Welcome to the Lumbar Nook.
Cozy, warm studio space with a groovy 70s-style conversation pit, now renting at $3200 a month in the Bay Area.
It’s a location in Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, specifically somewhere inside Bowser’s lower spine, in between (or inside?) one of his lumbar vertebrae. After Bowser is betrayed by a trio of Fawful-loyal minions, he is stuffed inside a safe and then discarded into Princess Peach’s royal junkyard, where the safe shatters. Unfortunately for Bowser, the impact also leaves him in great pain. He pleads with Starlow to find some way to fix his spine, and so the erstwhile Brothers Mario travel to the Lumbar Nook.
Finding a boney sort of crevice in the tiny space, the two decide to drill into the spine. Toadsworth and Toadbert set a timer and have a cup of tea. After minutes of waiting, during which the player cannot do anything, the alarm sounds and the brothers reemerge to a rejuvenated Bowser. The Lumbar Nook is never visited again.
The whole episode is one of those Nintendo oddities that were particularly popular during the DS era, like that infamous puzzle in Phantom Hourglass which requires the player to close the DS to imprint a symbol from one screen to another. Is it engaging gameplay? Not at all. Does it ever play a role in the game’s mechanics again? Nope. Will you remember the Lumbar Nook segment once the story is all said and done? Probably not. But it’s endearing because of that baffling, almost standoffish quality, defying the player’s expectations of what should be happening minute-to-minute.
Which is why it’s weird that it can be skipped. Yes, in fact, Lumbar Nook Tea Time can be blown right through if you happen to speak to Toadbert at the right point in the story, specifically after defeating the memory brothers in Bowser’s brain. Toadbert describes a dream in which he is waiting in a small room drinking tea, and then (somehow) hears buttons being pressed – A B X Y L R Y X B A – which, if pressed during the wait, will shrink the time down to virtually nothing.
Screenshots from YouTube playthroughs of aWiibo and LuckySevenDX.
My question is: why? What’s the point in programming such a markedly odd little episode that asks the player’s patience, only to have it be skippable? Why include the skip code in an NPC dialogue that the vast majority of players are unlikely to see? Why does Toadbert have prophetic meta-dreams?
Feel free to ponder this over a nice cup of tea and some relaxing music. Or don’t.
SPIRIT: If Nintendo was an American company, we might have gotten a visit to the Chiropractic Zone, where the brothers play whack-a-mole with Bowser’s vertebrae and unintentionally doom him to quadriplegia.