“Explore multiple haunted mansions with Luigi and his ghost-hunting Poltergust 5000 in this HD remaster“

If you know me, you’ll know that the original Luigi’s Mansion is in my top 5 games of all time. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve played it over and over again – it’s just such a fun and simple spooky game. It was my first Gamecube game and I very fuzzily remember getting it as a 4 year old at Circuit City (how do I remember these things?)That was 2001 and we had nothing else Luigi’s Mansion related, albeit a stage in Smash or Mario sports games, until 2013 on the Nintendo 3DS. Finally, we got another game in the series, even if it was portable.

Up front there are 2 huge changes for this sequel: the first being that this is a mission-based game, you cannot freely explore a mansion as you please. The second is that we have moved away from the spooky aesthetic from the original game, for a more kid-friendly art style and rather bland ghosts. Both these things suck, I am still not happy with the direction they went. Luckily Luigi’s Mansion 3 ditched the missions and went back to the same exploring as 1, but 3 also has its own issues.

For what it was though, I did somewhat enjoy 2 (or Dark Moon in America at the time). It’s fun when E. Gadd isn’t calling you every 3 seconds and the levels are nicely paced. The mansion varieties aren’t bad as there are 5 in total, yet having 1 huge mansion with all sorts of different rooms is the way to do it. There’s a new mechanic where you can build up power to suck in the ghosts quicker with the poltergust, I didn’t mind that addition.

I only beat 2 once, same with 3 back in 2019. I kept hoping the first 2 would be ported to Switch, and 2 HD came this year…for $60. Yes, I still bought it, and it’s strange they didn’t put 1+2 together like Pikmin. I mean 1 is also ported to the 3DS? Regardless, the updated graphics for 2 do look nice. Nothing groundbreaking but they do just fine as long as you know it is a ported 3DS game with nothing new added. There are no QoL updates, no checkpoints added to the missions, it is the exact same game but now on console.

I finished 2 HD in about 10 hours. It is still ok, except for the AWFUL staircase level which I will share down below. Whoever designed this should’ve been fired and I don’t understand why it was not changed even the tiniest bit to stop me from ripping my hair out.