This is the downfall of the Mario and Luigi series, an absolutely pointless game with a ton of wasted potential, less replayability, and overall the reason to NOT get a 3DS at the time. I have to ask, why this game? Why remake this game? Why not the one you guys skipped before it? Partners in Time is such a mixed bag in a lot of areas that you could have easily made more enjoyable if AlphaDream chose to focus their time on that one. But here we are. This game on its own is fundamentally the same game as the original with a bit of changes here in there, the changes range from astronomically huge to they changed the creative toad designs into the stale bread generic toad design. Visually I think this game really is beautiful, but with great visuals come cheap performance, this game runs at a solid 30fps, while the original ran at a clean 60fps. If you think that's not a huge difference then maybe you should play both back to back like I did and realize that this remake is not consistent in its timing windows. A lot of the game is just slower and more drawn out than the original with battles taking longer only because the slow battle transition animation has to play every time. If you think the original was easy you have not played the remake, they somehow made it more easy to play with damage values being reduced and you earning more and more from battles than you would have playing the original.
It's just... disappointing, that this was the game that made an entire gaming corporation go bankrupt, and it killed off this series entirely. If you haven't played Bowsers Inside Story and you have a 3DS, just find the DS one, ignore this, it serves no purpose in the market.

And so wraps up my adventures through the 3DS Mario & Luigi games. To start as I mean to go on, I'll admit that Bowser's Inside Story has always been my least favorite Mario & Luigi game, and I never actually intended to play this remake. the only reason I did is because, while buying the first game's remake on Amazon, I saw this one was half the price I've seen if for anywhere ever, so I figured I may as well snag a deal as an excuse to try this out and give this game another chance for the first time in 7+ years. It took me 43 hours to play through the Japanese version, and I beat both the main Mario & Luigi adventure as well as the both the main and post-game content of the Bowser Jr's Journey side game. The game doesn't keep hard time stats for each mode (confusingly enough, as the first remake did), but I'd wager that the main game took me about 30 hours, and Bowser Jr's Journey took me about 13.

The game's premise is, as the title implies, inside Bowser. Fawful, the vengeful minion of the first game's main antagonist, is back with a plan for revenge all his own, and feeds Bowser a mushroom that gives him the ability to vacuum up things down into his gullet. He then tricks Bowser into unleashing it inside Peach's castle, vacuuming up the Mario Bros and knocking Bowser unconscious. Fawful being rid of his biggest obstacles to conquering the Mushroom Kingdom, he sets to work in his evil plan. Bowser sets out to stop him in the overworld, as the Bros go around Bowser's insides to help augment his abilities. It's' an interesting premise, but one that divides the game into two halves that don't often meet.

Bowser's parts are on the overworld using a top-down view, while the Bros' internal parts are a side-scrolling view. Sometimes there will be enemies or bosses who Bowser can suck up minions of and then the Bros will fight them, but there's no back and forth between the two halves most of the time. The Bros finish their internal fight and then Bowser's part starts up again. Given the Bros mostly fight as they always do, and their side-scrolling dungeons are much more aggravating to navigate than the top-down sections, I always enjoyed Bowser's parts far more. Bowser's fights also go a lot faster, in general, but the combat in this game is a whole other story.

Where the previous remake felt like there were a lot of balancing changes, I really didn't notice that here, at least not in a positive way. Normal enemies feel very powerful, especially for the Bros. You're constantly using Bro Moves to help defeat enemies in a timely fashion, and you wanna fight lots of stuff because otherwise you're gonna start falling behind in power. I remember this being a problem in the original game, and it's just as much one in this game. Where in the previous two M&L games (that being the remake of Superstar Saga and Paper Jam), normal enemies could be taken out quickly with normal attacks most of the time, that is a sure-fire way to make battles take FOREVER in this game. It makes each half's section feel very drawn out, and it makes going back to the other half disorienting as you remember how to do the special move timings again (albeit they are fairly generous). Bowser's special moves require using the touch-screen while his normal moves require the face buttons, and constantly going back and forth between them is really annoying. It's not even like items that restore BP (this game's mana) are that uncommon either. It's super easy to purchase and carry around scads and scads of them, or even just use the ones the game throws at you for free, so there's very little element of resource conservation in how often the game encourages speeding up combat with Bro Moves. The combat is more or less the same as it's always been, but this game's fights last SO long that it really drags down the pace of the adventure in ways that I really can't excuse given the previous two games before this and how they easily could've rebalanced this game to fix that.

The writing is definitely far from its strongest in this game as well. It was a neat idea to bring back Fawful, but he's just not a very intersting villain. He's always steps ahead of the main characters, and it feels like he's leading them around by the nose. It doesn't help that both Fawful AND Bowser are far less entertainingly written in Japanese either. Bowser is much more just a more generic feeling somewhat eccentric villain, compared to how he's flinging around lines in English like "Did someone call for the King of AWESOME?!" That's more a tip to the English localization team than an explicit mark against the game overall though. What are explicit marks I hold against the game, however, are how uninteresting the overall story is compared to Superstar Saga (and being the other remake, this game puts itself in direct competition with that game's pacing, narrative, etc).

The intrigue and back-and-forth between the Bros and Cackletta has been replaced with Bowser's overworld misadventures. Bowser's own adventures are fine (and I remember wishing we'd gotten just a Bowser game with no Bros, back when I played this originally), but they have trouble standing on their own compared to the large, listless Bros sections. Bowser talks, but Mario & Luigi don't, and it's not exactly like they interact with many NPCs inside Bowser's body other than Starlow. She's effectively a personification of Nintendo's love of over-tutorializing EVERYTHING in the late 2000's to early 2010's, and she has very little to her character beyond just telling Mario & Luigi how to approach the latest power they've been given, and there is a LOT of that. Even with the fast-forward button the remake adds to speed it up, there is a LOT more outright talking at you that you are forced to watch compared to the previous two games. It makes the Bros parts constantly feel like the fun being taken away and the overall pace of everything grinding to a halt, and it also doesn't help that the Bowser parts are heavily stacked near the front of the game while the Bros have far more parts in the 2nd half. That's not to say the game NEVER made me laugh, but this is definitely far weaker when put next to the last couple games in the series, where originally it's main point of comparison was Partner's in Time.

Aside from the normal stuff mentioned above, there're the Giant Bowser fights as well as the mini-game sections in Bowser's body. Bowser's parts are occasionally broken up with touch-screen mini-games that the Bros are activating inside his body. Activating super strength, helping him fly, helping him run faster. They're not terrible, but they are far too frequent, and come off as padding out the game's clock rather than varying up the pacing of the other gameplay. The Giant Bowser fights aren't as bad as I remember them being, but they're still not very welcome. It all being touch-screen based and all about holding the 3DS sideways, it is very impractical to hold when playing on any XL model of 3DS, and some of the attacks (especially the ones based on rapidly hitting the screen) have some serious input-detection problems. I'd personally prefer there be none of these at all, but they're not as bad as I remember (however they're still inferior to Paper Jam's mech battles).

As far as general changes to the remake go, there aren't many. There are SOME balancing changes, but they're not super noticeable compared to how Superstar Saga's were. There aren't really many quality of life changes either, as Inside Story already did away with the position-switching of Superstar Saga, and it's mostly down to menu design being tightened up a little as well as the emergency guard and universal jump button features coming back (although it was changed from X in the previous game to now being Y, which is difficult to get used to). There are even some perks that Superstar Saga DX added that were not carried over to this, such as the ability to pick an overworld ability (like the spin jump) via the touch-screen,or the ability to place pins on the mini-map for places of interest (likely because of how both screens are used for movement, one for Bowser and one for the Bros). The main perks here are the updated graphics and music, although I didn't really find any of the music in this game particularly good outside of the Bowser Jr's Journey mode.

Speaking of Bowser Jr's Journey, let's talk about that for a bit, as it's the part of the game I definitely enjoyed most. The premise here is that it's what Bowser Jr was doing while Bowser was out fighting Fawful, and revolves around a similar kind of bildungsroman coming of age story as Bowser's Minions did, but a bit more seriously told this time. It fumbles a bit in the second half, and I saw the outcome of the set-up coming from a mile away (and I usually can never see where a story is going), but it was still a story that was able to touch me with how it was told. It's a fairly thoughtful look at the kind of brat you'd be if someone as self-important yet overly affectionate as Bowser raised you, and Bowser Jr coming to terms with the responsibilities he has to now carry. It lacks the number or quality of comedic moments from Bowser's Minions, but it's still a story I enjoyed. An added perk is that you can entirely ignore the Bros mode to play this, where you needed to beat Superstar Saga to unlock Bowser's Minions' last levels.

It's hard to call it an outright mechanical improvement on the Bowser's Minions mode from the M&L 1 remake, but it's mostly good. It's still the "set up and watch them go" simple strategy game, but with more added mid-fight as well as in the planning stages. You can now actually position your fighters on a 3 x 5 grid, so you can position your troops of the 3 rock-paper-scissors types to best fit the army you'll be facing (as you can reference they're layouts before each battle). There are no longer different commanders, but now 8 different sub-commanders. Bowser Jr can toggle pre-fight between a melee, ranged, and flying character, and he'll get a new 4th attack for each form (but his other 3 are always the same). Each of the 8 sub-commanders gets two abilities of their own to use as well tied to their own resource point wheel, opening up when/how you can use them in battle.

It's got a couple issues like the difficulty curve being a lot harsher than Bowser's Minions due to the more advanced toolset (at least in part, anyhow, sometimes fights are just SUPER hard and you've gotta grind a bit to get ready for them). Another issue is that one sub-commander is very obviously far better than all the others due to one of his activateable abilities, so despite each sub-commander giving a different army-wide passive buff, there's no real reason to use anyone but the best one. Other than that, it's a pretty long campaign (if not somewhat because of the grinding I had to do) that is a great palate cleanser for the main game's pacing issues, although you sadly can't access the mode from the in-game menu anymore. You've gotta back out of the Bros mode to get into this.

As one last note, this game does have amiibo functionality, but nothing remotely close to how the last game had it. You can just scan any Mario series amiibo to get some extra beans to use for passive buffs to your characters. Nothing nearly as extreme as the locked (albeit very simple and unimpressive) battle stages that Superstar Saga included.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I only paid 1500 yen for this, and I'm glad I did. It seemed like an unnecessary remake at the time it was announced, and playing through it, that's what it feels like too. Inside Story could already be played on a 3DS in its original form, didn't need the quality of life improvements Superstar Saga did, and was far from the strongest entry in the series to begin with (despite it being the highest selling). In early 2019, it does not impress, and the relative strength of the Bowser Jr's Journey side-addition is nowhere near enough to justify buying this at full price. If you're a fan of the original, this is certainly the definitive version of the game, but not by very much. While this certainly isn't a bad game, you've got much better options for cheaper prices in the Mario & Luigi series on 3DS.

I am rating this game as a remake. As a game on itself, it is still just as baller ass as the original.

This remake is a pick your poison type thing. There are improvements in this remake like fast forwarding, skipping tutorials, new songs that schmack and a new game mode, however not as much as it could, like adding saving without a save block. Also its in 30fps, which you get used to but will definitely mess you up. The visuals are up to you, I prefer the OG mostly but the new look does look pretty sick at times.
Little nitpicks:
- Why the FUCK did they change the title theme?
- The giant battles are flipped the other way for some reason
- The music is more consistent than what i've heard from the Superstar Saga remake, but that also means that none of the music is a super huge improvement over the original OST, its either slightly better or slightly worse.

This feels like an unnecessary game! Yeah the graphic update was good but for a lot of things I prefered the original better! The game and the Giant Bowser animations ran at 30 FPS, kinda annoying but not a big deal. Bowser Jr's Journey was nice but like Bowser's minions, the game mechanic bored me after a while. AlphaDream had to remake Partners in Time first, it was a bad move to release a remake of a DS game on the 3DS that is retrocompatible and moreover the era of the 3DS was coming to an end. I'm sorry that this game was AlphaDream's reason of Bankruptucy. I really hope one day, we will have new M&L games... It won't happen but never say never!

The graphics are much better in this version than I love how it ended the 3DS’s game cycle. Bowser’s inside story 3D’s a lot of fun and is a good remake of one of my favorite RPG games. Bowser Jr.’s Journey is also kind of fun. The best part about it is some of the dialogue is throughout the story, it is hilarious. The gameplay itself is not the best, but then it is still fun, and I played through the whole thing.

I think the best addition to this version is the fact that they included a digital soundtrack of both this one and the DS version.