Mario & Luigi: Dream Team

Axis1500 wrote:

Candidate for best 3D effect on the 3DS ever? I think so....

Very much so. The blocks falling away at the beginning of the battle gets me every time.

I'm actually stuck on this, which is good! One by one, Alphadream is breaking down my complaints: the Dream World music, that I was afraid would get on my nerves, changes depending on your overworld position; the enemy variety is increasing... Got my first Bros. Move, and it's very nice. Great stuff.

I'm about 4 hours into this & its just excellent stuff, love the whole art style, music and how Mario & Luigi speak that crazy gibberish.

I just have a constant smile on my face when playing it.

I'm only a couple of hours in and loving it.

Also got my travel kit today with an uncomfortable pillow and a rather small mask  

Just met the main antagonist for the first time...

Spoiler:

Sadly, Dreambert is much less interesting than he could be. I've caught a few whiffs of "ye olde English": he'd have been more interesting if they kept that up. Prince Peasley still retains his title as the best Mario & Luigi good supporting character.

Poor Starlow :-(.

Been playing more of this, and it's been good fun, the next big 'area' has some neat puzzles in it. First disappointing bit has been the Giant Luigi bits (I'll say no more in context to avoid spoiling anything).

It just wasn't as engaging or fun as the Giant Bowser bits in Bowser's Inside Story, and came across feeling more gimmicky. Looks amazing though, and hopefully later giant Luigi battles will have more variety as Luigi learns moves.

Other than that, it's been strangely refreshing, as I've ventured into the first proper town since Superstar Saga. It's huge.

I can't buy Dream Team this month, so instead I'm playing Partners in Time because I never even made it to the first major battle.

It's much prettier than I remember...

The animation is great in the M&L games. I remember being surprised at the smoothness when I picked up PiT. As Fronky says, DTB seems to have sacrificed a bit of that for the 3D, but it doesn't really matter because the 3D is lurvely.

I've just come off the drill machine, which was really satisfying to use! The environments are up there with SS' or PiT's: occasionally a bit too spread out, but great for the most part. Enjoying the dreamy stuff for the most part too, the tower of Luigis (everyone's seen that bit, right?) being a highlight. The drills and sneezing are a bit tedious if I'm honest. Only a bit though.

And I will give Starlow her due: she's had some great lines. Peasley's still the best though.

I'm still at the start of the game so only so far I'm liking the Jump thing where Mario jumps and the Luigi's follow suit.

And now I'm stuck at the part where Boss Brickle is stuck..

Couple of hours in to this, already fed up of ze accent on ze yellow cube with ze how-you-say moustache. It's like reading a shitty comic strip in The Sun...

But apart from that, this is great stuff. This is my first taste of the Mario and Luigi games, and answers the question of why the leveling-up and RPG elements are no longer in Paper Mario, because they're all housed in this series. Bit of a shame for PM, not sure where it sits with me now.

The accents get better/worse later on...

shanks wrote:

And now I'm stuck at the part where Boss Brickle is stuck..

This is where I got stuck coincidentally.  I'd just missed a path to somewhere.

fronkhead wrote:

Been playing more of this, and it's been good fun, the next big 'area' has some neat puzzles in it. First disappointing bit has been the Giant Luigi bits (I'll say no more in context to avoid spoiling anything).

It just wasn't as engaging or fun as the Giant Bowser bits in Bowser's Inside Story, and came across feeling more gimmicky. Looks amazing though, and hopefully later giant Luigi battles will have more variety as Luigi learns moves.

Disagree most heavily.  I don't know why it is, but I much preferred this segment to the Bowser battles.  It just seems like less of an afterthought, if you will.  Also Mario is strangely adorable, which is more than can be said for...

Minor spoiler:

fronkhead wrote:

Other than that, it's been strangely refreshing, as I've ventured into the first proper town since Superstar Saga. It's huge.

I'm here now, and my goodness does it make me happy.  The shopping!  The dialogue!  The Link's Awakening-type fetch quest (the outcome of which is adorable)!  I never thought I'd be so happy to see a fetch quest, but it underlines the game's RPG credentials (unlike the above-mentioned Sticker Star) and it's spread over a small enough area to not be tedious.  

And then the person they meet outside the tour centre!  And the cut-scene inside, with Luigi and Starlow!  

This has become another one of these games, like LM2 and ACNL, where I feel the need to come on here repeatedly and gush over how wonderful it is.  Everyone who can afford to should buy it, and buy it first-hand.  It's brilliant, and Alphadream deserve every penny of their share of the price.

Yeah I kept wandering aroun until I found that thing which I saw before but for some reason thought I had already been there

I still can't get over how good the sprites are in this, particularly when you have a whole pile of Luiginoids, where there are probably around 105 (I tried counting in one of the Bros. Moves) sprites, all animated and not entirely identical. Even more impressive when you crumple your pile of Luiginoids into a heap. Love it!

I actually thought the town segment outstayed its welcome a little, though I'm not sure why. I did prefer the more compact towns on Superstar Saga, but this may merely be positive nostalgia.

Just wish the game doesn't have Pokemon levels of explanations. I've now been told twice how to use badges, and it's grating on me hugely. Superstar Saga handled all of this best, leaving us up to our own devices in the opening moments as to who we should talk to and what we should learn about.

Hoping Superstar Saga is one of the Wii U GBA VC launch titles so I can play through it again and get some perspective. Would dig out the cartridge but I have no cartridge after a friend lost it ages ago. Was very unhappy about that

Agreed that Dreambert's been a boring support character, he hasn't done much for me yet, neither have any of the Pi'illos for that matter.

I wonder if the antogonist's speech is a riff on the 'Vampire Speech' where Ws sound like Vs (I vant to suck your blood among other fun phrases), rather than anything specifically German. Though Broque speaks in a French-English way, so maybe not.

I didn't realise this was out yet, I'm definitely interested in it and I hope I can pick it up around my birthday.

Agree on the tutorials: I can figure out how to use the Luiginary Stopwatch (nice though it is - shades of Viewtiful Joe there) myself, thank you very much.  Disagree on the town: it's not that big.  Not compared to some of Xenoblade's settlements.

EDIT: Did I just play a game of Angry Birds?  

Balladeer wrote:

Agree on the tutorials: I can figure out how to use the Luiginary Stopwatch (nice though it is - shades of Viewtiful Joe there) myself, thank you very much.  Disagree on the town: it's not that big.  Not compared to some of Xenoblade's settlements.

EDIT: Did I just play a game of Angry Birds?  

Fair enough, I found it interrupted the flow of the game a bit (Superstar Saga's towns were a lot more compact), but I might have appreciated it more if I went into the town after reaching it -- I left that for the next day's session!

What I did find hard to adapt to at first was the way the game handles text skip.

Not sure if anyone else noticed this but if you press A to make all the text appear in the text box, unlike older games where the speech sound effect would stop playing immediately, here it keeps playing for an extra second, enough time for you to finish reading the text box/bubble.

At first it annoyed me a little (me being me), but now I'm really used to it and I'm almost indifferent between the two ways.

Like Dusty, this is my first experience of a Mario & Luigi game (I bought Superstar Saga for stupidly cheap when the GBA was on the way out, then stupidly traded it in towards my Wii for a stupidly, stupidly low price without ever really playing it). I'm three hours in, and all is well, except maybe for the Pokémon-style tutorials and the amount of time I've found myself needing to set aside to play it.

This is the first 3DS game where I've found it really, really, really difficult to stop playing. It's because of the structure: you can save anywhere, so there's always an incentive to just see what's up there, or just get to the next screen, or just fight that enemy, and before you know it an hour more has past and your eyes are in pain.

The text skip sounds like something only you would notice, Fronk.  

I'm halfway through the area after Wakeport now...

Spoiler:

I had this 'problem' too, each time I say I'll put it down I end up finding something I really want to do next. Luckily upon reaching Wakeport's Dream World, where the Hoohooligans (I think) run off (alongside a Save Block), I could call it quits. For now. Seemed to be the first bit I've come across where I can genuinely take a break from adventuring.

Not sure if I mentioned this before but I absolutely loved the 3D aspect of the deeper part of the dream world with the Luigi's running about

That's a great set-piece, to be certain.

You know what's not so great?  The second giant Luigi battle.  Turns out I am incapable of drawing rapid circles with the stylus, or of tapping approaching projectiles to hammer them, or of sliding the stylus rapidly on-screen!  I can do none of those things, and only won by timing my jumps right.

Hoping to get Luigi's Mansion 2 sorted before stepping onto this. Curse you, Animal Crossing! 

I had my first giant battle and well.... Yeah..

I feel almost guilty saying this, but I... have a criticism, and it's essentially the entire Dream World.  The "dungeons" are frequently dull, being too big with not enough in them; the Luiginary Works are slow and tedious to use (looking at you, sun and clock), and are used in very basic ways; and if the third Giant Battle is any harder than the second (I didn't find the first one a problem, actually), I'll be swearing.  Granted, they do some things right: the Luiginoid tower works, the Luiginary attacks are fun, and the crowd battles are okay but still not as good as the Bros. battles.

Anyway, I'm currently at the beach, dealing with a very long and tedious Dream World stretch; hence the rant.  As with many such, the Luigi-on-a-rubber-ring Work could have been well used, but hasn't been so far beyond the umbrella-platform-on-a-groove.

Agreed on the Dream World. The more compulsory bits tend to be decent (like the one where you have to face off and find the Hoorahs in certain battle conditions), but more often than not I've found most the dream world segments lead to filler or barrenly-designed bits. Particularly from the normal Pi'illos that lie about.

I think this is the one bit where Bowser's Inside Story got it right, its 2D segments properly melded in with the Bowser bits (though the tradeoff with that was how Mario and Luigi spent most the time in the 2D world, so there wasn't an opportunity to make BIS into a traditional RPG like the rest, with an awesome cast of NPCs and a few towns and the like), and never felt awkwardly executed.

At least the Dream World does bring about more interesting battles.

I'm impressed by the size of this one. The previous Mario & Luigi games took me pretty much 20h to ace. Now I've barely started what (admittedly) I suspect is the final quest before I take things to the final boss, and I'm at 19:42. And I still have some Pi'illos to find.

Admittedly, who knows how much time the tutorials took up...