Musing: The BIS Remake & the Future of Mario & Luigi



Well, that's not wordy.
Sarcasm aside, this game, as a fan of the series and the original game, is puzzling.

Actually, the better word might be "baffling." It was one thing to remake Superstar Saga, which at that point had only been recently playable on the Wii U's Virtual Console, assuming you were fine with not being able to play it on-the-go. For AlphaDream to remake the very first game of the series after the painfully mediocre and unoriginal Paper Jam was... nice, for lack of a better word. Plus, it came with a neat side story centered on an ordinary Goomba leading fellow minions in search of Bowser.

Ultimately, Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions (or just SS DX) financially performed only as well as a 3DS remake of a Game Boy Advance game could when another Mario game called Super Mario Odyssey was right around the corner. "Well" as in not even 80,000 copies.

Yeah. That's... pretty bad, to put it lightly.

At the very least, it was a good idea. While it may have been a better idea to remake Superstar Saga for the Switch instead, that may have been a transition AlphaDream either couldn't afford, was unwilling to undergo (and stuck to what they knew with the 3DS), or both.

A year later came what was the final nail in the coffin in the form of another remake: Bowser's Inside Story + Bowser Jr.'s Journey (or just BIS DX, because that name is seriously just ridiculous). It not only performed worse financially, but it's also one of the worst-selling Mario games ever. Ever.

Here's the real kicker about this to me, though. Remaking Bowser's Inside Story at all was completely unnecessary. Not only is the original fine the way it is, but it was also – and still is – playable on every Nintendo system with "DS" in the name. The fact they still went ahead with BIS DX is mind-boggling, especially when you take into consideration that the original sold over 4.5 million copies (the series' highest). In other words, a lot of people already had the original DS version.
Were they so far into its development that AlphaDream just released it anyway, despite the poor sales of SS DX? Were they blinded by BIS's record as the series' top-selling game and think a remake would get them back on track? Were there any plans to make a Mario & Luigi 6 at all? Either way, it was a poor decision, regardless of how things turned out for AlphaDream.


So, moving on, the future of the series has been pretty bleak since AlphaDream went bankrupt. That being said, that doesn't at all mean the series is kaput. Heck, Nintendo recently filed a trademark in Argentina for Mario & Luigi. While that could just be Nintendo protecting one of its IPs, as put by Liam Doolan of Nintendo Life, there's hope. Considering the series' success in the past, a sixth installment developed by a subsidiary for release on the Switch in the next two or three years isn't unrealistic. There's an abundance of potential for what could be done, preferably something with its own identity but doesn't stray too far from what made the first titles (mainly SS and BIS) as memorable as they are.

That about does it for this musing. Next musings will be fun brainstorming for what I'd like to see in a hypothetical Mario & Luigi 6 and some thoughts about Paper Mario.


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