The esteemed plumber brother duo Mario and Luigi could have been edgier and more rugged in their newest game, but Nintendo said otherwise. Read on to find out more about how the art direction for Mario & Luigi: Brothership went!
Mario & Luigi Was Rough And Rugged Early On
Experimenting With Different Styles
Image from Nintendo and Acquire
In an Ask the Developer article on the Nintendo website published December 4th, Mario & Luigi: Brothership developers Acquire said that the famous brothers were edgier and more rugged at some point in development, but Nintendo thought that it was too different and it would have lost the Mario and Luigi identity.
The developers interviewed were Akira Otani and Tomoki Fukushima from Nintendo’s Entertainment Planning & Development Department, and Haruyuki Ohashi and Hitomi Furuta from Acquire. On their quest to develop “3D visuals that would bring out the unique appeal” of the series and to make it stand out from other Mario-titled games, Acquire took a huge detour, experimenting and looking for a unique style—and thus, edgy Mario and Luigi were born.
“And in our search for a new Mario & Luigi style, at one point we ended up trying to present an edgier, more rugged Mario instead…” designer Furuta shared with a laugh. Afterwards, they received feedback from Nintendo that the art direction should still be identifiable by fans as distinctly Mario & Luigi, then called a meeting to reassess the direction. To guide Acquire, Nintendo presented a document describing what defines Mario and Luigi in the series. “Although we'd enthusiastically pitched this rugged version of Mario, when I considered it from a
player's perspective, I started to worry about whether it really represented the Mario that players would want to play,” she added. With Nintendo’s clear direction, they finally got their answer.
“We were able to narrow down our focus to how we could combine two things: the appeal of illustrations featuring, for example, solid outlines and bold, black eyes, and the charm of pixel animations depicting the two characters moving around comically in all directions. I think that's when we finally started to develop an art style that's unique to this game.”
Nintendo’s Otani chimed in that “While we wanted Acquire to have their own unique style, we also wanted them to preserve what defines Mario. I think it was a period when we were experimenting with how those two things could coexist.”
A Challenging Development
Acquire is a studio known for less colorful and more serious games such as the JRPG Octopath Traveler and the action-adventure series Way of the Samurai. Furuta even admitted that if the team were left to their own devices, they would subconsciously move toward heavier directions akin to darker RPGs. It was also a challenge for Acquire to be creating a game from a globally popular IP, for they rarely ever created games with other companies’ characters.
In the end, it all worked out for the better. “Although we were still getting to grips with the mood in the Mario & Luigi series, we decided on this direction so we wouldn't forget that it's a stage for fun, chaotic adventures. This doesn't only apply to the game's world, but we learned a lot from Nintendo's unique design perspective about making things easier to see and understand. The world turned out brighter and easier to play due to the insights we gained.”
Source:
Ask the Developer Vol. 15, Mario & Luigi: Brothership – Chapter 2
