Current thoughts on the new Mario & Luigi after the first story boss:

First the good: the writing at worst is still perfectly serviceable. Characters and worldbuilding at the micro level is generally interesting, even if it falls a bit flat at the macro level. Puns are plentiful and spot on and the physical comedy on display elicited quite a few chuckles out of me.

The primary game loop feels well paced. The frequency and duration of battles is just right. The game's travel mechanic means there's an incentive to re-visit islands to check out all the new areas that got unlocked after you cleared them. By the time you've finished exploring, you've usually reached the next area.

Cutscenes are frequent but almost all of them feature a fast-forward or skip button. The game is animated superbly all around, but the low framerate means they're fighting an uphill battle to look as smooth as they actually are. The achievement system is a nice addition, though the usage of the word 'challenge' is dubious at best.

The battle system is what you would expect from a M&L game. It is generally quite good, enemies telegraph well and are quick to punish mistakes, even early on, but the action commands do feel a bit too forgiving at times. Tutorials are non-diageitc now, but are quick to skip and can be reviewed in a menu.

Now the bad: The game's implementation of Luigi is unforgivable. He's almost entirely controlled by the AI instead of the player. You just tell him what to do in places. His overworld jump is completely functionless, you can't use it to platform as he just stands still when he reaches a ledge. Instead, you jump with Mario and the AI attempts to follow suit. I should note that the AI can fail jumps, and if it does, control of Mario is wrestled away from you so he can rejoin his brother and you have to redo whatever platforming segment you were on. The whole thing feels designed for a scrapped co-op mode.

Additionally, Luigi's diegetic actions sometimes use the 'B' button and sometimes use the 'L' button. Often interchangeably and Luigi's battle menu uses the 'A' button to select options and 'B' to attack, which has caused me to miss action commands on more than one occasion. Previous games used 'B' for both.

The menus feel uninspired and boring, which is a far cry from the charm present in the menus on the DS games. Some of the menus feel redundant, there are separate 'gear' and 'stats' menus that show 80% of the same information, only one allows you to change your gear, the other doesn't. Why not just combine the two? The settings menu is also comically useless. There is one setting in the entire game and it's to toggle controller vibration.

A switch game wouldn't feel complete without noticeably low framerates, but this game also feels like it has considerable input lag in the overworld, making everything feel quite unresponsive and clunky. Doesn't help that the hammer animation has a deceptive amount of of trail time on it. For some reason, it's necessary to fully animate Mario putting his hammer away before you can do anything else.

Also the soundtrack feels generic. I don't like it and really doesn't fit some areas. The second island you visit has a dark forested area where the upbeat town music is still playing throughout the whole thing.

Fo far, probably a 6-7/10. Will probably change as I play more of it, but so far I don't hate it, which is more than I can say for dream team.