If you’ve been living under a rock for the last year and are craving a Mario RPG, then I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that Nintendo has put out three of them in the last 12 months, including fantastic remakes of Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. The bad news is that Mario & Luigi: Brothership – the only fully original adventure so far in this plumber roleplaying renaissance – is easily the worst of the bunch, and an incredibly frustrating return for a series I hold dear. Apart from its action-packed, turn-based battles, it fails in almost every way to recapture the magic of the best Mario & Luigi games while also clinging to their bad habits like ridiculously chatty dialogue, overbearing hand-holding, and boring, runtime-padding fetch quests. Couple that with shockingly bad performance issues that distract at nearly every turn, and the nearly 10-year wait for a brand new Mario & Luigi game hardly felt worth it by the time the credits rolled.

Having the Mario Bros. sail a giant island-ship hybrid to uncover and explore new islands is a great idea on paper, but in practice, navigation boils down to a pretty unspectacular ocean map where you pick the next destination you want to sail to and wait as you inch your way there, and the results are ultimately meaningless. I never felt any sense of discovery remotely approaching that of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, or even of the small open-ocean segment of Paper Mario: The Origami King. I instead felt like a kid in the backseat on a road trip, just wondering if we were there yet.