Mario Vs. Luigi: Who Would Win In A Fight?
At first, Luigi was just another Mario. That is to say, the original Mario Bros. in 1983 was the first Mario game to support two players, and it wouldn't have made sense for Player 2 to control a second Mario. Therefore, Luigi effectively began as a clone of his slightly older brother.
Of course, since then, the most famous siblings in gaming history have become defined just as much by their differences as their similarities. They wear the same outfit, but in different colors. Both brothers jump, but Luigi can jump a little bit higher. Mario, however, virtually always gets to be the hero, sometimes even edging Luigi out of planned appearances completely.
That's just what would make the Super Mario Bros. ideal opponents in one-on-one combat: their nuances. Determining who would win in a fight between Mario and Luigi requires a deep dive into these very subtleties that separate one Italian plumber (well, former Italian Plumber) from another. Declaring a winner, however, first requires outlining just how these subtleties would come into play.
The power-up question
Calculating the brute physical strengths of Mario and Luigi relative to one another is a hopeless task. While it may be possible to cite examples of objects with estimable weights in various Mario games and extrapolate the brothers' quantifiable strengths from there, the examples would quickly become too numerous and variable from instance to instance to declare anything other than that Mario and Luigi are both very strong.
Fighting strength, then, depends on power-ups. The most impactful power-up is arguably the fire flower (excluding the star because the brothers agreed beforehand that wouldn't make for a fun fight). However, both Mario and Luigi are capable of fireball-slinging, nullifying its role as a differentiator. That said, one brother obtaining a fire flower before the other would be enough to tip the scales, thus redefining the terms of the match as not who can immediately overpower whom but who can power up first.
The winner of what would only be the second-most contentious fight between brothers in pop culture history would therefore be the Mario Bro. who can run, jump, and bonk into a Question Block before the other has a chance to do the same.
The better brother
Though strength is a non-factor, size remains very much in play. An article on MuayThaiPros.com about this very topic explains that in a fight, the smaller and likely more skilled combatant gains more of an advantage the longer the fight goes on, meaning that the larger fighter has to secure their win quickly for their size to play a role (e.g. knock the smaller fighter out before they can score a bunch of points).
Therefore Luigi has the edge over his superstar sibling. Running into a Question Block is not a feat of endurance but a single, straightforward task. While the brothers may match one another in raw power, Luigi's mass is ultimately going to secure him a Question Block's bounty first.
In what has now become a battle of green fireballs vs. no fireballs, the winner is clear: us, the viewers, who get to witness the two most famous mushroom-loving, pipe-warping adventurers in world history give it everything they've got.
But no, actually, it's Luigi. Yahoo!