In Mario & Luigi: Brothership, one of the toughest battles in the game is against Glohm Bowser in Fortress Zokket. A multistage fight with numerous attacks and pattern changes, the battle tests every one of your skills with the game and its battle system in every way possible.

It’s an amazing battle (and false story climax), but one that may be tricky for many less experienced players.

But did you know there’s actually a way to skip it now? To avoid this entire battle altogether and go right off to Conductor Island instead?

Yep, by using a simple out of bounds trick and a tiny bit of movement, you can avoid the entire fight altogether. Here’s how to do it.

The Walkthrough

But before we start, here’s a video. If you prefer that to reading, you can watch it here:

First, ride to the elevator to the top floor of the fortress. However, don’t go up the stairs in front of you.

Instead, go into this corner, and have Mario stand about here, facing down-right.

Then, switch to the Fire & Ice ability. You should be able to jump onto an invisible wall.

Quickly select a greyed-out ability, like the Fire & Ice one. This disables the out of bounds protection the game usually has, which teleports you away if you land on an invisible wall/out of bounds area.

Jump up a few times to reach the top, and walk forward along the wall until you drop down on the bridge past the stairs.

That’s it! Now you’ve skipped a key trigger for the start of the Bowser battle, and the game will assume you’ve already won instead.

Of course, this does have some amusing side effects. Most notably, it completely breaks the cutscene in the most hilarious way possible.

Since by doing this, Bowser, Bowser Jr, Zokket and the Extension Corps are already waiting to start the battle, while also being present for the cutscene afterwards. As a result, there are now two copies of every character in the scene, many of which are overlapping one another. It looks absolutely ridiculous, and only gets more so as the scene progresses.

Regardless, the cutscene ends and normality seemingly resumes. The Glohm laser beam of death chases Mario & Luigi down the hallway, and the escape sequence seemingly plays out as normal.

Seemingly. Since when they approach the trigger they skipped, the text for the initial cutscene starts playing during the escape sequence. And that Glohm death beam? Well, it slowly keeps knocking them back until they’re at the edge of the bridge.

It doesn’t do anything, since for some reason the designers decided the effect of being hit by the laser was being knocked back all of 2 feet, but it is funny nonetheless. Regardless, if you don’t skip through the text, the laser will quickly force you to, since the bros will get knocked back to the trigger for jumping off the building instead. At which point, normality resumes, and one of the toughest battles gets entirely skipped.

Either way, that’s how to skip the Glohm Bowser fight in Mario & Luigi: Brothership. It’s probably one of the easiest skips in the entire game, and one that any decently skilled player should be able to pull off without any real concern. So, send your thanks to Junofa and luigifan32 for finding the glitch…

And consider testing it out if you replay the game. It’s a nice intro to the out of bounds shenanigans present in Brothership speedrunning, and a fun way to completely bypass one of the game’s longest boss battles to boot.