In Mario & Luigi: Brothership, one of the most controversial changes to the series is how Luigi controls in battle. Indeed, while the previous games had Mario select attacks with the A button and Luigi use the B button, Brothership makes both bros select options with the A button alone.

It’s theoretically a lot more consistent than in the previous titles, but it’s a real hit to muscle memory for anyone who grew up with them.

But did you know the option to revert this was actually there all along? Or that enabling it via a mod is as simple as changing a single flag in the game?

Yep, as modder and dataminer Coaltergeist found out, there’s actually a debug flag in the game itself to enable the old behaviour. By simply setting the LuigiButton parameter in the BattleDebugParam options, you can make Luigi use the original control scheme in battle.

Here’s a video showing the change in action:

Interestingly, it also seems to enable the cancel/back button controls from Bowser’s Inside Story too, with ZL becoming the button to cancel actions in battle.

And all this makes us wonder something. Why isn’t this an option in the game itself?

Why was this even changed to begin with, despite it working fine in the last 7 Mario & Luigi games?

Honestly, we have no idea. Perhaps Acquire got poor feedback from their testers, and failed to understand the previous games’ mechanics. Or perhaps some executive order resulted in all menus working the same way for ‘usability’ concerns, muscle memory be damned.

Regardless, if you want to fix Mario & Luigi: Brothership’s controls, there’s now a mod that can be downloaded here. Check it out if you want Luigi to play like in older games in this title as well.

Source:

I fixed Mario & Luigi: Brothership’s biggest flaw… (Coaltergeist on YouTube)