Ranking the top 101 Nintendo games: No. 77, Luigi's Mansion 3
Vast improvements to the Luigi's Mansion formula made for the first can't-miss title in his solo franchise.
I’m ranking the top-101 Nintendo developed/published games of all-time, and you can read about the thought process behind game eligibility and list construction here. You can keep up with the rankings so far through this link.
The original Luigi’s Mansion is sometimes referred to as something of a tech demo for the Nintendo GameCube, as it was a launch title for the console back in 2001, and a relatively short affair. That’s always been a bit unfair: Luigi’s Mansion was short, sure, but “short” is different from “is a fully fleshed out experience.” In this case, “short” is “you can finish this game in around six hours,” which… well, I just ranked a Star Fox game and the shortest Pikmin experience right before this game, so you can guess how much a six-hour runtime for an enjoyable game bothers me. Less than the implication that Luigi’s Mansion was some kind of incomplete experience solely meant to show off the GameCube’s audio and graphical capabilities, for sure.
The GameCube introduced us to the ghost-hunting version of Luigi, only his second starring role at that point following the edutainment title Mario Is Missing. It helped flesh out the character and characterization of Luigi that Intelligent Systems’ Paper Mario had begun the work on just the year before. This — and Pikmin — were the early GameCube focuses for Shigeru Miyamoto, not a new Mario, and while that certainly annoyed the people who wanted a new Mario on day one with their new Nintendo console, the company instead got two new, critically acclaimed series out of the deal. While the original Luigi’s Mansion itself wasn’t necessarily a critical darling, it was a good game whose ideas and success eventually paved the way for the release of Luigi’s Mansion 3 on the Nintendo Switch 18 years later. And that one, well, there is no denying that this game rules.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 is the second title in the franchise developed by Next Level Games, a company you might be familiar with thanks to their work on Super Mario Strikers, Mario Strikers Charged, and the Wii’s highly successful reboot of Punch-Out!! — you could also be familiar with Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon on the Nintendo 3DS, of course, but I was trying to point out non-Mansion games for a second. Yeesh. Dark Moon itself is a great game, one that just missed inclusion on this list. A large part of that is because Luigi’s Mansion 3 does the things Dark Moon does well, and either just as well or better, while adding new and improved wrinkles on top of it all.
Let’s back up for a second, though, and discuss what it is you actually do in Luigi’s Mansion games. You catch ghosts. You know how in Super Mario Sunshine, Mario is equipped with a powerful backpack nicknamed FLUDD, designed to shoot water for a variety of reasons? Luigi got the first such invention developed by Professor E. Gadd, the Poltergust, which in many ways is a regular old vacuum, but in other, less regular ways, is capable of sucking up and trapping ghosts. There are ghosts all over the titular mansion thanks to King Boo, and Luigi’s job is to get them all inside of the vacuum and then to E. Gadd, who wants to study them, for science reasons. Surely none of the ghosts will ever escape E. Gadd’s clutches, causing there to be sequels to the original game.
You can’t just suck up the ghosts, though: even the Ghostbusters had to weaken haunts somehow before they could catch them in a trap. Unlike that foursome, though, Luigi doesn’t just shoot a powerful beam at ghosts to hold them in place until they can be trapped. He disorients them with a powerful flashlight, runs behind them with a vacuum, turns it on, and then beats the ghosts into submission by whipping them into objects, walls, the floor, and other nearby ghosts as they desperately try to crawl away from their suction-based doom. That is so much cooler than proton streams that I shouldn’t even need to pile on and say that Luigi’s Mansion has the far superior sequels of the two franchises, but hey, the truth should be known.
You traverse haunted mansions (or, in the case of Luigi’s Mansion 3, an enormous haunted hotel), solving environmental puzzles and clearing rooms of ghosts, one cartoonishly violent suction-slam at a time. One thing Luigi’s Mansion 3 has over its predecessors is variety: haunted mansions are all well and good, but Luigi’s Mansion 3 threw continuity logic out the window and decided that each floor of this hotel was going to be a completely different environment. So, you end up with a very hotel lobby area to explore, as well as some regular hotel rooms. But you also go through a museum with a full-size T-Rex skeleton that, obviously, ends up possessed by a ghost — yes, Luigi fights a possessed T-Rex skeleton, using a vacuum cleaner. You have to solve the secrets of the pyramid that is for some reason inside of this hotel. There is a mall, a castle, a movie studio, a theater, floors overrun by a ghostly garden, the boiler room, a dance hall, and more.
Each section has a boss fight tailored to the theme, and, by and large, they’re excellent. You won’t necessarily strain your brain to figure out how you need to go about defeating them, but it’s not always 100 percent straightforward, and, like with all of the other systems and actions in the game, the fights are just so satisfying in part because you’re not used to playing games designed in the same way this one is.
Each area uses the same basic concepts in terms of your basic goal — find ghosts, defeat ghosts, secure elevator button to get to the next floor — but the puzzles and challenges you must overcome are very different, and tailored to the specific theme of the level. It keeps Luigi’s Mansion 3 fresh, makes for a longer experience and more fulfilling, creative experience than the original, and we haven’t even gotten to the best part of the game yet.
The Poltergust gets upgrades across the series, and it’s in Luigi’s Mansion 3 that it hits its as-of-now zenith. You see, instead of just a stronger vacuum with some new bells and whistles, this time, the Poltergust can create a clone of Luigi of sorts, one his consciousness can briefly be shifted into. The clone is made up of a green goo, and so, this creation is named… Gooigi. The name is as gross to say as the sound Gooigi makes when he squeezes his squishy, moist body through a grate is to hear. And I love him.
Luigi deploys Gooigi in situations like the above, when there’s an area Luigi himself cannot access, but a goo-based creature held together by nothing more than a game developer’s desire that it exists as such can. Grates, small pipes, areas you don’t want to throw Luigi into headfirst since his health is finite but the worst thing that happens to Gooigi is that he melts and has to be formed via Poltergust once more… these are all moments to switch control from Lu to Goo. There will also be occasions where you need to use both Luigi and Gooigi at the same time: you do this by setting one of them to a task (say, having their Poltergust pulling on a large object) and then switching control to the other. The -igi you moved off of will continue to do what they are doing, and then you make the other do it as well, and then poof, an object is moved, broken, sucked up, revealed, whatever.
You can play the entire game like this, solving puzzles by switching control from Luigi to Gooigi, or you can play co-op, where a second player can control Gooigi the entire time. This is the optimal way to play Luigi’s Mansion 3, to me: everything can be solved more efficiently, the amount of stuff you will want to vacuum up or blow around in order to find hidden goodies is cut in half since you’ll have a partner helping out on that task, and it’s just generally the kind of game that works perfectly with another person, since it is a source of constant amusement and joy, amusement and joy that can be shared with someone sitting next to you on the couch.
The joy comes from many places, too. The animation is top-notch, with Luigi’s walk and facial expressions changing depending on whether he thinks he’s safe or if there are ghosts around. He’ll shift from upbeat and confident, moving quickly without a care in the world, to hunched over, walking ahead only because he has to and not because he wants to, depending on whether he thinks he’s in potential danger. Luigi is terrified of ghosts, and that feeling is palpable just from looking at him. The expressions and movements of the ghosts and the world they inhabit, too, deserves attention. So much care was put into how this game would look at every possible moment, and I don’t mean that in terms of graphical fidelity. The whole game world feels alive despite the fact you’re surrounded by death, and you’ll want to turn your Poltergust on all of it to see how everything within this world reacts.
The sound, too, is wonderful, as it has been since the original entry in the series. Both in terms of the music — cartoonish and haunting, often at the same time, with melodies that will stick in your brain while you play and while you don’t — and the sound effects Luigi, the ghosts, Poltergust, and even the objects in the world make. Part of the reason slamming a ghost into other ghosts is so satisfying is not just because it’s an efficient way of knocking down the health of multiple ghosts at a time, but because they make such a, well, satisfying thud when they smack together, and the stunned faces they make when it happens only add to that feeling.
Nintendo might have left the Luigi’s concept alone for over a decade after introducing it to us, but Next Level Games has now created two excellent entries in the series in the last few years. Luigi’s Mansion 3 is the must-play of the bunch, for all of the reasons listed above, and unlike some of the games you’ll read about on this list, it’s still pretty easy to find. After all, it just came out in 2019 on the Switch, and whether you plan to play solo or with a friend sitting next to you on the couch, it’s absolutely worth your time.
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