Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon

The Nintendo GameCube was one of my favorite game consoles of all time. Not just because of its hardiness or its excellent controller, but also because Nintendo just had some big old balls during that entire development cycle. A Mario Kart game with two people in each cart. A Star Fox game in the third-person adventure genre. A first-person Metroid game. A Zelda game rendered in cel-shaded cartoonish graphics, set on the open sea. A Super Mario game based almost entirely on spraying water. A Kirby racing game. A Donkey Kong rhythm game. These were all radical ideas, and they led to a wide array of results. Some of them fell flat, some were met with acclaim, some are mocked and ridiculed to this day, and some of them drastically altered the course of their respective franchises for the better. It was a hell of an era, and Nintendo wasted no time jumping into this high-risk mindset when they decided to launch their new console without a Super Mario game, banking instead on gamers' interest in Luigi. Luigi's Mansion was one of fourteen launch titles for the system and in the absence of a Super Mario game became the marquee title for the GameCube. I played it and liked it a lot. I wasn't alone. It was met with critical acclaim and wound up being the GameCube's fifth-best selling title of all time when all was said and done. (The top four? Super Smash Bros. Melee and three games I referenced above, in Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, Super Mario Sunshine, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.)

Anyway, the game was soon forgotten about, and left without a sequel or any plans for one. In the ultimate indignity, it soon became little more than a punchline for those who thought the GameCube was a failure due to Nintendo's poor decision-making. So it gave me great pleasure when Dark Moon was announced, and even greater pleasure when it was released to all sorts of acclaim. It bothers me a little bit that a lot of people seem to cite it as an all-around improvement to Luigi's Mansion, finally "getting it right" where that franchise had somehow screwed things up ten years ago, but maybe I'm in the minority who just remember the first game fondly.

For the uninitiated, both Luigi's Mansion games revolve around Luigi using a vacuum cleaner to suck up a punch of pesky ghosts that have invaded an old, run down building. In the first game, that was one sprawling mansion. Here, it's five smaller distinct buildings. That about sums up the difference between the two, and honestly, I prefer the sort of open-ended feel the first game had to the level-based system from this one. But I'm not complaining, because both games are great. Blog readers know I'm not the type of guy to take my time with a game unless I'm really enjoying it, and this was a perfect example of such an instance; I collected every Boo (one in every level) and gem (thirteen in each... "world," for lack of a better term) in the game, often looping back through previously-played levels just to get that 100% completion.

This was one of the best games I've played in a while. Like, easily a top ten or fifteen game from the past year or two, and narrowly able to edge out Super Mario 3D Land as my favorite 3DS title to date. Check it out. And check out the first Luigi's Mansion too.