Nintendo fans were given a new Mario & Luigi game this year. I’m, of course, referring to Mario & Luigi: Brothership by development studio Acquire. The RPG was first announced in June of this year before finally seeing its release into the marketplace in November. However, while you have a game design that very much resembles the characters from past installments of this RPG series, that wasn’t always the case. The developers working on this title seemed initially interested in bringing out a Mario design that gave it some edge.
Mario and Luigi were almost a little more rugged than in the final game. Thanks to VGC, we’re finding out that some of the developers behind the title were asked about their time creating the concept art of Mario & Luigi: Brothership on the official Nintendo website. During the conversation, Hitomi Furuta, the designer for Acquire, noted that she made an edgier-looking character design.
However, upon presenting these ideas to Nintendo, they were met with some outlines of how the characters should be viewed that would stay in line with the Mario & Luigi series. It was after these discussions that Acquire felt that they should take Nintendo’s advice and make changes. Instead of the rugged look, we were given a design similar to past designs, such as solid outlines and bold black eyes.
Our challenge was to develop 3D visuals that would bring out the unique appeal of the Mario & Luigi series and differentiate it from other Mario games. I’m ashamed to say it, but we weren’t conscious of that when development started, which led to us making a huge detour. 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… (Laughs)
Then we received feedback from Nintendo that we should aim to make the art direction identifiable by fans as belonging to the Mario & Luigi series. After that, 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. – Hitomi Furuta
Regardless, the article did present the original concept art featuring the iconic character duo’s edgier and rugged design. Would you have liked to see this design portrayed in the final game? It certainly is a bit of a step away from the final design.
At any rate, Mario & Luigi: Brothership is now available for players to enjoy. Players can pick up a copy of the game on Nintendo Switch. Meanwhile, if you have yet to pick up a copy of this game, you can view a trailer of it embedded below.
