As the entirely new Mario & Luigi RPG in some time, and the first home console entry in the series, Mario & Luigi: Brothership brought plenty of new skill to the table. One of these is Battle Plugs and Power Taps, which you get access to early in the game. These allow you to enhance your attacks and defenses in battle. You start with two Taps, but you can eventually get five.
It takes a while to get all five of these — but some fans have discovered that there’s an easy way to get every Power Tap immediately. First discovered by Reddit user TheHeroShade on r/marioandluigi and investigated further by CM30 at Gaming Reinvented, you can get all five Power Taps as early as after beating Merrygo Island.
Get your health relatively low and talk to the tutorial NPC to kick off a tutorial on Battle Plugs. You’ll need to do this twice — once where he confirms he’s getting a tutorial set up, and another where you can do it.
When the tutorial fight starts, all you need to do is mess up your timed attacks so you don’t defeat the Seedles, and let the enemies defeat you. Then select the Try Again option to start the fight again.
You can then go into the menu and head to the Set Battle Plugs to discover that yes, you now in fact have five Power Taps, so you can now equip five Battle Plugs right from the get-go. You can watch a video on how to do all this below.
You don’t lose these after fighting the Lighthouse Bosses — which is when you’re supposed to get the Taps — so really, you’ve just opened up way more options earlier in the game.
There’s always a chance Nintendo will patch this out, as it seems like a rather big oversight, but for now, enjoy this extremely easy glitch and power through Brothership with a few more options on hand.
What do you think of this glitch? Do you enjoy Battle Plugs in Brothership? Let us know in the comments.