Video Games

The Mario & Luigi Brothership developers are the team who made Octopath Traveler

We finally know who the new Mario & Luigi developers are, no thanks to Nintendo's continued trend of excessive secrecy

Josh Broadwell

Nintendo

Nintendo has developed a new habit of keeping quiet about who’s making their games, for reasons known only to Nintendo, but we finally know who the Mario & Luigi Brothership developers are. The question is of particular interest for those who’ve followed Mario & Luigi over the years, as the original development team – AlphaDream – went bankrupt in 2019. 

Popular opinion settled on ILCA, a support studio who made Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl and Sand Land, among others, or Luigi’s Mansion 3 studio Next Level Games, but the truth is rather more surprising. Twitter user Nintendeal posted material related to the game’s intellectual property trademarks after it surfaced online, and it turns out Acquire is the team behind Mario & Luigi Brothership.

Acquire’s first game, Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, launched on the original PlayStation in 1998, and since then, the studio developed a wide variety of games. These range from four Way of the Samurai games, the PSP dungeon crawler Class of Heroes, vampire-stripping game Akiba’s Trip, and, more recently, Octopath Traveler and the excellent Octopath Traveler 2. Mario & Luigi Brothership is only one of Acquire’s games planned for 2024. The studio has six others, including a card-based RPG called The Misty Battlefield.

GungHo, the team behind the Grandia anniversary collections and Lunar Silver Star Harmony, purchased Acquire in 2011, but Japanese media giant Kadokawa Corporation purchased it. Kadokawa also owns Elden Ring maker FromSoftware, along with several anime and manga studios and the light novel company JNovel.

The studio profile certainly doesn’t fit with Nintendo’s usual choice of partners, though why the Big N believes all this secrecy is necessary is a mystery and not one they're likely to clear up.

Mario & Luigi Brothership launches for Nintendo Switch on November 7, 2024.

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Josh Broadwell
JOSH BROADWELL

Josh is a freelance writer and reporter who specializes in guides, reviews, and whatever else he can convince someone to commission. You may have seen him on NPR, IGN, Polygon, or Rolling Stone shouting about RPGs. When he isn’t working, you’ll likely find him outside with his Belgian Malinois and Australian Shepherd or leveling yet another job in FFXIV.

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