed Bowser swallows it, allowing him to be possessed by the ghost of the Elder Shroob. This triggers one final fight where the bros have to fend off Bowser's attacks while not attacking him back, with each dodged move doing damage to the Elder Shroob's apparition. This is a pretty clever fight, one that I absolutely did not see coming at all. But once we do enough damage, the Shroobs are finally completely eradicated once and for all.

And it's here that we get our final- final, actual ending, where the two time periods say goodbye to each other and the past group heads back to their time, of course after the babies give the hammers to their adult selves, since babies definitely do not need hammers. And that was Mario & Luigi Partners in Time. Honestly I do see why it is a little less beloved, at least compared to Superstar Saga.

It's definitely more bloated, repetitive, and formulaic than Superstar Saga was, and it doesn't really have the same charm that game had. Not to say that there isn't charm here, I feel like if you're a big If you're a big fan of Z grade sci-fi and horror movies, you'll be right at home in the surprisingly dark, yet pulpy world that the game tries to create. But I do feel like Superstar Saga is a much more concise, consistent package that nails everything it's trying to do, whereas Partners in Time does stumble every once in a while.

I still had a great time playing it and think it is a really good game. It's just one of those situations where its predecessor was just such a tough act to follow, and while Partners in Time did do enough different to make it stand out as unique, I don't really think it did quite enough to make it stand out as better. I'm not sure I'd say it deserves the relative obscurity though. Heck, AlphaDream didn't even think it deserved a remake and that kind of sucks. It definitely is a mixed bag though.

For every improvement it made over Superstar Saga, it also took one step back, and in my opinion, the negatives do outweigh the positives here. Battling especially was not nearly as fun, which is unfortunate, since battling is a pretty important part of these sorts of games. But apparently, whatever criticisms AlphaDream got for this game were definitely taken to heart, and four years later would release the game that many people would call their magnum opus, the game that I've been looking forward to playing the most in this entire retrospective. But we'll get into that in the next video.

Thank you all so much for watching. And just before the video ends, I want to shout out my patrons, R.A. Miller and Anon42.

You're the best. I can't thank you enough.

Transcript for:Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time Insights

Transcript for:
Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time Insights