This review contains spoilers
- Graphics are nice, despite removing some personality (and also they're the same graphics from the other dozen M&L 3DS games).
- Joke's End music is better.
- Minimap on the bottom screen is a nice touch.
- The new field controls tried to make things less confusing for new players by making A always Mario and B always Luigi and in the process made them a thousand times more clunky. There's an elegant logic to the original field controls that take a little getting used to; in here you just keep mashing R to go through the ten different combinations (or use the touch screen, but then you can't see the map), and it doesn't even implement any of the streamlining (if A is always Mario and B is always Luigi, why do High Jump and Spin Jump have to be separate things? They could both be on the same one and you just press A or B; same for hand powers and back-bro hammer powers, especially since X always makes both of them do a normal jump) or quality-of-life features (being able to choose how many gulps of water to swallow and seeing remaining spit ammo on the HUD) that Partners in Time added over a decade earlier.
- Harder to overlook the casual transphobia coming back to the game 18 years later. The Beanstar, which can only be awoken by a voice of pure beauty, reacts violently when it hears the voice of Birdo -- and the reveal that underneath that dress was actually a Birdo (incidentally, the question of whether she consented to this plan to permanently lose her voice is not addressed at all; she's not really treated as a sentient being in this scene despite another Birdo having full lines of dialogue a few hours later) is immediately followed by her chasing a horrified Toad offscreen trying to kiss them. Then later another Birdo shows up (presumably not the same character? since this one still has her voice? but that could just be this game not bothering to make sense), and once again the joke is that the male character she's with (who hesitates before calling her a woman and arguably deadnames her) is uncomfortable with her romantic advances, at least publicly, and she refuses to back off. Queen Bean refers to Bowletta as "he... she... uh, IT!" The Luigi scene isn't that bad but the part where Cackletta and Fawful see Luigi's mustache and it's just a big joke can definitely be a bit uncomfortable. Most of this could have been fixed for the remake -- the Birdo whose voice was stolen could have been replaced with a Goomba or a Beanie (simultaneously avoiding questions of "wait why is this Birdo talking now? is this a different Birdo?") and some dialogue could have been altered a bit. They changed the Donkey Kong skeleton to a regular skeleton, changed Kamek to Dr. Toadley, and changed a line of Bowser's dialogue to remove a British slur, so they could have turned down the transphobia a bit if they wanted to but instead a localization team of twelve people in 2017 looked at this and said "yeah, this is all still fine."
- You can save after the final boss now, but not actually. The game state is still where it was before the final battle, with the castle town still permanently under attack. What's the point of that?
- Haven't played Bowser's Minions / Minion Quest yet; not sure if i will.
- Still a pretty good game overall, but this version doesn't do much to justify its existence, with any changes being a roughly equal mix of slightly better, slightly worse, and neutral (and some things that should have been changed being left alone).
- Joke's End music is better.
- Minimap on the bottom screen is a nice touch.
- The new field controls tried to make things less confusing for new players by making A always Mario and B always Luigi and in the process made them a thousand times more clunky. There's an elegant logic to the original field controls that take a little getting used to; in here you just keep mashing R to go through the ten different combinations (or use the touch screen, but then you can't see the map), and it doesn't even implement any of the streamlining (if A is always Mario and B is always Luigi, why do High Jump and Spin Jump have to be separate things? They could both be on the same one and you just press A or B; same for hand powers and back-bro hammer powers, especially since X always makes both of them do a normal jump) or quality-of-life features (being able to choose how many gulps of water to swallow and seeing remaining spit ammo on the HUD) that Partners in Time added over a decade earlier.
- Harder to overlook the casual transphobia coming back to the game 18 years later. The Beanstar, which can only be awoken by a voice of pure beauty, reacts violently when it hears the voice of Birdo -- and the reveal that underneath that dress was actually a Birdo (incidentally, the question of whether she consented to this plan to permanently lose her voice is not addressed at all; she's not really treated as a sentient being in this scene despite another Birdo having full lines of dialogue a few hours later) is immediately followed by her chasing a horrified Toad offscreen trying to kiss them. Then later another Birdo shows up (presumably not the same character? since this one still has her voice? but that could just be this game not bothering to make sense), and once again the joke is that the male character she's with (who hesitates before calling her a woman and arguably deadnames her) is uncomfortable with her romantic advances, at least publicly, and she refuses to back off. Queen Bean refers to Bowletta as "he... she... uh, IT!" The Luigi scene isn't that bad but the part where Cackletta and Fawful see Luigi's mustache and it's just a big joke can definitely be a bit uncomfortable. Most of this could have been fixed for the remake -- the Birdo whose voice was stolen could have been replaced with a Goomba or a Beanie (simultaneously avoiding questions of "wait why is this Birdo talking now? is this a different Birdo?") and some dialogue could have been altered a bit. They changed the Donkey Kong skeleton to a regular skeleton, changed Kamek to Dr. Toadley, and changed a line of Bowser's dialogue to remove a British slur, so they could have turned down the transphobia a bit if they wanted to but instead a localization team of twelve people in 2017 looked at this and said "yeah, this is all still fine."
- You can save after the final boss now, but not actually. The game state is still where it was before the final battle, with the castle town still permanently under attack. What's the point of that?
- Haven't played Bowser's Minions / Minion Quest yet; not sure if i will.
- Still a pretty good game overall, but this version doesn't do much to justify its existence, with any changes being a roughly equal mix of slightly better, slightly worse, and neutral (and some things that should have been changed being left alone).