The original and scariest instalment in Nintendo’s cuddly horror series is now available on Switch, just in time for Halloween.
If you took a trip to 2002 when the GameCube launched in Europe, the phrase Luigi’s Mansion may have yielded little more than a disappointing shrug. The spooky adventure led by Mario’s perpetually nervous brother was, weirdly, the most prominent first party launch title for the system, alongside Wave Race: Blue Storm, Super Monkey Ball, and Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader.
When you’re coming off the revolutionary Super Mario 64, at the launch of the Nintendo 64, a horror game led by his less famous brother was always going to be perceived as a lesser offering – and it was, even with Luigi’s bumbling charms and his wizardry with a vacuum cleaner.
Fast forward two decades, however, and Luigi’s Mansion has ascended into a premiere franchise for Nintendo. The latest entry, 2019’s Luigi’s Mansion 3, sold over 14 million copies. While not as high as the likes of Mario or Zelda, it’s more than Splatoon 3 and Pikmin 4 – and yet the games often end up being forgotten, during roll calls of Nintendo’s most popular titles.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 is the series’ peak so far, and one of the best games on the Switch, while the recently remastered Luigi’s Mansion 2 is also great and generally perceived as a step above the original. But the first game is better than you perhaps remember.
The original (most recently remastered on the 3DS) has been released on Nintendo Switch Online this week, and if you’re after a one-night ride of comedic family friendly scares for Halloween, it’s certainly the best choice.
That’s because it’s the shortest, at around six hours, and, I’d argue, the scariest. As a franchise, Luigi’s Mansion takes a kid friendly approach to horror, with Luigi’s slapstick animations and ghosts pulled straight out of Casper, but the original game veers closer to a Resident Evil parody – with some thornier, creepier charms not seen in the two sequels.
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Along with the Resident Evil style animations when opening new doors, a big draw of the original is its more open-ended labyrinth design. The two sequels (especially Luigi’s Mansion 2) were largely streamlined into linear levels, but the first had a stronger emphasis on back-tracking and finding keys to unlock doors in its connected mansion.
Later entries were more mechanically diverse with their bosses, but in terms of set pieces, some of the most memorable moments are in the first game. The opening showdown with a ghost baby inside its crib is still one of the best, but encounters with clockwork soldiers, along with the superbly named bodybuilder Biff Atlas, still shine with a unique off-kilter personality.
The success of Luigi’s Mansion 3 makes another sequel inevitable, and it’s exciting to think about how impressive a new entry could be on the Switch 2.
Developer Next Level Games – who made the two sequels but not the original – have accrued a reputation for their stunning animation work (see the goal celebrations in Mario Strikers: Battle League Football) and, assuming they’re doing the next entry, it’s likely Luigi’s Mansion 4 will be the first true test of the Switch 2’s graphical abilities, if it launches before a new 3D Mario or Zelda.
While the original Luigi’s Mansion has a more mixed reputation, a fourth game could benefit from a return to a less linear structure. The second game was designed for short bursts on the handheld 3DS, but with the Switch 2, an expansive inter-connected map would help to get it closer to the original design and have it unequivocally become a top tier Nintendo blockbuster.
Luigi’s Mansion may have started in the shadow of Mario, but it’s one of Nintendo’s most interesting, and underappreciated, left-turns in the modern era.
Nintendo’s family friendly reputation might come with some inherent restrictions, but much like Splatoon’s spin on competitive shooters, this shows what magic the company can spook up when slowly twisting the door knob into new territory.
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