Game #1055: Luigi's Mansion

 If there's something strange in your neighborhood.... Who you gonna call?

 If there's something I'm wont to do that's play horror game franchises out of order, nothing spookier than that eh!, so as not to drop a bad habit, I'm playing the very first Luigi's Mansion... after playing its two sequels. It gives me an interesting perspective, as now I know how the series evolved and changed. Posh introduction aside, the original Luigi's Mansion is considered by many the best in the series, and since I adored the third game... I was chomping at the bit to get my hands on this one.

  Well, I'll tell ya this, it took me a while to get used to how the game plays. Luigi has his flashlight out by default, and you need to aim at a ghost with it to stun it, and then, and only then you can use the Poltergust-3000 to suck them in. You have a very brief window of opportunity to turn on the Poltergust, and once you enter the tug 'o' war against the ghost you have to hold down the opposite direction the ghost is moving towards in order to sap their health, but you also have the option of mashing the analog stick in that direction to suck them in even faster. I don't think the controls ever felt completely comfortable, but I learned to appreciate the simplicity of it all.

 Another thing I appreciated was how streamlined and Arcadey it felt. The closest thing to mini-bosses are a few big ghosts with unique designs and weakness you have to find and exploit before you can stun them with the flashlight. There are no cutscenes introducing them, or anything weird, you just find them and do your best, which is something that aids in making it feel like a fast-paced game. As you clear rooms from ghosts you'll get keys that will allow you to move deeper into the mansion, and since the mansion isn't very large it feels like you're getting intimately familiar with it, to the point that even now, about a week after finishing the game, I can still remember the Mansion and its rooms. The mansion is very well designed too, while it doesn't have the variety of, say, Luigi's Mansion 3's hotel, the consistency makes it easy to immerse yourself in the adventure.

 As you go through the game you'll unlock the ability to use elements: Spit fire, ice or water. To be honest, this mechanic is very underutilized. There are a few candles you must light, a fire to put out and some plants to water and... I think you only had to use Ice once in order to progress through the game. That said, you'll find a few elemental ghosts you must defeat with the appropriate element. Besides how little this mechanic is used, it can also be a bit annoying, since it's possible to find yourself fighting a ghost without the proper element and having to remember WHERE you could find the element you need, backtrack there and then return. I think this became an issue three different times at most, but since it's a short game it did leave an impression.

 Luigi's Mansion 2 gets a lot of flak for returning you to the Mansion's entrance after every chapter, it's something I disliked a lot, but what if I told you that this game did the exact same thing? The game has four bosses, counting the final boss, and after every boss you are returned to the Mansion's Hallway. It was a bit annoying, because you'd be closer to your next objective if you could continue from the room you fought the boss in!

 And then we have the Boos, there are 50 boos in the game, but you only need to capture 40 them, and 10 of them are freebies that you get after the third boss. Capturing all 40 boos wasn't an annoying concept in and of itself, but the thing is... Boos can escape. And you have to chase them around the mansion. And they heal while they are in a different room. And they could potentially escape into a room you haven't opened yet and don't have the key for. I swear, having to chase boos from room to room really hurt the otherwise enjoyable quick pacing the game had. This was very annoying near the end of the game, when Boos started having annoying amounts of health and I'd go to and fro the same two rooms until, inevitably, it fled into a room I couldn't open yet, and then it'd recharge its health while I continued with the game, thus, wasting my time.

 Minor annoyances aside, I felt like Luigi's Mansion was really fun, and I understand why so many people have such fond memories of this game. That said, yeah, LM 3 is still my favorite, but I think I liked this game a tiny bit more than the second game. The mansion was really fun to explore, and I feel like its design was super memorable. The mini-bosses added some valuable variety into the ghost-hunting shenanigans, and the presentation holds up very well. I think this one's a classic.

 7.0