Mario & Luigi: Dream Team

What happens when you fall asleep and your dream becomes a battlefield? Mario & Luigi: Dream Team builds its entire existence on this playful question – here Luigi sleeps like a log and his dreams materialize into fantastic worlds through which Mario fights his way in a battle against the bat-like villain Antasma and the eternal pest Bowser. It is the most bizarre, most inventive, and perhaps most personal chapter of this beloved spin-off of the hopping brothers.

The Mario & Luigi series is famous for cleverly combining turn-based RPG battles with nimble action elements – in every attack and defense you must correctly time your button press, so combat never slides into mechanical routine. Dream Team adds a split between the waking world and the dream dimension. In dreams, Luigi multiplies into a swarm of copies, forms platforms and puzzles, and the game fully utilizes both 3DS screens – the upper one for the dream world, the lower one for the sleeping Luigi, whom you literally poke with the stylus.

Behind the game stands studio AlphaDream, the resident creators of the entire series, who always let their distinctive humor shine through. The script bursts with wit, parodies genre clichés, and turns the perpetually frightened Luigi into an unexpected star. It is Luigi who drives most of the ideas, which makes Dream Team something of a celebration of the eternally overlooked brother in green.

Visually, the game benefits from a clean, colorful aesthetic, and the dream sections offer monumental scale moments where the screen tilts and you control a giant version of Luigi. These "Giant Battles" using the console's tilt are among the most striking things the handheld had to offer.

Dream Team is proof that even a lighthearted spin-off series can be inventive and technically ambitious. For 3DS owners it was one of the titles that fully demonstrated the possibilities of the two screens and the 3D effect. It is a game that does not take itself deadly seriously, and yet you feel craftsmanly care in every detail.

Why play: A witty and inventive RPG that turns Luigi's dreams into a playground of ideas and perfectly utilizes the 3DS hardware.