Luigi's Mansion 3DS review - "It needed to be on Switch"
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3DS
| Luigi's Mansion 3DS

Luigi's Mansion is a stone-cold classic. Launching alongside the GameCube way back in 2001, it kicked off an era of experimentation for Nintendo that, frankly, the developer has yet to reach the heights of again.

But 17 years have passed since, and there are millions of people alive now who weren't when the game first launched. So, it only makes sense to rerelease the magnificent game on a newer console - which is exactly what Nintendo has done.

Except it's chosen the wrong console. Luigi's Mansion on 3DS suffers thanks to a mixture of inaccurate motion controls and an ever-present map screen that makes things far too easy. It makes you wonder why the game didn't just come to Switch instead.

Suck up

Let's backtrack. Luigi's Mansion is the other Mario brother's first eponymous adventure, and it's all about clearing a mansion of ghosts using a vacuum cleaner designed by mad scientist Professor E. Gadd.

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You roam the halls of the enormous mansion, using your flashlight to stun incoming ghosts before wrestling with them with your Poltergust 3000. It's a bit like fishing - they move left, you drag them to the right. Drop their hitpoints to 0 and they're yours.

Along the way you need to defeat huge boss ghosts, many of which require a quick puzzle to be solved before you can attack them. You'll need to uncover as much treasure as you can in the mansion to score points and achieve one of the better endings too.

The core game remains brilliant. Luigi's Mansion was unlike anything Nintendo had made before, and it showed a whole new level of inventiveness that threw out everything you expected from a Mario Bros. game.

It's wonderfully silly, looks absolutely beautiful (especially considering how old it is), and it plays like a dream. Or rather, it used to play like a dream.

Flailing around

The 3DS is lacking a pretty important feature - a second analogue stick. You can buy one as an add-on, sure, but with only a handful of games that use it, you'd be hard-pressed to find a reason to do so.

Instead, Nintendo has opted for a mixture of one analogue stick, a couple of buttons, and motion controls. While sucking up ghosts, you can physically move the 3DS up and down to change the vertical direction, and holding B lets you change the horizontal direction.

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Put simply, it just doesn't work. The motion controls lead to wildly inaccurate movements, and the game leaves Luigi pointed in whichever direction you left him when you stop using the Poltergust - sometimes you'll be wandering around staring at the ceiling, unable to hit anything on the ground.

Repositioning yourself while vacuuming is also a nightmare, and most of the time you'll find yourself cutting off the Poltergust, moving to a more advantageous position, and starting the whole showdown again.

For regular ghosts, it's not such an issue. But when you need accuracy and precision in puzzle solving and boss battles, it can lead to hugely frustrating periods of time where you know exactly what needs doing, but you can't quite get the angle right.

Over here!

While combat has been made harder, exploration has been made infinitely easier. Since the 3DS has two screens, one of them has been entirely taken up with a map at all times, making many of the traps and secrets stupidly easy to find.

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Where before trick doors would squash you on the regular, this time around you can glance down at the bottom screen and by process of elimination realise that it's not real. A glowing marker tells you which door you need to go to next pretty much constantly.

It removes any kind of subtlety, and means you're being pushed from encounter to encounter without any encouragement to do your own thing.

Don't forget to lock up

Yet despite all that, it's still Luigi's Mansion. It's still a brilliant game - it just needed to be put on a console that could match its original shine. It needed to be on Switch.

Motion controls will never make up for a lack of a second analogue stick, and an ever-present map screen ruins far too many of the game's mysteries.

If you've never played Luigi's Mansion before, and you don't fancy buying an old GameCube and a copy of the game, then take the 3DS version for a spin. It's not as good, but it's still a wonderful game that should be played by everyone.

Luigi's Mansion 3DS review - "It needed to be on Switch"

Luigi's Mansion is a truly wonderful game, but the 3DS was the wrong place to port it
Score
Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.