Luigi’s Mansion (Nintendo GameCube on Switch 2 Review)

Luigi’s Mansion
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Released September 14, 2001 (JP) November 18, 2001 (US)
Directed by Hideki Konno
Published by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2

I ain’t going to win any friends with this review.

My first day one Nintendo console was the GameCube. I was SO excited, even though 2001 had already broken my heart twice with new game machines (and the early demise of Dreamcast). The Game Boy Advance’s screen was like playing video games with three pairs of sunglasses on and the Xbox’s controller was NOT made for the hands of an already-small-for-her-age 12 year old girl. But that’s okay because that GameCube controller felt custom built for me and there’s no way Nintendo would ever bungle a launch lineup. All I can say is THANK GOD for Super Monkey Ball and Star Wars: Rogue Leader. And then Super Smash Bros. Melee came out a few weeks after launch and THAT dominated my next couple months of playtime and was everything I wanted from a new game on a new machine and more. So my GameCube worked out just fine in the end, and so did the Xbox and GBA (just not THAT GBA). Eventually, I did finish all those 2001 day one launch games. All except one. I never got around to finishing Luigi’s Mansion until I did this review. I’m not even sure I beat the second boss.

This is either the first boss fight or how fans of Luigi’s Mansion will react to this review.

I remember Electronic Gaming Monthly had an Xbox versus GameCube issue and someone actually gave Luigi’s Mansion a 5.5, which was jaw-dropping for a Nintendo-published game. Literally shocking. But it only took me about an hour of playing Luigi’s Mansion to get where they were coming from and, actually, I thought a 5.5 was generous. As a 12 year old, I thought Luigi’s Mansion was a boring all around experience, and now as a 36 year old, I feel the same way. It feels like a ten second long proof of concept hardware trailer that was stretched into a full length game. Because that’s exactly what this is. They took the 10 seconds of Luigi in a haunted mansion footage from Spaceworld 2000’s GameCube tech demo (the same one that got people hyped for Zelda before the cel-shading) and turned it into a full-length game. It’s kind of stunning that Nintendo didn’t throw every resource they had at making sure a Mario game was ready for launch. Apparently Hiroshi Yamauchi’s last request before stepping down as president of Nintendo was “make a Mario game for our new game machine!” Presumably he also asked “why don’t you have one already? Are you f*cking stupid? Don’t you remember how Virtual Boy did with no (real) Mario game to send it off?”

I thought “Game Boy Horror” was trying to play a launch day Game Boy Advance.

But hey, I liked the idea of Luigi in a haunted house as a kid. I was as hyped for that Spaceworld footage as anyone else. I wasn’t expecting a Mario game, and good thing for that because there’s no running or jumping in Luigi’s Mansion and the primary method of combat is basically tug-of-war. So much tug-a-war. First, you have to stun-lock the ghost by pointing a flashlight at it, and when its heart dings, you have to suck it up with a vacuum by holding the opposite direction the ghost pulls. And, well, that’s basically the whole game. Just do that over and over and over and over and over again. If you don’t like the combat, you’re going to be bored with Luigi’s Mansion. If you like it, you won’t be. It’s really that simple. I thought it was boring as a kid and I still think it’s boring now.

God, the Nintendo fans are going to have aneurysms with this opinion, but, yeah, I think the character designers are really forgettable and generic. I just didn’t like anything about this at all. And before you burn down my house, remember that I’m not a Nintendo hater. Read some of my other Nintendo reviews. Try Mario Wonder, the Switch remake of Mario RPG, Yoshi’s Island (from the same director as this), and hell, just go to my retro review index. I even gave the lazy as all f*ck Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition a YES! because I had more fun with it than not. So I think Luigi’s Mansion has no redeeming qualities. So what? It’s okay to not like one Nintendo game, you know?

There’s just not enough twists on the ghost catching formula. The idea is supposed to be that the “portrait ghosts” take extra steps to expose their weak spot. Like the guy in the above chair? He’s not visible if you face him. You have to turn around and wait for him to yawn, and when he does, THEN you can stun lock him and suck him up the same way you do basic enemies. All the portrait ghosts have 100hp and could take multiple stun-locks and suckages to capture. And again, the actual combat is exactly the same as it is for the basic enemies. It just gets so old, so quickly, and that’s before you factor in things like poison mushrooms. They spawn spontaneously during boss fights (and are also hidden in some fixtures in the rooms) and shrink you in size. I don’t care so much about the health ping. It’s easy enough to get health back. But you can’t operate your vacuum while shrank. It’s not hard to avoid damage once shrank, but it takes too long to grow back. It’s one of many, many aspects of Luigi’s Mansion that feels like it only exists to pad out the run time.

Safe bet that the team behind this were gigantic fans of the Haunted Mansion rides at Disney theme parks. Many of the gags are straight from the ride, including this candle bit. There’s also the whole mansion setting and portrait theme, a fortune teller with a crystal ball, dancing ghosts, a graveyard, a music room, suits of armor, and ghosts seen through shadows. Really, all that’s missing are the busts and the stretching room. This isn’t a knock on Nintendo, BTW. So, in a way this is kinda the third game I’ve reviewed based on that ride, including Adventures in the Magic Kingdom for the NES and the Super Famicom exclusive Mickey no Tokyo Disneyland Daibouken. So does this mean in another twenty years we can look forward to Waluigi’s Pirate Adventure? Because that would slap. And if you’re a Nintendo fan who has never rode the Haunted Mansion and are rolling your eyes at me right now, Disney+ actually has the full Haunted Mansion ride point of view. Watch it and tell me I’m wrong. Yes, the Tokyo version of the ride is basically identical. Hell, even the music is kind of similar to Luigi’s Mansion at times.

Every ghost portrait ghost is caught by the vacuum and the sucking mechanic. No exceptions, not even the bosses, whether it makes sense or not. At one point, you meet a fortune teller and the object is to retrieve five of Mario’s personal items and bring them to her. When this is done, she asks you to use your suck her up. “All right! At least with this one I won’t have to watch the number 100 tick off yet again.” Wrong. She still resists the vacuum and still has 100hp. Why? She literally instructs you to capture her. She’s going willingly. Shouldn’t the gag be that she has 1 hit point, or none? It makes no sense.

Maybe this is how ghosts do foreplay.

And that’s what my general problem with Luigi’s Mansion is. Anything potentially clever is kind of ruined by reverting back to the same, tired mechanic that’s used on all enemies great and small. Plus, on the Switch 2, I’m not entirely sure it worked as it’s supposed to. I was constantly getting the dings for stun-locking ghosts and then immediately cuing up the vacuum, only the ghosts vanished in the transition to the vacuum. Maybe that happened when I was 12 too and I forgot, but once I switched off a GameCube controller (a $70 accessory, mind you) and moved to the Joycons, it didn’t happen as much. Oh, it still happened. It happened a lot. This isn’t the “pulling back to suck them in” part but just initiating the combat itself. For whatever reason, the flashlight felt less effective than I remember it being.

I do have one nice thing to say: for such a darkly-lit game, it’s not as flashy as you would think.

And what I said about the flashlight above really only applied to the generic basic enemies. I don’t remember it ever being a problem for any of the “portrait ghosts” that are the main objective of the game. In general, I assume the combat is supposed to feel very frantic and wacky but I thought it was underwhelming and repetitive to the point of exhaustion. Eventually the basic enemies can be dealt with by using the different elements you can suck up into the vacuum which are water, fire, and ice. Some enemies require one of those three things, when it was optional, I preferred using the elements because it worked every time, unlike the vacuum. The problem with that is there’s no PUNCH to using those elements. No feeling of doing damage. You just watch a number count down and then the ghost dies when it reaches zero. They don’t even really react to it. They just kind of stop and fade out with no satisfying death animation.

I’ve jokingly called this “Luigi’s Tech Demo” for years but that’s really what it is. It’s meant to show off how cool the GameCube is. And this IS a massive upgrade over the jaggy Nintendo 64. I actually was surprised by how low resolution this looked. I hadn’t played a GameCube game in a long time. This certainly didn’t hold up as much as Wind Waker did. I mean, it’s not a deal breaker or anything. It looks fine.

And then there’s the Boos. One of the main objectives of the game is to unleash a cluster of fifty boos into the mansion, then find them and suck them up. They don’t put up fights as much as the other ghosts (some of the Boos don’t attack at all), but they can have as much as 300hp. That sounds like busy work by itself, and that’s before you get to what they CAN do: run away, leaving the room entirely. I was using save states to reload them, but eventually I gave up on that and started chasing them into hallways and other rooms. A ghost that has 300hp might require you to follow it back and forth into a room over a dozen times. It just creates more busy work, and again, it’s the same thing you’re already doing with basic enemies and portrait ghosts.

I think the vacuum could have been satisfying if they significantly dialed back the HP on the ghosts. If there was a quick, snappy pace to it, hell, for all I know this could have been one of the best games ever made. But the way they did it just makes it feel like a grindy slog, especially since the ghosts just reset if you don’t catch them in a single pass. The only positive thing I can say is “at least they don’t require you to repeat every single activation step.” Faint praise.

If the mansion offered anything but the combat, like a genuine sense of exploration or getting lost or hidden things, I’d have liked it more. But it doesn’t. The “puzzles” in Luigi’s Mansion are really rudimentary stuff, and there’s really no room puzzles at all in the “you’re locked, how do you get out?” sense. Everything is based around the ghosts. But haunted mansions are almost never JUST about the ghosts. There’s two “hidden” rooms. One of them you fall into from the roof and the other you enter by scanning a mouse hole with the Game Boy Horror, which is like the game’s radar.

Besides the “speedy ghosts” I did get everything in the game, including all 50 Boos. Initially I finished the game with 49 out of 50. There was a hidden room I missed and my OCD got to me while writing this review. Worth the effort? Not really, but at least I’ll have this to figure out how much the sequels improved the game. Which I assume they must have because it can’t get much more boring than this.

But activating the ghost battles isn’t exactly something that requires you to have a seat on your thinking couch. Move a curtain with the vacuum. Move an airplane on the ceiling with a vacuum. Spray a sleeping ghost with water. Spray a bathing ghost with ice. Spray a frozen ghost with fire. Even late in the game, there’s a ghost that you just have to wait for it to basically say “boo.” Activate all the musical instruments or clocks in a room by pressing the A button next to them. The engine is just too limited to do anything more complicated or clever. If you can’t manipulate it with the vacuum or with a single press of the A button, the game can’t handle it. That’s probably just as well. The most complicated enemies require you to clog the vacuum with a ball that you then can launch back at them, it’s pretty haphazard. The controls in general are. Even then, I wish each ghost had a unique capture method instead of vacuum.

Like, these guys WOULD be fun battles since they fight back and feel boss-like (but they ain’t bosses). Except the method of capture is the same for them as it is everyone else. It gets old.

I guess I pictured in my mind a Clue-like mansion (or maybe the Winchester House, which I totally recommend visiting at least once) with lots of hidden rooms, secret passages, booby traps, and puzzles. Instead, it’s the facade of a haunted house, with all the expecting trappings but barely any of the interactivity I would hope for. A lot of the rooms look interesting and have lots of furniture and fixtures, but you don’t really do anything with them but shake them (sometimes it looks like he’s dry-humping them. At least I hope it’s dry). If they have money or health refills in them, it flies out inelegantly. Maybe a drawer or door opens or a chandelier sways, but that’s basically the extent of what you can do with the setting. At one point, I had to walk on a treadmill to get a key and the moment stood out so much I couldn’t believe it because so much of it just sits there doing nothing.

Another weird thing, at least for me, is how the Boos are the central focus of the game, yet they don’t look like the portrait ghosts at all. The portrait ghosts are the only eventful parts of the game, so when you think about it, shouldn’t the portrait ghosts be Boos playing dress-up instead of being humanoid ghosts? Especially since the last boss is also just an ordinary looking Boo with a crown on his head. Maybe his expression is a little more sinister, but he’s just a Boo, right?

So, I thought Luigi’s Mansion was a mostly empty game with boring combat and a plodding pace. I literally didn’t like anything about it. Even the bosses were snoozies. The first one, a giant baby, was probably the most memorable. The second one I honestly thought looked just like the basic enemies, and the third one IS just a giant Boo that you have to lure into the spikes of unicorn statues. Then the last boss is also a Boo but he’s the last boss because he has a crown on his head. Well Boos are like 94% head anyway and it’s not like he’s going to wear the crown on one of his flippers, but at least he also operates a robotic Bowser so that the game can feel climatic.

That’s the second boss. Brought to you by AT&T because they phoned that sh*t in.

I was wrong though about Luigi’s Mansion being cynical. Hey, I can admit when I’m wrong. No, I think the problem is the game was rushed out because they didn’t have a Mario game or anything remotely Mario-like for the GameCube launch. Luigi’s Mansion is a very simple game. Simple combat. Simple puzzles. Nothing too complex. Nothing ambitious at all, really. Maybe the least ambitious Nintendo launch game ever made (well, besides Mario’s Tennis on Virtual Boy). One of the biggest general complaints about Luigi’s Mansion is that it’s too short. That’s kind of bonkers because it’s one of the most artificially padded games from Nintendo I’ve played. If not for the poison mushrooms or tedious life bars, this might have only taken a couple hours to finish.

Honest to God, this guy felt more boss-like than two out of the four big bosses. He also had one of the more involved “puzzles.” You had to suck up the foot he was eating, then capture the waiters who would bring him more food, and THEN dodge his attacks when he had a tantrum, and THEN he was ready to be captured. Hell, I thought he WAS that floor’s boss. It felt like an event.

I don’t happen to think the layout of the mansion was optimized in the way, say, a Zelda dungeon is. But even if I ignore that, the game does so many things that grind the tempo to a halt. After you beat the giant Boo boss, it takes you back to the lab to turn the portrait ghosts into paintings. The next thing that happens? You have to manually walk back to the spot where you just fought the giant Boo on the third floor, at which point lightning strikes the mansion and knocks the power out. This is done as an excuse to restore basic enemies to the floors you’ve already cleared (basic enemies stop appearing in any room with the power restored), at least temporarily. You can go to the basement and restore the power. Why couldn’t the lightning strike have been a cut scene after you beat the Boo? Or why couldn’t the circuit breaker to the house be somewhere else? I guess the reason I found Luigi’s Mansion to be so boring is because nothing about it feels optimized. If you enjoyed it, hey, it’s okay. I like plenty of things that people find to be boring. I watch competitive ballroom dancing and everything.
Verdict: NO!

They went to all the effort of programming these upside-down gravity swap panels that you can step on and then they totally underutilized them. I think like two rooms in the entire game use this. To me, this is the prime exhibit in “they had a lot more plans that had to stay on the drawing board.” And really, I think this is the only time that you use this to reach something. You have to drop down on a table to reach a chest. Wait, isn’t Luigi the better jumper of the two? You mean to tell me he can’t reach up and open a chest on a table? Yeah yeah, I know, because then it wouldn’t be a game. But this upside down mechanic could have made for some interesting maze-like design. There’s none of that type of thing in Luigi’s Mansion. Rooms are just boxes that you wander around in. There’s no sense of a labyrinth of mystery. It’s just a shell. I expect more from Nintendo by 2001. This came out after Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, etc. And even 2D games had evolved past this by this point. (shrug)