Like many turn-based RPGs, Mario & Luigi: Brothership has a pretty slow start. It takes a good 20 minutes to get through all of the cutscenes and intro dialogue that sets up Mario and Luigi’s adventure, but even when you finally get control of the brothers, things start out pretty simple.
For the first couple hours you’ll get a lot of practice jumping on enemies and dodging their attacks. A couple hours after that you’ll get to swing a hammer to bonk baddies and deflect projectiles. If you’ve played the other Mario & Luigi games this is all familiar stuff. You’ll get the hang of jumping and bonking quickly and be ready for more, but more won’t come for a long, long time.
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It takes about 10 hours for Brothership to hit its stride, which isn’t that long by RPG standards, but feels like an eternity for the bros. By the time I executed my 10,000th Excellent hammer swing, I was starting to feel less “Let’s-a go” and more “Mamma mia.” It was right around the time I started fantasizing about playing the other Mario & Luigi games instead that I unlocked my first Battle Plug, and suddenly, everything changed.
Battle Plugs Are A Game Changer
Battle Plugs are brilliant. They’re swappable buffs that change the effect of your attacks, enhance your defensive abilities, or let you use extra actions for free. The most basic plugs will enhance your attacks with elemental damage or status effects, but as you progress further into the game you unlock plugs with niche effects designed to give you an edge in specific battles.
The coolest thing about battle plugs is discovering how they synergize together. There’s a ton of battle plug combos to discover by mixing and matching different plugs. If you equip Attack Boost, which gives your jumps and hammers an extra hit, and Kaboom Attack, which creates AOE waves of damage when you execute an Excellent attack, your Kabooms will turn into Boosted Kaboom, and send out a second wave of AOE damage.
I’ve found ten battle plug combos and a few other plug combinations that synergize well together without adding a new effect. There may be more, but Brothership doesn’t reveal the combos until you’ve discovered them yourself.
Finding new combos is exciting, and it gets even more complex and interesting once you start to unlock additional copies of the same plug. Two copies of Surprise Iron Ball will make an even bigger spike ball fall on an enemy after an attack, and adding those two copies to a copy of Kaboom Attack will make a giant spike ball fall on all the enemies. With battle plugs you can turn a simple hammer attack into a status-exploding multi-hit elemental super hammer swing, and I think that’s neat.
Plugs Keep Combat From Getting Stale
I am, admittedly, not the world’s biggest turn-based RPG fan. Even the most beloved turn-based classics turn me off after a while. But it’s taken me close to 60 hours to finish Brothership and I never got bored of its combat because of how much depth battle plugs add.
That’s something new for the Mario & Luigi series. It always relied on its real-time elements to keep things interesting, while offering a limited selection of attacks and Bros. Abilities to use. Plugs add a whole new dimension to battles that the series has never had.
Swapping plugs in and out based on the state of the battlefield and what your particular needs are at any given time makes a huge difference. You can grind out every battle until your eyes roll back in your head, or you can make smart use of your Kabooms, Attack Boosts, and Anti-Flying Specialist plugs and make short work of most fights – and feel like a genius while doing it.
There are 45 battle plugs that you’ll unlock in groups of three or four, plus some you’ll earn from completing side quests. Don’t miss the quest for Anti-Glohm Specialist when you see it pop up, that one is very useful late game.
Plugs have a limited number of uses before they go on cooldown, so the game won’t even let you set up your favorite build and just leave it. It sounds frustrating, but it’s a genius decision that forces you to constantly engage with the game’s best mechanic. In the longer boss fights, planning out when to use each plug so that the correct ones are off cooldown at the right time is crucial.
Equipping the Auto 1-Up and Deluxe Auto right before taking lethal damage will save you an entire turn you would have otherwise had to use to feed your KO’d brother a 1-Up mushroom, and saving the Damage Shield for the part of the fight where the boss becomes enraged and does extra damage can save your life.
Battle plugs increase the skill ceiling of Brothership immensely, and complicate its combat beyond anything the other Mario & Luigi games have offered. It’s a shame it takes so long to unlock this essential mechanic, but it’s well worth the wait. Not only are battle plugs my favorite thing about Brothership, they might just be the most interesting battle mechanic in any turn-based RPG.
Mario & Luigi: Brothership is the first new entry in the RPG spin-off series since 2015’s Paper Jam. The plumbers board the island-ship hybrid Shipshape Island to explore all that Concordia has to offer.