The Mario & Luigi RPG series began on the Game Boy Advance, and even many years and a few iterations later, it has always reflected a connection to those roots. The two-button Game Boy Advance was the impetus for the series’ central hook: each brother is assigned a face button, and you control them both at once. Even as the series moved toward platforms with more face buttons, the core concept remained defined by its initial limitations. Now brought to Switch, Mario & Luigi: Brothership feels like a conscious effort to escape those limitations, resulting in a long RPG that can’t hold its own weight.

In Brothership, several inhabitants of the Mushroom Kingdom are magically swept into the new setting of Concordia: a vast sea dotted with islands that used to be part of a contiguous land mass. A type of world tree, the Uni-Tree served as the tether that held all the islands together, but it suddenly withered and the islands drifted apart. With the help of a young researcher, you pilot a ship that houses a new shoot of Uni-Tree, connecting islands and great lighthouses that amplify their power to bring them all back together. This will make your ship look like a tugboat, with several islands tied up and towed behind it.

It’s a concept that allows for many different types of environments and stories on small independent islands. One could be modeled as a desert, while another is a multi-story corporate headquarters. The Great Lighthouses serve as the main dungeons, so each of the acts consists of the smaller stories of each island, the larger story arc of the region, and then the Great Lighthouse dungeon as the resolution.

Mario and Luigi are wandering do-gooders who simply contribute because they are in a position to help. And although they don’t have spoken dialogue, you get a lot of characterization thanks to the stellar quality of the animation. Brothership is an impressive feat of art direction, showcasing new and familiar characters in a simple but highly effective style that has a cartoon-like elasticity. I never got tired of watching Luigi’s face light up or the different arrival animations as they landed on different islands. There’s a joke that Mario always lands perfectly and Luigi always lands a little less perfectly, with lots of fun variations on how many ways it can go wrong.

However, if the islands are well differentiated, exploring them is nothing special. Mario & Luigi has never been known for its platforming prowess, and you’d never mistake Brothership for a real Mario platformer. The controls are too rigid, and sometimes that makes the platforming puzzles feel less organic than they should. Interestingly, it also abandons the Mario and Luigi double hero gimmick by putting Mario directly in the driver’s seat. Luigi is less of an equal than a companion who follows you (for the most part) diligently, and you can sometimes tap the L button to send him out to gather resources so you don’t have to, or to help you solve puzzles. That alleviates some frustration I had with previous Mario & Luigi games, where I had to get the timing perfect for both brothers while crossing a gap, for example, but it’s strange that Luigi so clearly plays a supporting role. This functionally compromises their identity: less Mario and Luigi and more Mario with special guest Luigi.

However, in combat, Luigi is more than equal. Both brothers do their own animated versions of timing-based attacks, but for most boss fights, Luigi can summon a “Luigi Logic” moment to do a special stage-based stun that will leave the boss vulnerable. I got the feeling that this was to give the character something to do and act as a counterbalance to him being primarily a second banana in the exploration segments. Synchronized attacks work as well as ever here, and you select Jump or Hammer depending on the enemy’s attributes for a light rock-paper-scissors element. Counterattacks are also back and can sometimes even end a battle immediately while dealing heavy damage to the opponent. That said, with only two party members, it can be very easy to get into a vicious cycle of using revival items on each brother in turn, once you get to tougher enemies and learn their attack patterns for the first time.

Combat has a couple of additions that help add more depth, the first of which is a regular pace of permanent upgrades. Every eight levels, you can choose an upgrade that lasts you the rest of the game, such as gaining additional EXP from each battle or gaining additional power stats with each subsequent level. Those are uniform between Mario and Luigi, but the two brothers have their own specialties with stats that level up faster; Luigi is especially good at Defense and the Luck-like Stash stat, for example.

The second major combat element is Sockets: revolutionary major power-ups that can be equipped via a power strip-like interface as you unlock more Sockets. These can have attributes like creating a blast radius when you get an Excellent rating on a timed attack, returning items to you after use, or being especially resistant to certain status effects. Plugs have a limited number of charges, after which they enter a charging state, but other plugs can also affect the charging time. Overall, it reminded me a lot of Final Fantasy 7’s Materia, where nodes could be set up to enable powers and the real joy was in playing with powerful combinations. In fact, sockets are even more versatile because you can hot-swap them mid-battle without wasting a turn.

However, Plugs also raises the specter of Mario & Luigi: Brothership’s main weakness: its pacing. The Mario and Luigi games are full-fledged RPGs, but they are compact and usually last around 25 hours. Brothership seemed determined to extend playing time and simply cannot sustain itself for that long. The Plugs element isn’t even introduced until almost 10 hours into the experience, and by then, combat was starting to feel routine. I appreciated that it injected a new element, but I wish we had it before the combat became stale, not after.

The pacing issues only become exacerbated as the game progresses. Later in the game, there is a required story mission which then leads to a decision that could make the mission itself totally irrelevant. In more than a moment, you will have to revisit a lot of islands that you have already visited. There are two almost identical boss fights that occur almost consecutively. Traveling by sea can be tedious, even with a faster navigation option, and small islets have no fast travel option and must be navigated manually. Additionally, when a particular plot element is introduced, the writing becomes significantly funnier with several laugh-out-loud jokes and dialogue, but it took me about 30 hours to get there. All of this makes it seem like the game doesn’t really respect your time. Even worse, performance suffers from drops in frame rate, especially near the end, leaving the ending on a sour note.

All of this is especially frustrating because, at its core, Brothership tells a sweet yet simple fable about togetherness and human connection. The islands were left shattered and isolated, and the main threat at play is a kind of pandemic of loneliness. There’s even a surprising light visual motif surrounding screen addiction and how it can prevent people from forming interpersonal bonds. It’s a nice story, but it doesn’t have to be 50 hours long.

That length may have been born out of a desire to create a big, meaty RPG, but in the end, it mainly serves to accentuate simplicity across the board. Stretching over so many hours, the exploration becomes boring, the combat feels repetitive, and the story can’t stand on its own. Mario & Luigi: Brothership is well made and has some great ideas, but when freed from its portable limitations, it becomes too ambitious for its own good.