Ranking the top 101 Nintendo games: No. 90, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
The Mario & Luigi series has produced some fun games, but it took a playable Bowser to reach greatness.
I’m ranking the top-101 Nintendo developed/published games of all-time, and you can read about the thought process behind game eligibility and list construction here. You can keep up with the rankings so far through this link.
Back in the spring of 1996, in the waning days of the SNES being the primary focus of Nintendo, a collaboration with Squaresoft released. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars was the first Mario game that was also a role-playing game: Mario and his universe had already appeared in many other forms — traditionally platformers but also puzzles, educational games, a racing game — but this was something else entirely. The first time would also be the last time with Squaresoft, whose relationship with Nintendo would change when the developer moved on to Sony and the first Playstation, which would be the home of the next three Final Fantasy installments.
From there, Nintendo’s in-house developer Intelligent Systems, the creator of Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and other series you’ll eventually read about on this list, took over Mario RPG development, in a reboot series for the Nintendo 64 named Paper Mario. It largely followed the plot structure — or, more accurately, the MacGuffin structure — of Legend of the Seven Stars, but reinserted Bowser as the baddie instead of as a companion. Nintendo didn’t stop there, though: before the second Paper Mario title released on the GameCube, a second Mario RPG series released for the Game Boy Advance.
This was Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, developed by the now-defunct AlphaDream, which was once comprised heavily of former Squaresoft developers. While AlphaDream, as a third-party developer, originally created more than just Mario & Luigi titles, the series ended up being their primary focus before they declared bankruptcy in 2019.
The Mario & Luigi games were well-received, so it’s no wonder there were a number of them. The standout of the bunch, though, is easily the third one: Bowser’s Inside Story, released for the Nintendo DS in 2009. Superstar Saga was real good, and a different way of playing a Mario RPG, as it had a top-down view and a battle system that, yes, involved timing-based button presses as is the Mario RPG standard, but also had you using different buttons for different actions. Hammer and Jump being mapped to different buttons during a battle, for instance, be it for offensive or defensive purposes, rather than having to select them from a menu. The followup, Partners in Time, used many of the same mechanics but introduced Baby Mario and Baby Luigi into the mix: it’s good, but also mostly more of the same in a way that can wear on you.
(I felt this way over a decade ago when reviewing Bowser’s Inside Story: time has not softened my stance on the Mario & Luigi games that preceded this one sometimes feeling like a chore even when they are, overall, fun.)
Bowser’s Inside Story, though, completely changed the way the game works by making Bowser the focus. The game is split into three types of play. You will control Mario and Luigi in the traditional top-down view of the series. Or, you control them in a 2D platform view that takes place inside of Bowser — do not get hung up on the mechanics of how Mario and Luigi manage to fit inside Bowser on what appears to be a cellular level, and other science facts.
The third and best way you will play the game is as Bowser himself. Whereas Mario and Luigi work in tandem to traverse their environment — Luigi squishes Mario with a hammer so Mario can fit through small spaces and then reach switches, for instance — Bowser travels alone, unless you count brute force as a traveling companion. And also fire. Bowser burns his way through old forests, he smashes his way through rocky paths, he punches everything in his way until it conforms to his needs of the moment. It’s a very different — and more aggressive — style of role-playing than what Mario and Luigi tend to get into, and also more fun and more rewarding. After all, Mario and Luigi weren’t about to (literally, not figuratively) punch their way through an ocean in order to forcibly slam a ship into place in a bay in order to create a bridge from which Bowser could retrieve his captured Koopa minions.
Bowser has the strength to do things like move a galleon to where he wants because Mario and Luigi are manipulating his body from the inside. They aren’t controlling Bowser like a puppet. Nothing that weird. No, they’re just continually whacking shiny power balls of unknown origin and design into Bowser’s muscles from the inside of his body, causing him to temporarily be capable of incredible, impossible feats of strength. Normal stuff.
These events are the most fun you’ll have with Mario and Luigi in the game, as the timing-based mini-games with the stylus tend to work well as you settle in a rhythm with them. The platforming you do inside of Bowser is fine, but is easily the weakest part of the game: it’s a shame there is so much of it over 20-25 hours, when you consider how great all of the Bowser-specific stuff feels. The prevalence of the Mario and Luigi platforming is why this game rates at the back-end of this list rather than in a more prominent place. All I want to be doing at all times is controlling Bowser, and that feeling can take away from the Not Bowser portions of the title. That still averages out to one of the 100-or-so best things Nintendo has ever had their name on, though. So, it’s hard to complain too much.
My absolute favorite part of the game? That’s when Bowser is under extreme duress, and his health is flagging because of some story-based thing. Like, say, when his own castle is dropped on his head. Mario and Luigi do their thing to increase Bowser’s strength, but they do it to such a degree in these moments that Bowser grows to gigantic proportions so you can participate in a Kaiju battle with him. That castle that fell on his head? It’s also a fully operational battle station, and you now fight it while Bowser is also that size.
In this form, Bowser punches, he breathes fire, he fights hordes of enemies coming at him from his foe, and he tries to deplete their health bar before his empties. You also play this with your DS in “book” form, where the two screens are side-by-side instead of top and bottom. I don’t think a video necessarily does how playing this feels justice, but all the same, here’s Bowser facing off against a tower that looks like a person, that is also mostly impervious to damage until you can square up Bowser’s fist with its face:
Like the Paper Mario series, the Mario & Luigi games do a great job of poking fun at the RPG genre and its conventions. It’s stuffed with inside jokes for fans of other Mario franchises, and the writing is genuinely funny, especially whenever the big bad Fawful shows up on screen to deliver utterly nonsensical threats to you. Bowser being around so often helps, too, as he’s not a silent protagonist like Mario and Luigi are — both of whom speak sounds more than they speak words. Bowser, though, graces us with his thoughts, of which there are many: he’s not much of an internal dialogue kind of guy, and it only adds to both his and the game’s charm when he’s decided he doesn’t like something that’s happening to or around him.
Bowser’s Inside Story is the only Mario & Luigi title you need to play. That sounds harsher than it’s intended to be, but that’s the short of it. Superstar Saga and Partners in Time are both good, but they had their flaws at the time, and those are magnified now. Bowser’s Inside Story took care of most of those issues and added Bowser, sharper writing, more varied battles, and a Kaiju element to boot. This ended up being the peak of the Mario & Luigi franchise — followups did not reach the same heights, not even the crossover with Paper Mario — and while you can certainly play all of the titles within and enjoy yourself, if you’re strapped for time or cash or whatever, Bowser’s Inside Story is where you want to focus what you do have.
You can pick up this game either in its original DS form or in a 3DS re-release from 2019, which ended up being the last game AlphaDream developed. Personally, I prefer the more pixelated art style of the original to the smoother, less sprite-looking 2019 release, but YMMV, and it might be more convenient to track down a 3DS copy that also has additional content on it, too. Either way, it’s worth your time, be it your first or a revisit.
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