Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time

The pacing - direction, plot development, whatever you want to call it - of Partners in Time is all wrong. "Dungeon" areas (which are not always indoors, but are field areas in which enemies can be encountered) are too large, numerous, and populous. The links between them are also haphazard at best, with, as Brad mentioned, what amounts to a one-at-a-time sequence of rooms. On the surface this may seem like a non-issue but the story's sparsity makes most of the game feel unnecessarily claustrophobic. The game balance means that if you get fed up with constant fighting (which, given enemy abundance, can take forever), it's easy to skip some encounters, but as in any RPG this is a very delicate line.

Combat is really fun at first, but eventually becomes tiring. The four-character dynamic isn't all that different from the two-character dynamic, and with the exception of Bros. Items, the quartet actually has less abilities than Saga's duo. As for these Bros. Items, a few of them are easy and efficient, but the vast majority are just way more work than they're worth; having to coordinate four button-presses, as we should all know from Simon, stretches the limit of human reactivity.

The small-scale production of dialog scenes is pretty good. Most of the screen time in these scenes is of Mario and Luigi playing with their baby selves, and this all has great accompanying animation and sound effects. But I definitely feel like the writers lost the forest for the trees with this, in that the bigger picture is terribly mismanaged.

Still, there are parts of the game that are pretty fun, most notably boss encounters. It's actually somewhat startling, transitioning from hopelessly-easy normal enemies to hectic boss fights, which especially in the later game require pinpoint coordination of dodging and counterattacking just to survive. For this reason I would say if you enjoyed Superstar Saga and have 10-15 hours to blow, you could do worse than Partners in Time. But the GBA game is definitely the better of the two.

Progress: Beat final boss