I'm at the point in my Top 100 where the games' quality speaks for themselves. I don't quite have the emotional attachment to them that I would a Top 25 contender, but they're also so obviously brilliant that there's no reason why I wouldn't put them on the top of this list. Super Metroid and Yoshi's Island are just simply stone-cold classics, but Bowser's Inside Story despite being more recent is a game that just about everybody seems to adore. Even TTYD has a lot of baggage around it, but Bowser's Inside Story is just so hard to dislike. So yeah, no wonder I ranked it this high.
The late AlphaDream's Mario & Luigi series often felt like they were second fiddle to the Paper Mario games, and I mean, considering I have three Paper Mario games on my Top 100 list and just one M&L game, I can't really say I'm helping with that perception. I generally prefer the more dramatic storytelling of the Paper Mario games, but I still have a lot of respect for these games and AlphaDream as a whole. They have a unique vibe and charm all their own, and in some aspects like the battle system, far surpass their sister series. But I feel like while every Mario & Luigi game is at the very least good, most of them have at least one thing holding them back from true greatness. Superstar Saga has a more basic battle system than the other games and a drawn-out final act, Paper Jam has unoriginal environments and characters that don't take proper advantage of the Paper Mario theming, Dream Team despite being my second favorite has a very slow start with heavy tutorialization, and Partners In Time has an overcomplicated control scheme, the flawed Bros Items system, and borked difficulty in the US release. But Bowser's Inside Story doesn't have any of these issues, everything just clicks.
Bowser's Inside Story doesn't really have the deepest narrative or anything, it's not anywhere near the level of its predecessor in terms of storytelling, but it more than makes up for that by being one of the funniest games I've played in my entire life. This game is an absolute riot, filled to the brim with some of the most quotable lines across the Mario franchise. A very big chunk of those lines belong to the game's villain Fawful, whose distinct broken English leads to a consistent string of comedic gold. There's a reason Fawful gained such a massive following, he's so much fun. But on top of the top-notch comedic writing, this game's got some pretty solid character work too, particularly for Bowser and the new character Starlow. Bowser starts off the game severely humbled and humiliated and has to learn to swallow his pride and work with the Mario Bros, and becomes all the more badass for it. Meanwhile, Starlow is pretty much just Tatl from Majora's Mask, a snarky little fairy who starts the game picking on Bowser and Luigi before growing a begrudging respect for them. I've seen a lot of people hate Starlow because of how much she pokes fun at Luigi, but I think that's doing both of their characters a disservice. Luigi is great because he's such an underdog, he needs that kind of friction to really prove himself. And Starlow is great because she doesn't immediately get along with the Bros, particularly Luigi, but by the sequels, she comes to know them better than most anyone else in the Mushroom Kingdom. I'm just going to go ahead and say it, Starlow is one of my favorite video game characters and it's exactly because of her sassy abrasiveness. She's basically what you'd get if you plopped Kazooie into a Mario game and it really works for me.
As far as core moment-to-moment gameplay goes, I have always thought the Mario & Luigi games were better than the Paper Mario games. The Paper Mario games do have their strengths like their badge system, larger scale, generally stronger narratives, and of course, their unique artstyles, but on a pure mechanical level, the Mario & Luigi games are just so much deeper. In the overworld, you play as Mario & Luigi at the same time. They have a increasingly wide range of platforming moves they can perform in tandem ranging from a spin jump to a double jump to a digging move and so on and so forth, which gives the overworld traversal a much stronger focus on platforming and puzzle-solving. Meanwhile, the battle system takes the action commands that defined Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario and fleshes them out even further. Now every enemy has their own unique attacks to learn and avoid, and the Mario Bros have their own special attacks that play out like full-on minigames. The Mario & Luigi games completely eschew any strategy and planning for pure mechanical skill, you'll need to master all the attack patterns and special moves to make it to the end, and that can be a fun change of pace for a turn-based RPG. I'm not saying it's better, but it is unique and refreshing in its own way.
The big gameplay hook of Bowser's Inside Story is the fact that you can now play as Bowser alongside Mario & Luigi. This isn't the first Mario & Luigi game to have you control more characters than the titular duo, but the way BiS handles it feels far less overwhelming. Bowser is on the upper screen, and the brothers are on the bottom. You can only control one of the two at a time, but that doesn't limit the ways in which they can interact. You can solve a puzzle as Mario & Luigi to allow Bowser to move something in the overworld, or in battle, Bowser can swallow an enemy or boss so Mario & Luigi can wail on him. This system also allows for a lot of gameplay variety. Mario & Luigi play as they always have, with a wide variety of context-sensitive actions and platforming moves, but all of the areas inside Bowser's body are played from a 2D perspective this time. Meanwhile, Bowser's sections are entirely top-down, and his gameplay is more focused on using pure raw strength to demolish your environments. And even more, around halfway through you get to start exploring Bowser's areas as Mario & Luigi, completely contextualizing them and making them feel fresh. It's some truly impressive mechanical interplay through and through.
And speaking of feeling fresh, I think the biggest strength of Bowser's Inside Story is its incredible pacing. Barring some occasionally overlong tutorial segments, AlphaDream always had a knack for RPG pacing and balancing. Their games never drag and never demand the player grind, and always know when to move on from the current setting and show you something new. Out of all of their games, BiS does this the best. The way this game operates is that you enter an area either as Bowser or the Mario Bros, and you will immediately start to struggle. The enemies have beefier health bars than ever before and entirely unfamiliar attacks. But as you progress through the area, you will start to learn the patterns and level up, which makes defeating those enemies much easier. By the time you reach the end, you'll be able to demolish every enemy in your path, so the game drags you to the next setting for the cycle to start again. Toss in the frequent swapping between Bowser and Mario Bros gameplay, a ridiculous amount of minigames, and even some very fun kaiju battles as a Giant Bowser, and you get a game that refuses to stay in the same place for more than half an hour. But despite this breakneck pacing, Bowser's Inside Story is still roughly 20-30 hours long, with barely any padding to be seen.
In terms of visual presentation, I think Bowser's Inside Story is still the best-looking Mario & Luigi game. While I do really like the look of the 3DS games, AlphaDream's greatest strength was always spritework and it really shows in their game, with its colorful and wacky environments, expressive and fluidly-animated characters, and crunchy effects. I've always especially loved their UI, and the way they shamelessly implement the console's button layouts into it. The soundtrack is also predictably incredible, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise considering it's by Yoko Shimomura, my favorite video game composer. While I do think Partners In Time and Dream Team have overall better and more tonally cohesive soundtracks, the Bowser's Inside Story OST is still fantastic in its own right and boasts a ton of the series' most iconic tracks, including The Wind Is Blowing In Cavi Cape, Beachside Dream, Grasslands All The Way, Short Break In Toad Town, Tough Guy Alert, Showtime, and of course, The Grand Finale, one of the best final boss themes of all time. Frankly, the entire final boss encounter is fantastic, easily my favorite in a Mario RPG.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story is one of the most tightly-designed RPGs I've ever seen, stuffed with so much gameplay variety that coalesces incredibly seamlessly. It's gutbustingly hilarious, boasts some fantastic character work that puts Origami King to shame, and impressively polished on pretty much every level. It's not my favorite game in the "Mario RPG" subseries, but it is my favorite Mario RPG.
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