Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time is the sequel to the GBA game, Superstar Saga, and they’re both spiritual successors to the Paper Mario and Mario RPG games from Nintendo consoles. This is a more hands-on RPG than a Final Fantasy perhaps, requiring you to time button presses during battles in order to control special battle techniques. Overall, a great game, but you have to be willing to stare at Mushroom Kingdom characters for hours to play. This is not for Mario haters. Mario fans, however, will find lots of fan service and even more of Nintendo’s legendary localization courtesy NOA. One thing to watch for is how the presentation feels a little unbalanced at times. In fact, it almost feels like a GBA game at first, and a DS game more towards the end. Maybe to be expected for a game that was in development before the platform was finalized.

If you played Superstar Saga, you generally know what to expect of the mechanics. You have four playable characters this time around, that being Mario, Luigi, Baby Mario, and Baby Luigi. You spend most of the game controlling all four, but at times you’ll split up into teams of two in order to conquer some of the more clever puzzles in the game. By the time you reach the end of the game, the puzzles feel easy, because you often know exactly what to do as soon as you see a puzzle once you understand the physics of the moves you can do. It feels as though they’ve intentionally watered down the whole experience in order to avoid any frustrating moments. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is a matter of personal taste.

The battle system is far friendlier this time around, which is hard to imagine without experiencing it. Gone are the “spells” from the first game (Fire! Thunder!!), and in their place are items such as green shells that you can use on enemies by timing button presses to keep them in play. I found that some of the items kind of sat in my inventory for favor of more useful, easier to execute ones, so I think a little more time could have gone into making those items more compelling.

The premise is that mushroom-like “shroob” aliens have kidnapped Peach, and the Marios and Luigis from two timelines team up to get her back. The execution is a bit more original than the summary implies though. Parts of the story are surprisingly sinister for what you might expect from a Mario game, and that’s a big plus in my book. The story is easier to understand than that in Superstar, even though it’s significantly more complicated.

In the end, I give Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time four ‘nauts out of five for the average player. It gets a four point five if you’re a big fan of NOA’s talented localization team and the Mario universe.