Bowser's Inside Story Review Page 2

22 Oct 2009 at 17:02:53 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (DS)

What doesn't work quite so well is the flow of the overworld. There's rarely a time when you feel safe, or that you can rest; you pretty much travel from one dungeon to the next.  Shops are accessed infrequently and with very little in the way of personality unless you've just discovered a new one. In fact, you only ever really come across a town, or even a location where you can just stop and talk to NPCs, towards the last third of the game. It somewhat works for a DS game as you'll likely be playing it in bursts anyway, but it's not ideal.

The rest of the game is divided largely into combat and mini-games. Combat is, as mentioned above, a mixture between RPG combat and timing – you choose an attack and use timing to boost its power. With Mario's jumping, tapping the appropriate button just as he's about to land on the enemy causes him to inflict more damage and jump a second time. With Bowser's fire breath, you need to press a button just as he finishes inhaling to unleash maximum damage; pushing early inflicts less, and failing to push a button at all results in him inhaling to much and coughing for minimal damage. Defence is dealt with in much the same way – Bowser can either punch to knock attacks away, or hide in his shell to block threats dropping on him from above, while Mario and Luigi either jump or deflect attacks with their hammers, and it's up to you to not only get the timing right but use the correct brother, and it's not always clear which one the attack is going to hit. Again, there are grades of timing; jumping may dodge an attack, but if you time it better the next time, you might actually land on the enemy and inflict some damage as they pass underneath. Again, it's all at its best when the two otherwise disparate "worlds" - inside and outside of Bowser - combine, when Bowser uses a Vacuum attack to suck enemies into his stomach for the Mario Bros. to fight.

It's both good and bad. On the one hand, you feel more involved in battles, and there's a lot of trepidation when meeting a new, high-level enemy – you need to adjust to their attack patterns quickly if you don't want to take loads of damage. On the other hand, it can be intensely irritating when you've learned a foe's attack patterns and know they're not going to hit you, but they have high health, long attacks, and there are lots of them. In these cases, battles are a foregone conclusion but nonetheless take a minute or two to resolve. It feels a little harsh to whine about this as it's a problem that's always been with the series, but there are a few tweaks that could make it a lot less annoying. There's another type of battle which I shan't spoil, but these are usually reserved for certain bosses. They normally have a few quirks of their own and use the stylus and microphone to entertaining effect, although getting the timing right with the relative insensitivity of the microphone can also be a tad annoying.

And then there are the minigames, which are largely decent. These are generally played when you're in control of Mario and Luigi, and are usually timing based as you power up Bowser in some way. Perhaps you're hitting energy balls with hammers to power up his arm muscles. Maybe you're playing a vertical shooter akin to 1942 to boost adrenaline levels. Or perhaps you're redirecting pollen into cells in Bowser's nose in order to make him sneeze. If you're doing the latter, I pity you, because it's an abject nightmare and easily the worst minigame in Bowser's Inside Story. It's a good thing it's the only particularly bad one, because watching the brothers flail around under your stylus is like watching deaf people navigate through echolocation.

Perhaps the worst thing about the game, though, is that it never really reaches the heights of the rest of the series. There are none of Thousand Year Door's wonderful setpieces, and even the world feels a bit bland in comparison to the earlier titles – and all of this is a real shame, because it means I'm damning this with faint praise. As such, understand this: Bowser's Inside Story is a good game. It's got just about everything you'd want from an RPG starring the Mario Bros. and enough wonderful quirks of its own to make it worth a purchase. It's just pretty far from the best Mario RPG, and it still has the problems that the rest of the series does.

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