As a GameCube launch title, Luigi's Mansion was a shining star... coming out of the muddy darkness of the PS1/N64 era, Luigi was an eye-opener. Detailed environments, nice character models, excellent sound design, and a completely different sort of game from Nintendo: essentially a Mario-comic take on Resident Evil. It was a game of promise, representative of this bold new generation's technology and creativity.
Four years later, I decided to pick it up again - do that second quest - and see how it measures up to the current state of video gaming. This is the GameCube's final calendar year; most of the truly great games have come and gone. There's only a handful of major releases left and then Nintendo will dive off after the Revolution. Although I doubt there are many GameCube owners at this point who haven't already played and forgotten Luigi's Mansion, it holds up surprisingly well (visually, anyway) and remains worth a weekend spin. Perhaps this is a testament to how hard Nintendo pushed this particular launch title, and how often many later games fell away from the standard.
You already know the story. Luigi has inherited a haunted mansion. He finds out that Mario is trapped somewhere inside and with the help of a friendly but addled scientist, E. Gadd, Luigi summons his courage to go inside to save his brother. The game's gimmick is the Poltergust 3000, a vacuum cleaner he uses to suck up the spirits or spray out various elemental attacks. (The later comparisons to Mario's FLUDD backpack from Mario Sunshine are obvious.)
The game's weaknesses are the same as they were in 2001. Too short, too much backtracking, and a confusing control scheme. On the other hand, it is graphically solid and thoroughly charming. Now for the details...
It's a problem that a game can be too short and contain too much backtracking. That's not usually a good sign. It is clear that the detailing of the Mansion itself took up a great deal of dev time. See, in 2001 we were still accustomed to repeated low-res wall textures and blocky unpainted rooms in our adventure games. And even after 2001 we still got quite a bit of that, particularly on the PS2 side (Kingdom Hearts comes all too easily to mind here.) So the lovingly crafted Mansion with spiderwebs in the corners and plenty of completely differentiated rooms to explore was a revelation. Visually, this WAS the new generation. The price for all of that beauty was that the Mansion is a very limited world. You don't explore the countryside surrounding the Mansion. You don't have to slog through a fire world, an ice world, a pinball world or a gears world to get there. It's just one biggish building that you'll get to know very well because you'll be pacing around it quite a bit.
As you might expect, there are plenty of locked doors and hidden keys. There are also puzzles that might require you to be holding item X or have power X to proceed. That's where all the backtracking comes in, and since hallways aren't cleared of ghosts until you reach a new chapter point, you end up getting smacked around by respawning corridor spirits all the time. In contrast, rooms can be safely cleared - usually after a miniboss fight.
Fighting and capturing ghosts is the action meat of the game, and although it is appropriately frantic and fun, it underscores the game's issues with the controller. Remember, this was a launch title for a brand new system with a brand new controller design. Part of Luigi's Mansion's mandate was to introduce the GameCube controller to the masses. So your button controls are all over the place as Nintendo tries to use every single shiny new button.
In combat, the Poltergust 3000 intakes on the right shoulder button and sprays out on the left shoulder button. That part is fine and intuitive enough, the problem is the flashlight on the C-stick.
By default, Luigi keeps his flashlight turned on. You hold the B button to turn it off and direct the beam around the room with the C-stick. Wrapping your mind around the C-stick is the game's most irritating problem. The controls are inverted (airplane style, so pushing up points the flashlight towards the floor and pushing down points the flashlight towards the ceiling) but also relative to Luigi's perspective. So you need to always consider which way he is facing when you flick the C-stick around. Now, if all the flashlight did was add a little visual flair to the game, it wouldn't be a problem. However, you need to point the light at the ghosts to begin the capture process, so having excellent control of the C-stick is absolutely critical.
The light stuns enemies for a second, exposing their ghostly hearts. Only when the heart appears can you slam the right shoulder button and start vacuuming up the spirit. But if you're waving the light wildly around - which happens quite often because you're simultaneously moving Luigi to avoid a ghost attack and therefore changing his physical perspective - you might miss that split second, or point the light completely in the wrong direction, or any number of control scheme horror stories. I think an absolute control scheme - where pushing right shines the light to the right, etc, no matter where Luigi is facing - would have been far more easy to use. (Although that would have led to some pretty disgusting acrobatics from Luigi if he was facing east but pointing his flashpoint west. At that point in the development process, I would have turned the flashlight into an omnidirectional mini-spotlight attached to the Poltergust.)
What's crazy is that it looks like hilarious fun. Once you lock on to a ghost, it freaks and tries to escape, dragging Luigi around the room, knocking him into furniture, coins and items dropping everywhere. Luigi grunts and struggles to maintain control... as directed by you pulling back on both analog sticks like a fisherman reeling in the big one. It's more complicated than it needs to be, but when it finally works, it looks amazing.
Then there's your inventory and in-game map. In a self-promoting move typical of Nintendo, Luigi carries around a Game Boy Color, redubbed by E. Gadd the Game Boy Horror. The GBH is used as a first-person examination tool, a status/inventory screen and a map/goal tracker. However, all three of those functions are set to a different button. Today, we would just have one button pop up the GBH and let the player navigate between functions... at the least we would combine the mapping and inventory; I could see a case for keeping the first-person viewpoint separate. You don't use it all that much anyway. What is annoying about the actual setup is that you have to put the virtual Game Boy away and bring it back out again if you want to switch between your inventory and your map, for example. Nintendo was determined to use all the buttons, rather than streamlining the setup and including efficiency options (like being able to page over to the map from your inventory screen.)
Even in 2005, there's a lot to gape over in Luigi's Mansion. The dust motes in the flashlight beam. The lightning flashes that fully expose a room for a second. The translucence of the ghosts combined with a puppetesque weight, sometimes reminding one of Slimer in the Ghostbusters movies. The way the vacuum tugs on curtains and tablecloths. Luigi himself, full of smooth and varied animations. It is still a pretty game to watch while other games of GameCube Year One are showing their age (like Eternal Darkness, Beach Spikers or Mario Party 4). It's a shame the controls make all the exploration more trouble than it needs to be.
A lot of work was put into the audio as well. There is a recurring melody that keeps the whole game together... sometimes as pure background music, sometimes heard in mutterings from unseen ghosts, and often whistled by Luigi as he tries to calm his jangled nerves. The audio is used to add personality; hitting the A button when there's nothing contextual to do will cause Luigi to cry out Mario's name. It is just plain charming to hear as well as to watch.
You can see why Luigi's Mansion quickly earned a reputation as a GameCube tech demo rather than a full-on game. The enhanced graphics, stellar audio and complicated controls all add up to an early Nintendo inspiration piece, a harbinger of games to come. It looks better than it plays, but all those quirks of control would be hashed out in later titles. No one is going to lump this game in the same league as Metroid Prime or Wind Waker, but it remains a serviceable little adventure game, currently going for $20 or less (often much less) and well worth that. This is one of those games that, when somebody makes fun of it for being lame or kiddie or stupid, I would go "Oh, it's fine," and leave it at that.
