The Iterations of Luigi’s Mansion

Alright to finish off Spooky Month I’ve got to talk about the spookiest game franchise there is; Luigi’s Mansion. It’s the superlative. There is no other. That’s science. Luigi’s Mansion is an action adventure game (does that mean anything?).. Luigi’s Mansion is a spooky ghost-catching action game centered around methodically exploring a creepy mansion whilst engaging in periodic encounters of high-action ghost-hunting that punctuate the gloom. It released in September 2001 for the Nintendo GameCube, received a sequel in March 2013 titled Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon for the Nintendo 3DS, and a second sequel, Luigi’s Mansion 3, in October 2019 for the Nintendo Switch. All the games’ action plays similar on the surface, involving a lot of running around, bumping into things while you fight ghosts in a tug-of-war scenario. They’ll drag you around the room, and you’ll suck them up by the tail with a vacuum cleaner. The player can lean Luigi around in different directions to have a limited control of his movement while the ghosts try to escape his vacuum. Leaning away from the ghosts drains their energy faster, and poor movement control might let the ghost escape. The combat of Luigi’s Mansion is easy to grasp and instantly satisfying. What I’m interested in though, is how the simple systems were iterated on in its followups. In particular, why I found the combat of Luigi’s Mansion 3 so blase so often.

Aha, yes. Plot twist, I actually think the combat in Luigi’s Mansion 3 is pretty weak in comparison to its predecessors. The games play mostly the same, and there aren’t that many elements in play here, relatively speaking, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to suss out what’s going on here. Luigi’s Mansion 3 introduced a mechanic called the slam to Luigi’s arsenal, which allows him to, after vacuuming a particular ghost for a short time, repeatedly slam the ghost into the ground, in any direction, stunning and damaging other ghosts while annihilating his main target’s energy. It quickly becomes a one-size-fits-all solution to any ghost altercation outside of boss fights, and isn’t an especially engaging mechanic on its own.

Luigi’s Mansion 3 was never going to miss out on its well-earned popularity for lack of a more considered difficulty curve. Being too easy isn’t exactly the problem I have. Luigi’s Mansion 3 was always going to be popular because it is one of the most lavishly produced, polished, and animated Mario games of all time. I don’t really think Luigi’s Mansion 3 has bad combat. On the contrary, I think one among the many reasons for Luigi’s Mansion 3‘s notable anticipation was due to its less talked about predecessor’s proof of concept. It showed that the off-beat, frankly weird gameplay of Luigi’s Mansion was a formula with staying power that had room to grow as a robust system. Indeed, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon doesn’t quite get the credit it deserves for what it contributed to the notoriety and design ethos of Luigi’s Mansion. Luigi’s Mansion 3‘s combat has its basis in Dark Moon and works well enough as a result. Dark Moon is where most of the changes to the formula came from and they are for the most part, positives.

The strobulb is Dark Moon‘s first prominent addition. Where in the first game, sweeping one’s flashlight over a ghost’s exposed eyes was sufficient to stun it and open it up for being captured, Dark Moon requires an active button press. The light will flash brightly, and anything caught in its cone will be stunned. The strobulb can also be charged up for a wider flash that is less likely to miss its mark, and has the added bonus of hitting many more ghosts at once. The original GameCube game made stunning ghosts in this way passive – simply sweeping the light over them is sufficient. Speaking of passivity, I liked the way the first two games in this series made defeating ghosts such a concerted effort. They would drag Luigi about the room, possibly ramming him into obstacles. The player’s own control input was the only thing stopping them. Admittedly this aspect of being dragged around a room began to be de-emphasized in Dark Moon, and that trend continued in 3.

On the flip side, Dark Moon added the power surge ability, which would let Luigi deal extra damage to a ghost he had been focused on for a certain amount of time, uninterrupted. Adding this simple additional button prompt helps keep the player feeling like an active participate, among other advantages like rewarding skilled play. The slam move is an iteration of the power surge, whereas now pressing the button after focusing on a ghost will slam it into the ground for massive damage, and this can be repeated multiple times on one charge. The move is so powerful and repetitive I often found myself passively clearing rooms of ghosts without thinking much of it.

That’s not to say that passively oriented gameplay is inherently a negative. There’s plenty of passive gameplay in Luigi’s Mansion anyway. It’s an atmospheric piece about slowly creeping through an abandoned estate. If action is half of what you do, the other half is kind of just wandering around, albeit in a extremely realized world dripping with personality. The point is, the action could stand to have some active engagement to accentuate and contrast the more low key exploration. I think something that made the original GameCube game’s spooks stand out as so, well, spooky was how legitimately threatening ghosts could be, and how that threat made a real intrusion upon the quiet tension of Luigi’s nervous wanderings. Luigi’s reactions are telling me that I should be elevating my heart rate when ghosts appear, after all. The ghosts need to pose a legitimate threat.

Luigi’s Mansion 3 is not lacking for interesting boss fights that feel legitimately threatening, but while bosses are often a highlight of their games, moments that stick out as particularly exciting or memorable, they’re not what you’re going to be doing in an adventuring game like Luigi’s Mansion 80% of the time. If most of what you do is fighting mooks, or if even half of what you do is fighting mooks, fighting those mooks may as well be fun, or at minimum engaging. I found the slam ability’s overwhelming power and utility distracting from this. I wasn’t engaging the core Luigi’s Mansion experience like I used to. I missed those chaotic tugs of war. What’s more, the animation for this maneuver just looks… wrong. I did mention this is among the most lavishly animated Mario games ever, and it completely is. There’s some real talent and attention to detail on display here, so it’s kind of confusing how strange the transition is on this loop of Luigi slamming the ground. The way he’s leaning his weight around just doesn’t make much visual sense. It looks much more like he’s supposed to shift from slamming on one side to the other, yeah? The natural motion here would be for him to swing the grappled ghost over his head. This is fairly obvious if you go out of your way to alternate what side of Luigi you’re slamming the ghost on.

The biggest problem, though, is in how powerful the slam move is, relative to how easy it is to use. The power surge mechanic in Dark Moon only served to accentuate and accelerate the flow of gameplay as it happened. An enemy with a piddling 10 hp is probably going to be captured by a skilled Luigi pretty quickly regardless, so the addition of the power surge mechanic would let a skilled player skip that extra 5 hp at the tail end of the engagement – we all knew they’d get through it no problem anyway. In this way it’s a reward for skilled play that keeps things smooth and flowing, but it doesn’t overtake the game’s main combat mechanics, it merely augments them. The slam, on the other hand, functionally replaces the combat of Luigi’s Mansion as it had existed up to the point of Luigi’s Mansion 3. It’s not a extra tool that augments gameplay, it’s a sledgehammer that is overwhelmingly more powerful than engaging with the game’s other tug-of-war mechanics. More often that not, the goals of struggling in a ghostly suction-y duel are shuffled aside for the goal of simply reaching the point where you can start slamming which, while rewarding in its own way, gets awfully repetitive in how readily available it is. It begins to homogenize the combat encounters of the game.

I have to touch on the fact that when defeating a ghost using the slam, it does not, I repeat, does not, get sucked into Luigi’s vacuum. Defeating ghosts in Luigi‘s Mansion near-universally results in the ghost’s malleable body getting all smushed into the mouth of the device, before disappearing into it with a satisfying slurp and *pop* sound. Delightfully expressive flails of panic from the victimized ghosts accompany. It’s the punctuation of ultimate victory over your foe. The cherry on top. The fullest realization of the fantasy of Luigi’s Mansion– being a ghost hunter. Any and all dark spirits no matter their might may be laid low before the great equalizer of an overcharged vacuum cleaner. There’s little more satisfying than that in the game. The idea that the most powerful move in Luigi’s Mansion 3 is also the only way to dispense with ghosts without that oh so sweet final animation of a ghost being sucked away into oblivion is utterly baffling to me. How is a ghost even destroyed? Is that not the point? They’re already dead, so you need to capture them with a device, right?

This may seem like a minor point, but I cannot under-emphasize the importance of nailing the aesthetics of your game to work in concert with its mechanics. Would Luigi’s Mansion be as fun if everyone and everything were replaced with featureless blobs? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think its as fun if it’s missing even this one crucial animation and sound effect. Destroying ghosts just doesn’t feel right compared to capturing them in this setting. Imagine your favorite tense or emotional scene from your favorite dramatic game, or movie. Now imagine it set against the backdrop of this music. I just cannot reconcile the incongruence here. If you defeat a boss ghost with Luigi’s slam ability, the ghost-getting-sucked-into-a-vacuum-cleaner animation plays in its entirety, because of course it does. Why is this not the case for regular ghosts, whom you will be encountering far more often? It throws off the whole vibe of the game, so I have to physically restrain myself from using the most powerful tool in Luigi’s arsenal if it would finish off a foe, and that feels terrible.

Now if this sounds pretty harsh, don’t worry, because this is the part where I shower praise on the slam mechanic, as it is not a bad concept by any stretch. One of the greatest strengths of Luigi’s Mansion is its slapstick and cartoonish aesthetic. Action in these games quickly becomes outlandish and comedic as kitchenware flies off of shelves, vases are smashed, and tablecloths go whipping about in the scuffle. The thought of a struggle with Luigi escalating to the point that he’s literally slamming stubborn ghosts over his head like he’s hammering a tent peg into the ground is inherently hilarious, and perfectly congruous with the game’s general feel. Having this big and bombastic move to build up to gives every encounter a concurrent goal alongside simply ‘defeat all the ghosts’. It does potentially offer an interesting choice between slamming ghosts or simply sucking them, were it rebalanced to make the latter method more viable. The addition of an attack specifically for dealing with large crowds of ghosts also fills a niche in Luigi’s moveset that could allow for a far more varied and interesting array of encounter designs.

There are so many possibilities. Ghosts that wear armor which needs to be slammed into pieces before they can be properly captured, ghosts that can only be captured after they’ve been slammed into water, ghosts that only take damage if other enemies are slammed into them, rooms full huge numbers of ghosts that are best dealt with using the slam to thin out their tanks. The list of goes on and on. If it were just a little less frequent, if it were just a little less powerful, if it didn’t replace the more seamless power surge ability, and if it were just a little more in line audio-visual-wise with the rest of the game (by which I mean, allow the slam to suck up regular ghosts like it does bosses), I’d probably be over the (dark) moon for this addition to Luigi’s repertoire. The point is, the slam is a potentially excellent addition that fumbles in the execution.

What’s frustrating about this, is that Dark Moon had already figured out how best to implement this. In the game, there are instances where the power surge technique can charge up to multiple levels, by spending more uninterrupted time connected to a particular ghost. In essence, by proving you are able to keep up with a ghost for a longer period of time, you are rewarded with a great amount of damage you can ‘skip’. A longer charge yields greater damage, but also requires making a meaningful decision as to whether hanging out for a little longer for a little extra damage is worth it. Why not implement the slam in a similar way? After suctioning a ghost for a short period of time, you could power surge to get some extra damage. Useful for quickly dispatching small ghosts, or for pumping the damage on a ghost you’re not totally sure you can hang onto much longer. If you can, however, stay connected for a decently long period of time, you can instead slam them for much greater damage, and the added bonus of stunning and damaging other nearby ghosts. This implementation would be a lot less repetitive by making the slam more specialized, requiring a greater investment of time and risk to perform. By specializing the slam more, you improve the flow and perceived speed of the game, because Luigi’s tug of war action with the ghosts is no longer being constantly interrupted. The slam now acts as a crescendo to more gradual and engaging interest curve within each combat encounter, while most of the benefits of the previous version of the slam remain intact with the power surge as a replacement.

Right. I’ve gone on and on about the changes to the combat formula of Luigi’s Mansion that I didn’t care for. To be clear, I did not dislike the game. It’s gorgeous, funny, and engrossing with an abundance of creativity on display. Its polish is outstanding in almost very way, but it could’ve have been even better if all of its gameplay was as overachieving. That’s the ultimate takeaway I have here. Luigi’s Mansion 3 has almost all good ideas, but not all of those ideas are executed as superbly as they could be. The way the slam ability ironically beats the game’s own combat mechanics over the head distracts from the combat’s other strengths, and moves the game away from those strengths. Luigi’s Mansion 3 deserves a lot of praise for bringing one of the Mario franchise’s weirdest entries back into the limelight and to a bigger audience than ever before. I just hope they keep iterating on its quirky gameplay and don’t forget what great ideas all of its games brought to the table. I hope a new surge in its popularity doesn’t mask the fact that no game is perfect, and Luigi’s Mansion still has room to grow. Forgetting that, would be the spookiest fate of all. Happy Halloween everybody!