During a new “Ask the Developer” interview with Nintendo, Mario & Luigi: Brothership Producer, Akira Otani spoke out about Mario & Luigi as a series and how, despite desires for the series to continue, there was a time the developers did give up on the series after Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam:
Otani | Prior to Brothership, Mario & Luigi Devs did Give up on the Series:
Akira Otani: The first game in the Mario & Luigi series was released in 2003 for Game Boy Advance. The Mario & Luigi games are Action RPGs characterised by having Mario and Luigi work together to progress in the game, and we like to call this genre “Brother Action RPG”. I think the series is well balanced and neatly packages just the right amount of action and puzzles, as well as a fun story and character reactions that are unique to the Mario series. This is the first new title in the series in nine years, since Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam in 2015.
People were more surprised than I expected, both in Japan and elsewhere. I think the biggest part of the surprise was that people didn’t expect any more of these games to be released, and now the series has been brought back.
Of course, for a long time, we’d been having a number of internal discussions about a new instalment in the series following Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam. We needed to aim for something new that would keep up with hardware advancements while maintaining the appeal of the classic Mario & Luigi games. It wasn’t easy to achieve both at the same time… We kept trying various things, but there was a time when we thought it might not be possible to make any more games in the series and considered giving up.
There were a lot of discussions, and eventually we decided to reach out to Acquire. After speaking a number of times with Ohashi-san, I felt that Acquire might be able to realise our dream of making Mario & Luigi in 3D, so we agreed to start joint development.
Of course, it was also important to keep that “Mario & Luigi-like” feeling, so we also had some former AlphaDream staff members who were involved in the development of previous titles in the series join the project.
For the full interview, why not click here to check out Ask the Developer Vol. 15, Mario & Luigi: Brothership – Chapter 1:
Ask the Developer | Mario & Luigi Brothership (Participating Developers)
- Akira Otani | Entertainment Planning & Development Division, Co-Production Group (Producer)
- Tomoki Fukushima | Entertainment Planning & Development Division, Co-Production Group (Associate Producer)
- Haruyuki Ohashi | Director, Acquire Corp.
- Hitomi Furuta | Designer, Acquire Corp. (Art Director)
