Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD – bustin’ makes him feel good (Nintendo)
Nintendo has taken to remastering old 3DS games for the Switch but while Luigi’s ghostly adventure is a lot of fun the asking price is high.
Until the recent Nintendo Direct this looked like it could end up being the final first party release for the Nintendo Switch. Since the Direct though, an unexpectedly large host of new games have been announced, for this year and next, which leaves Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD seeming like more an anomaly, considering it’s a remaster of an 11-year-old 3DS game.
For years, Nintendo has filled in many of the quieter corners of their release schedules with ports of Wii U games but it’s only now, in the twilight months of the Switch, that they’ve thought to remaster anything from their final, dedicated portable. But, other than the fact that it’s a good game, we’re not sure why they picked Luigi’s Mansion 2, or whether it’s a one-off or the vanguard of a new wave of remasters.
There are certainly many excellent 3DS games they could bring over – Kid Icarus: Uprising, in particular, is crying out for a remaster with better controls – but there is one very obvious problem and that’s that Nintendo is charging full price for the game, which means it costs significantly more than the 3DS original did. It’s still a great game but it’s a shame all anyone’s really going to be talking about here is the price.
Luigi’s Mansion is a sorely underappreciated franchise in general, that has done wonders to expand on Luigi’s character and give him an entirely different style of gameplay, where there’s no jump button involved. The franchise’s relative obscurity is probably because the first game was a launch title for the GameCube and was little more than a tech demo. It was fun, as a sort of family friendly parody of Resident Evil, but also very short and shallow.
It wasn’t until Luigi’s Mansion 2 that the series got into gear, with a significantly more substantial adventure by American studio Next Level Games – whose work was impressive enough for Nintendo to go to the rare step of buying them up, following their involvement with 2019’s equally good Luigi’s Mansion 3.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 is easily one of the best-looking games on the Switch, with some excellent cartoon graphics and a surprisingly complex physics system. Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD is, as the name suggests, not a remake like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and so it can only work with the original graphics to improve them, rather than replacing them entirely. It’s a credit to the original visuals that this works as well as it does and while it never looks as good as Luigi’s Mansion 3 it comes extremely close.
The remaster also features a rejigged user interface, which easily compensates for the fact that you haven’t got the second 3DS screen to display the map. Obviously, there’s no 3D effect …read more
Source:: Metro
