Luigi’s Mansion is a game series that has certainly changed over its releases. The first game was great but had a lot that could be ironed out, mainly with how you stun ghosts, which was improved in the second one with the addition of new things.
But forget about the first and the second, as I want to speak about the third.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 came out in 2019 and I only just got around to playing it.
I played the game multiplayer with my brother using the Gooigi two-player mode.
I have a lot of nit-picking here for this so forgive me in advance, and I will be speaking about some light spoilers, so you have been warned.
First of all, let’s talk about how the game looks.
In terms of looks, it’s easily a 9 out of 10. The lighting is amazing, the animations and cutscenes are worthy of being in a movie. It’s clear a lot of talented animators worked on this, but at the same time, it’s clear just how much of the team was animators or artists over programmers or gameplay designers. I’d play this game just to look at it, it’s that good.
There are a lot of cool rooms in the hotel that the game takes place in and a lot of character to the characters and world. Moving between the floors is really cool, the hidden loading screens are something that I love. Plus, love the amount of mirrors in the rooms. It’s not often you see mirrors in games due to limitations, but they are becoming a bit more popular.
I could just keep complimenting how it looks, but let’s focus on the gameplay, and ‘story’.
First off, there is a lot of nit-picking with gameplay, so let’s speed run this:
A lot of gameplay mechanics, primarily the rainbow light thing and the new jump launch thingy, feel useless until the game remembers they are needed. If you were going for 100% you’d probably be using them a lot more to solve the secrets, but in terms of just story, the gameplay almost forgets they exist.
The same can be said for basic room ghosts. The personality of the boss ghosts is the main thing here, so it makes sense that the basic ghosts take a back seat, but there were times when I forgot they existed, and when they did show up, it was just a minor inconvenience or annoying because of how easy they are. There are like 4 types of basic ghosts, with some baby versions, and they’re all pretty much the same just with different health.
Solving puzzles mostly just ends up becoming a matter of pressing all the buttons on your controller until you find the thing you needed, which is usually, firing something into something, pulling apart something with your pulley thing, or using Gooigi to go through a pipe.
And when a complex puzzle did show up, it was almost impossible to figure it out without using the E Gadd tips (which were useless) or Google. (Maybe I’m just an idiot but how are you meant to figure out the solution to Floor 8 without looking it up?)
Now, Gooigi. Gooigi is super cool. I did enjoy playing Gooigi, he’s basically just Luigi that can go through pipes and not climb ladders. When I was playing through some of the Luigi and Gooigi puzzles with my brother, we were both so thankful we weren’t playing this one player. Swapping between the two characters seems like it’d be such a pain. Some of the puzzles just seem so demanding of swapping, along with the somewhat annoying controls, it just seems like it’d frustrate me so much. I often confused what X and Y did so I ended up messing up a few things.
Now, for the thing that annoyed me the most, making Luigi an idiot to drag out the story. I couldn’t count how many times Luigi ‘messed up’ so the floor could be dragged out longer. I was so frustrated at how many times they could use such a trope. It just became so repetitive that every time I saw it I just wanted to stop playing. It had me feeling like I was never making progress.
Had I not played the game through in almost one go, I’d probably see it as less repetitive.
Obviously, as I said, I’m nit-picking. But it feels as though the things that made the original so great have gone. The original was super repetitive, especially with the boos, but that game is like 2-4 hours long, this one is 12+ hours (and it doesn’t even need to be).
It has no story it needs to develop over the 12 hours, and it has no interesting developments that make the story anything interesting.
It’s just they wanted to show off all the cool ideas they could come up with for the floors, most of which are super cool, and they all feature a boss fight, which is also great.
Although most of the boss fights are cool, some are a bit painful, either too easy or just a bit meh. There were a few cool bosses, but other than that, none of them were that memorable.
One final nit-pick, aiming the objects you launch is the worst. It’s too sensitive and even with Gyro controls off you can’t aim. In the final boss, it was impossible to even see where I was aiming because of the colour of the cursor with the background.
Alright, I think that’s everything I wished to say on this topic.
Overall, it’s not a terrible game, some people may even enjoy it a lot, sadly, I’m not one of those people. I was happy it was over more than anything. And I’m so glad I played through it with someone else so we could just laugh and mess about, playing through this on my own seems like it’d drive me insane.
I am blinded by nostalgia as I love the first one to death, although, I’ve never finished the second. And, it is aimed at a younger audience so I suppose I can’t really complain.
I give it a 6 out of 10.
Thanks for reading. If you have any thoughts on the game, let me know in the comments.
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