If you’ve been living under a rock for the last year and are craving a Mario RPG, then I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that Nintendo has put out three of them in the last 12 months, including fantastic remakes of Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. The bad news is that Mario & Luigi: Brothership – the only fully original adventure so far in this plumber roleplaying renaissance – is easily the worst of the bunch, and an incredibly frustrating return for a series I hold dear. Apart from its action-packed, turn-based battles, it fails in almost every way to recapture the magic of the best Mario & Luigi games while also clinging to their bad habits like ridiculously chatty dialogue, overbearing hand-holding, and boring, runtime-padding fetch quests. Couple that with shockingly bad performance issues that distract at nearly every turn, and the nearly 10-year wait for a brand new Mario & Luigi game hardly felt worth it by the time the credits rolled.

Having the Mario Bros. sail a giant island-ship hybrid to uncover and explore new islands is a great idea on paper, but in practice, navigation boils down to a pretty unspectacular ocean map where you pick the next destination you want to sail to and wait as you inch your way there, and the results are ultimately meaningless. I never felt any sense of discovery remotely approaching that of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, or even of the small open-ocean segment of Paper Mario: The Origami King. I instead felt like a kid in the backseat on a road trip, just wondering if we were there yet.

Speaking of kids, several choices in Brothership make it feel like Baby’s First RPG. It probably will be for plenty of kids out there, so that isn’t inherently a bad thing, but this is the rare game starring Mario that feels designed specifically for ages six to 12 rather than ages six to 66. The tutorials and dialogue are constantly holding your hand – for example, almost anytime you enter a new area, the camera slowly pans over to your objective and slowly pans back, followed by an excruciatingly long explanation from new assistant named Snoutlet, who basically spells out exactly what you need to do. The dialogue repeatedly reminds you of the overarching story and objective, and Brothership spends far too much of its already bloated 34-hour runtime rehashing the same tired notes. I lost count of how many times new characters were shocked to learn Mario and Luigi were on a mission to reconnect all of Concordia’s islands. Plus, the large font size means only roughly a dozen words tops can fit in a single dialogue bubble, so you’re always mashing the A button to get to the next line in these insufferably long scenes.

As a longtime fan of this series, though, I would’ve been able to tolerate a lot of technical roughness if it meant I was getting what I came for. Brothership isn’t outright bad in a vacuum, but it’s particularly disappointing because it fundamentally misunderstands the best elements of its own series, specifically in how it completely mishandles Luigi. In past Mario & Luigi adventures, Luigi follows right behind his older brother, and you platform and solve puzzles with the two of them as a unit: A to jump as Mario and B to leap as Luigi. When they split up, you seamlessly swap back and forth between the two. In Brothership’s overworld, though, Luigi feels more like an NPC ally than a second protagonist. He follows Mario at a disconnected, awkward distance, he can jump on his own without the press of a button, and many puzzles revolve around simply ordering Luigi to automatically do something for you. This approach is no worse than follower characters in other RPGs, but it loses the unique style of previous games and feels so watered down as a result.

The smartest new wrinkle in Brothership’s combat are Battle Plugs: equipable modifiers that impact Mario and Luigi’s power, defense, and more, comparable to if Paper Mario let you swap out which badges you were wearing at the start of each turn. Want to attack a whole group of enemies at once? Equip the Kaboom Attack Battle Plug to deal minor damage to every enemy adjacent to your main target. Or, if you want to deal some extra damage to one target, the Surprise Iron Ball Battle Plug lets you drop a spiked iron ball on the enemy you attacked. To make things even better, some bonuses chain together: If you have both of those Battle Plugs equipped at the same time, you’ll drop an iron ball on every enemy impacted by the shock wave of damage.

Many Battle Plugs work together in smart, surprising ways, and it’s one of the only areas of Brothership that doesn’t spell everything out to you and allows you to piece together these powerful combinations using your own logic. My main annoyance with Battle Plugs, however, is that they each have a limited number of uses before they need to recharge, and the only consistent way to kick off the recharge process is to exhaust them to zero. It can lead to awkward scenarios where you only have two or three uses on a Battle Plug left and no way to spend it before going into a major battle. It’s as if you needed to let your iPhone completely die before you could plug it in, and it feels a little clunky. Still, this mechanic makes the battles themselves some of the best in the series, and it’s a shame you have to sit through the rest of Brothership to play them.