The Haunted Hoard: Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon (3DS)

Over 10 years after his first game vacuuming up rogue spirits, Mario’s cowardly younger brother Luigi is called back into the ghost-busting business for Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, a 3DS outing that approaches the concept of a haunted mansion in a very different way… that being, there are multiple ghost-infested manors this go around.

 

Evershade Valley is a bit of a peculiarity in the Super Mario series, as most of the time, spirits seem to be innately hostile towards the living. However, in this particular location, a crystalline Dark Moon hovers overhead, pacifying the ghosts who inhabit the valley… until King Boo, the antagonist from the first Luigi’s Mansion, shatters the Dark Moon and hides its pieces, the valley’s ghosts switching to wild, mischievous, and malevolent specters without its influence to keep them calm. Ghost researcher Professor E. Gadd calls on his old assistant Luigi to come investigate the matter and set things right again, and despite being easily frightened, Luigi picks up a specialized vacuum and sets off to face the phantoms. Somehow, Luigi does seem more of an unwilling participant than last time, beamed into E. Gadd’s lab against his will to assist and often reticent to plunge back into the action between ghost hunting missions, but E. Gadd’s unhinged nature makes the strange scientist a rather fun character to speak with. While Luigi doesn’t speak much more than a few words, E. Gadd is constantly explaining the world, situation, and goals, all while peppering in fun lines that definitely ensure this adventure through haunted mansions remains lighthearted.

 

As mentioned before, the second Luigi’s Mansion game expands the scope of its journey to multiple locations, Luigi gradually making his way through different buildings in the Evershade Valley. While there is a typical haunted manor to start, the game starts to get a bit more creative with what could be considered a mansion, a few later locations being more akin to a museum full of historical exhibits or a snow-covered mining operation. Having this theme variety definitely helps the mansions stand out, having more pronounced aspects to them than just being spooky residences. For example, a mansion overrun with plants will naturally features the plants in the puzzle-solving as well as having areas like a greenhouse shift up the layout for the ghost battles you’ll have in that mansion. Splitting up the action across multiple areas does mean each one is smaller as a result, but you’ll usually do a pretty thorough exploration of them across the game missions. Sadly, the mission structure is also what ends up hampering your ability to explore these diverse mansions.

While it’s often been said a game on a handheld system should support the device by being easy to pick up and play for short innings, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon approaches this in a manner that, while not bad, does limit the game a little. E. Gadd will send Luigi into a mansion with a specific goal for the mission, these usually being finding items or facing off with a specific ghostly enemy, and while some of these objectives evolve over the course of the mission, once they’re complete, you are pulled back out by E. Gadd. E. Gadd will communicate with the player by way of a device whose call they can’t ignore, action coming to a halt until you hear what he has to say, even if that’s him telling you it’s time to go right before yanking you back to the lab. This does mean you don’t have to backtrack to finish a mission, but it also means the collectibles the game is flush with can be missed because you didn’t get to choose when to exit. Mansions are packed with hidden gems, and the orb-shaped Boo ghosts with silly pun names are hiding in each individual mission, the player needing to find them to unlock special challenge missions for each mansion. Delaying completion of the mission can give you time to explore usually, but being pulled out also breaks the game momentum, especially at moments where a mission abruptly wraps up outside the boss arena because the game wants the boss battle to be a separate mission.

 

Luckily, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon still has incredibly solid gameplay that can’t be hurt too much by the interruptions. Capturing ghosts is the main source of action, the player needing to first catch them unawares with a burst of light from the flashlight, after which the stunned ghost can be caught in the suction of Luigi’s vacuum. The ghost will resist as best it can, moving around the room wildly as the player has to adjust how they’re pulling the control stick to try and pull them in, almost like reeling in a fish that can fly. Once a ghost’s health has reached zero, they’ll be pulled in and stored in the vacuum, but the way these kinetic ghost battles can happen changes its shape and form quite often. Groups of ghosts will appear together, meaning you have to watch out for their attacks while reeling in their ally. Some spirits might have protection against the flashlight burst that you need to work around, and many like to hide in environmental objects you’ll need to shake to make them burst out. However, much like the mansions had a small asterisk to their enjoyment, so too do the ghost battles.

 

The enemy variety in Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is a bit underwhelming. Most of the regular ghosts are the same three spirits: a green normal one, a large red one, and a thin blue one. Throughout most the game you’ll be facing these foes and minor iterations on them, and while giving them weapons or making them stronger changes how you approach the fight technically, it’s not a very exciting level of deviation. There are some rarer enemies who start changing things up, like goopy purple ghosts who try to trap you in their bodies, fat yellow ones that fill a lot of the battlefield and spit gunk, and violet ones that disappear often to try and scare you while you’re catching other ghosts, but these ghosts could definitely use a greater presence to make things more diverse. The game does give them some personality though, the player finding many moments where the ghosts will be playing around or spreading mischief, and the ghostly dog Polterpup is given a big focus as Luigi has to keep hunting the adorable and friendly spectral hound down. The Boos are hiding in every mission and are fought in a slightly different manner involving finding them with a special flashlight attachment called the Dark-Light Device, but the bosses are definitely the most interesting break from the norm. While technically most of them are things called Possessor ghosts that act similarly when you’re trying to suck them up, the ghosts always inhabit the bodies of large objects or creatures, making their battles the kind of break from the norm that makes them exciting to fight. Whether it’s an enormous spider or a set of stairs turned into deadly teeth, it’s interesting to see what the Possessor will inhabit next, and the occasional minibosses like a trio of ghostly sisters or the mummies whose wrappings you need to burn at least mean things don’t stagnate.

There is a bit of an attempt to add more ghost variety in the game’s ScareScraper multiplayer mode, but its achieved by reskinning the ghosts so they look like fruit, sports balls, insects, or other themes without really changing how they act. Even though the reskinning is easy to see for what it is, ScareScraper is still an enjoyable multiplayer component where 1 to 4 players all take a Luigi of their own on a multi-floor ghost hunting journey. Different modes with different objectives have players doing things like trying to find and catch every ghost on a floor, hunt down Polterpups as they flee through walls, and find the hidden exit to that floor, and while players are likely to sort of bumble about searching at first, the randomized maps are usually condensed enough that players can join together easily enough to help each other out when an area of interest is found. Players can set how many floors they want to do, although they sadly culminate in the same final boss every time, but otherwise, the cooperative ghost hunting carries over the enjoyable action of single-player into a more replayable mode.

 

It’s a bit strange, but Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon does improve over its predecessor in many ways. It’s longer, it fixed problems like the Boo hunting sometimes being tedious, but the mission approach does lessen the spooky atmosphere this time around. Dark Moon does have a lot of good puzzles though, the vacuum being used to activate environmental objects, the Dark-Light Device unveiling hidden items (although having to suck up the spectral orbs that concealed them feels like an unnecessary second step to that task), and the greater complexity to arranging certain areas or even having little mushroom men called Toads assist in some puzzles means that while exploring the mansion isn’t as deep as the previous game’s and has less personality, it still has the gameplay components that ensure Luigi’s second ghost-hunting game is enjoyable in its own way.

THE VERDICT: Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is mechanically superior to the original game with its multi-step puzzles, kinetic ghost fights, and more diverse area layouts and designs making it a fun ghost-busting experience, but the original’s personality seems to have been sacrificed along the way. Fighting simple ghosts is fun enough and works quite well for the multiplayer component, but Professor E. Gadd and the Polterpup feel like the only memorable characters you’ll meet. The spirits have their charm and the bosses are good fits for interesting battles, but even with its extra content and unique locations to help with its longevity, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon adopts a mission structure that lessens the player’s overall investment.

 

And so, I give Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon for 3DS…

A GOOD rating. While good gameplay is more important than style to a game’s quality, it feels like a lot of what Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon does well isn’t helped by its mission structure. Areas designed to be eerie or dark are lessened by being teleported in and out between every important task performed there, and while skittering spiders, rats, and bats can add to that tone as well, the ghosts are perhaps too broadly goofy without ever having strong individual personalities to make them stand out as characters. Giving the ghosts different weapons and beefing them up makes their fights different but not appreciably so, and the mansion designs are similarly excellent for gameplay variety but the player doesn’t really get to know them thoroughly before they’re pulled out and sent to another.

 

Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is thankfully not a case of too much done wrong though. E. Gadd’s non-negotiable calls are probably the only true road bump to a game that has frantic ghost fights, strong area puzzles, oodles of secrets, and a varied multiplayer mode. Without too much personality or a strong tone though, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is less of an experience than its predecessor, but certainly not a bad one at all. It’s ghost hunting on the go, its mechanics polished so that it’s definitely fun despite not being all too spooky.