Luigi's Mansion overview

Would you believe me if I said that I recently finished playing Luigi’s Mansion 3 on the Switch, and got a Switch in the first place, entirely because I wanted to play Resident Evil: Revelations on 3DS? Well, I recently finished playing Luigi’s Mansion 3 on the Switch, and got a Switch in the first place, entirely because I wanted to play Resident Evil: Revelations on 3DS.

You see, just over a year ago I got really into the Resident Evil series. In fact, the Resident Evil series is also the main reason why I started writing these blog-posts/reviews/articles in the first place, because I had played most of the main line Resident Evil games and really wanted to rank them for my personal amusement, so I did that and decided to write an accompanying paragraph describing my feelings for each entry and why it was positioned where it was on the list. After completing this over the course of an afternoon, a few weeks went by before I decided to put it online.

Anyway, having gotten into the Resident Evil series I started to hear that one of the spin-off games, Resident Evil: Revelations, was pretty good, and might be considered a main entry in the series, depending on who you asked. But RE: Revelations was originally released on the 3DS, which I didn’t have, and being someone who likes to play games on their original release platform, I was hesitant to just pick up the PS4 port. On the other hand though, I was also hesitant to buy myself a £100 hand-held console for a single game that I didn’t care that much about so I sat on it for a while before looking up what other games on the 3DS there were that I might equally like to try out. One of the games I found was Luigi’s Mansion 2, or Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, depending where you are.

But Luigi’s Mansion 2, as implied by the “2” in its title, was a sequel, the original game being another game that I had never played; so if I were to play Luigi’s Mansion 2 alongside RE: Revelations, I would want to play the original first, which was originally on the GameCube. Luigi’s Mansion 1 had been ported to 3DS which might sound like it made the whole thing a lot easier, but again my preference for playing games on their original release platform got in the way.

Side note, there are exceptions to this rule. In fact, it’s not even a rule, just more of a desire to see older platforms still being used, and the best way of seeing that is to use them myself. But there are plenty of games that I’ve played on a port and are perfectly happy to do so. Perfect Dark springs to mind, which I bought on XBLA years before I owned an N64, and now that I’ve played GoldenEye on N64, I think buying Perfect Dark on XBLA was the right decision. That N64 controller was terrible for FPS games. Anyway, back to Luigi’s Mansion.

I don’t think I had ever played a Mario game before I played Luigi’s Mansion 1, with the exception of Mario Kart Wii and about 20 minutes of Super Mario Galaxy 2 some years before. I’m not sure when I got my NES and SNES classics but I think they came after Luigi’s Mansion.

The original Luigi’s Mansion was a blast to play all these years after original release. It takes place in a mansion full of ghosts in such a way that really reminded me of Grabbed by the Ghoulies on the original Xbox, a game that I’ve enjoyed since childhood and still do today. In fact, any game with cartoony graphics that take place in haunted mansions is bound to remind me of that game.

Luigi has been awarded under mysterious circumstances the deed to a big spooky mansion in the middle of nowhere (notice that the mansion is actually his now, as implied by the title), wandering up to the front door, he notices that something is afoot and soon learns that his big brother Mario got to the mansion ahead of him and has been trapped somewhere inside by the evil King Boo. I’m writing this entirely from memory and I can’t be bothered to look this up, but I assume Luigi learns all of this from Professor E. Gadd, a rather eccentric but strangely up-beat mad scientist who studies ghosts who’s come to the mansion to study all of the ghosts inside it. Professor Gadd arms Luigi with a ghost sucking vacuum cleaner and sends him into the mansion to liberate it from all the ghosts and save Mario and also a few daft Toads that somehow got lost in there as well.

Luigi’s Mansion, like most Nintendo games, is very much focussed on interesting gameplay ideas, the central gameplay idea being the ability to suck up ghosts and clear the mansion room by room, floor by floor, solving different types of puzzles in each room to unlock further rooms. In that way it’s a little bit like the original Resident Evil, funnily enough, except far more cartoonish and with much better voice acting.

Having played through Luigi’s Mansion 1 on the GameCube I was completely confident in buying a 3DS for the sequel. Unfortunately, Luigi’s Mansion 2 has some problems that I think got in the way of it being a particularly fun game. It’s certainly playable. In fact it’s basically just more of the original game except taking place in different mansions (plural this time), although only one or two the five locations you visit are actually mansions, one of them is some kind of factory and another is a complex of un-mansion-like mine shafts. Having set himself up in an area with several close-knitted mansions in the middle of nowhere, Professor E. Gadd has taken his studying of the ghosts to the next level by utilising the titular Dark Moon, a large gem that overwrites the ghosts free will and turns them into E. Gadd personal mindless servants, but when the Dark Moon explodes for some reason that I can’t remember, Gadd calls up Luigi to bring him to his special little, now hostile, ghost community to do plenty more sucking of ghosts. A better title for this game would be Several Buildings That Don’t Belong To Luigi And That Aren’t Exclusively Mansions, But He’s Going To Break Most Of The Furniture Anyway, but I guess that doesn’t roll off the tongue very well, so let’s stick to Luigi’s Mansion 2.

The main problem with Luigi’s Mansion 2, is that Professor E. Gadd will not leave you alone. The slightest bit of progress that Luigi makes in this story is always followed by him being called back to E. Gadd’s laboratory for no real reason. By that I mean where Luigi’s Mansion 1 was a far more open-ended explore-y game with very little interruptions, Luigi’s Mansion 2 is mission-based.

“Great Luigi, you’ve opened that door! Come back to the lab now!” Professor E. Gadd would yell. Then once the game forces us back to the laboratory Gadd would tell us “Right, now that you’ve opened that door, you can go through it and carry on what you were doing. Well, hop to it.”

It got really old after a while, and really boring, to the point that I had to start sticking on a podcast, or long YouTube video in the background to listen too while playing it, because Luigi’s Mansion 2 is really hard to play for long periods of time without the whole process feeling tedious. It reminds me a lot of how every 3D Mario game until Odyssey would rip you out of a level whenever you found a power star, only for you to go straight back to that level to carry on looking for more.

Now that I had my 3DS, I didn’t bother getting Resident Evil: Revelations for until several months later, also known as a couple of weeks ago, but this is a Luigi’s Mansion review. RE: Revelations can wait, because earlier today I finished playing through the third and most recent Luigi’s Mansion game, Luigi’s Mansion 3, it’s always quite satisfying when game series just stick to numbered sequels.

First off, a better title for this game would be A Hotel That Luigi Doesn’t Own And It’s Certainly Not A Mansion, but I guess that doesn’t roll off the tongue very well, so let’s stick to Luigi’s Mansion 3. Luigi is mysteriously invited to a large hotel in the middle of the countryside and stupidly decides to go with Mario, Peach, and three Toads, because no one in the Mushroom Kingdom has any long-term memory apparently. The obvious happens: the hotel is infested with ghosts; Mario, Peach, and the Toads get captured, and Luigi finds Professor E. Gadd hiding in the basement with a fully upgraded poltergust to do plenty of sucking with. Luigi is let loose into the hotel to do all of this sucking and in a return to the formula of the first game, you don’t have to keep going back to the lab every five minutes because E. Gadd was getting lonely.

There are few minor complaints about Luigi’s Mansion 3. Firstly, some of the puzzles I found to be quite cryptic leading me to look up a walkthrough half a dozen times, especially on the final boss fight; that being said though, it;s possible that I had to do that for the other Luigi’s Mansion games, but just forgot about it. Secondly, there’s a bit where you have to go back down to the lower basement area because one of the Toads that you had already rescued at that point was trusted by E. Gadd to go on a fetch quest, because E.Gadd clearly isn’t the genius he seems. This entire side-quest was done to get an upgrade for the poltergust that you use to open a single door, so it might as well have just been another puzzle from inside that same room and I simply can’t fathom why it wasn’t. Thirdly, there’s the fucking three-tailed ghost-cat that steals your elevator buttons, sending you backtracking through the last two levels for a three-stage boss fight just to recover the button again. And fourthly, the game becomes a bit too formulaic; each floor is the same, you do a bit of exploring, the boss ghosts jump out, Luigi predictably falls over, defeats boss, gets button. It got old after a while and I’m surprised that Luigi is still terrified of ghosts after the thousands he’s sucked up before.

Anyway, to sum up: Luigi’s Mansion 1 was a really good game on the GameCube, Luigi’s Mansion 2 was a fairly boring and tedious game for the 3DS, and Luigi’s Mansion 3 was a pretty good game for the Switch with a few padding issues and the occasional cryptic puzzle. This review is getting long so I’m going to stop now.