Luigi's Mansion 3: A Disappointing Sequel

I received the Gamecube for Christmas back in 2001 and with it came a single game Luigi's Mansion this was Nintendo's first foray into doing anything horror related with one of its original franchises to my knowledge and they absolutely knocked it out of the park now granted it's more goofy and funny than it is scary but nine-year-old me still had a blast and even a few frights since then I've played and replayed this game over and over across the years eventually Luigi's Mansion dark moon came out for the 3ds and I couldn't be more excited until I played it the idea of multiple mansions was a strange concept to me and the puzzles were kind of boring progressing seemed cumbersome and tedious I stopped playing it after completing the first mansion and it wasn't because I was mad about the game I just forgot about it and after seeing the rave reviews that have received I always attributed my lackadaisical response to the idea that I just didn't enjoy the format on the 3ds I just wanted a new title I wanted a new title on a home console rather than a mobile one what is a salad it seems to be a food substance of lettuce sometimes it involves other vegetables and meat Shh it's green it's just like yuji's hat is there a connection I like a hard-boiled egg on my salad oh wait now now that's my sponsor this is salad dot IO fellas let me tell you about these cool ass people so salad is a cryptocurrency minor which probably shoots up red flags for a few of you I assure you I check these dudes out and they're totally upfront about what they do basically they tap into your GPU when you're not doing anything with your PC and you reap the benefits in the form of gift cards and game rewards they can range from Visa and Amazon cards to stuff like dis court nitro and gift cards for different video games now it does use a lot of electricity so if you're at an area where it's gonna cost you a lot this probably isn't for you just make sure that salad is right for you before you download it and check out their website and discord community if you need any help or have any questions use the code salt in all capital letters if you want a cool sign up bonus as well please scream the code into your computer thanks guys my wishes for a home console release were answered last year in the form of Luigi's Mansion 3 which debuted ironically on a console that could be both mobile and hooked up to a TV and well it also fell flat for me again it got rave reviews and I had to question what it is that sucks me into the first game but causes me to feel less enthused about the third installment now I will say that I didn't proceed through the game and hate it hell I wouldn't even say that I disliked it but for a game that released 18 years after the original there are a lot of things missing that I would consider to be essential to making a Luigi's Mansion game a Luigi's Mansion game so in this video I want to take a look at the mechanics the ideas and the spirit of each of these two entries and analyze what was done well and what could have been done better more so in number three let's start with the first game I won't be walking through all of it like I tend to do with other videos but I do want to point out a lot of what made the game what it is to me so your objective is simple clear out every room of its ghosts to light them up before moving on to the boss of the area in this regards there are four types of rooms one standard rooms these consist of a room filled with regular grunts ghosts there's fat orange ones thinner purple ones blue ones that punch the big green ones that eat bananas and throw their peels all over for you to slip on and these pale pink ones that latch on to you until you shake them off later on these ghosts all have various alternate forms which make them tougher to take down which range from needing to hose them down with a particular element to make them vulnerable to ones that throw bombs at you to invisible ones which can only be seen through a reflection or from their silhouettes to these dancing shyguy ghosts which require their masks to be pulled away from them before they can be disposed of and these speedy boys that drop an assload of treasure if they're captured before they escape the second of these rooms are the portrait boss rooms these consist of rooms which contain a ghost that has its own distinct personality many of these goes to talk to you mind their own business and generally don't tend to be hostile towards you until you mess with them they're easily the single best part about Luigi's Mansion as the game shifts from being more quote-unquote combat oriented to being more of a puzzle game in a way the puzzles may be as simple as waiting for your adversary to yawn before you can stun them with your flashlight to making sure that they run out of food - orchestrating a symphony - try to get them to join you [Music] these portrait bosses are strange interesting and super fun to interact with and figure out and on top of that you're scored on how efficiently that you take them out resulting in their portraits having a bronze silver or gold border I loved and still love almost every moment with these weird bosses and their creativity is something that sticks with me still the third of these rooms are hallways every area has at least one hallway which is perpetually cast in darkness until the area boss is defeated they also contain ghosts which are exclusive to hallways which include the likes of these long boys which pop out suddenly the aforementioned bullying bomb variant of orange ghosts and these spiky little fellas which explode upon contact and then the last of these rooms are area boss arenas which are pretty self-explanatory of course there are still special rooms which don't fit into these four but you get the gist as you traverse the mansion you are constantly being assaulted by Lutz which seemingly has no purpose beyond being shiny there are coins multicolored bills gold bars gems jewels and pearls and all of them are inflated beyond belief it's like goddamn post-world war two hungry out here but as a kid you're kind of just watching that number rise and hoping that it does something cool and as it turns out it does kind of at the end of the game you get graded for the amount of money that you collected in the form of a new mansion if you collected a ton of money you get a magnificent new mansion if you didn't worry about money at all you're presented with a refugee tent or the house of that one friend I had as a kid whose mom gave us slices of plastic wrap cheese for a snack either way the game shames you into trying again and it's really the perfect length to do so if you decide to it takes me a good four hours or so casually after knowing how to proceed through it probably less if I wanted to go quickly I could easily see how someone would think this is a bad thing I mean hell the game was 50 bucks when it was released in probably 12 hours long max when you're jumping into it blind and that's being generous the length is one of the main issues with a game like Luigi's Mansion because if I bought a game that could be easily completed in a few hours for full price today I'd be more than a little miffed the second entry tried to solve this with multiple mansions and the latest entry decided to shift to a hotel which I actually think is a really good idea but it also gives birth to one of the biggest issues in the game money collection the reason why collecting money worked so well in the first game was because of how short it really is if you slow down enough to try to collect every drop of money it artificially extends the game length while giving players a reward in exchange for the time it's one of the few ways to extend a shorter game that I actually don't mind but it doesn't translate well at all to a game that's already longer which already has more areas to explore and things to do now don't get me wrong the overachieving side of me actually semi enjoys hunting down each floor set of six jewels but the whole idea of shake every object destroy everything you can vacuum random bits of wall shine your special crime black light on this inconspicuous corner and makes the game feel horrendously slow and I know it could just say yeah I'm not gonna do that anymore but I want the top score at the end of the day maybe it's a self-inflicted wound but it's still part of the game and it makes it feel less like Luigi's Mansion and more like a Wario game without Wario I guess it makes sense because this mechanic first made its appearance in the Wario Land franchise but again that series was comprised of short gameboy games not feature-length switch games the initial prospect of collecting potentially immeasurable wealth loses its luster after the first few floors of shake shaking every object in sight the game was built with ad/hd in mind as nearly every single chunk of it is absolutely littered with little treasures that pop out for you to collect if you give in to the temptation your game experience is going to be spent with you checking corners for three to eight minutes in every room for loot and again it's a self-inflicted wound if you choose this path because if you decide against spelunking for treasure everything goes a lot smoother but hey for as much credit as I give the first game it really isn't perfect either there's an extremely glaring flaw which comes in the form of one enemy boos boos are absolutely the worst part of Luigi's Mansion which is ironic since there's such a big part of not only the game itself but of the Mario franchise the first game's approach to booze was this stuff 50 of them into the mansion make them required to capture in order to progress make them unable to be automatically latched on to and have them flee from one room to another I cannot stress how annoying this is and it wouldn't be that bad if one of these four things were removed but all four of them combined really hinder the game from being as good as it could be if you made it so that a minimum amount of boos were required and the rest were for spare money then it would be a less of an issue if you make less of them in general maybe thirty then it's less of an issue if you make it so that Luigi doesn't have to manually aim at the boo to constantly capture it then it's less of an issue and if you lock them down to one room it's way less of an issue so how does Luigi's Mansion 3 handle boos then well a lot better there's only one boo per floor totalling 16 and they're completely optional to capture that's perfect the way that they hide requires you to feel the vibration in your controller for the object with the strongest buzz it's a pretty simple method for detecting boos but it can be kind of hard to determine which object is the correct one when it's right next to another object and if you guess wrong well you got to try again in another room which is frustrating I will say that if you do suss one out you get to slam the ever dying out of them which is a great therapeutic exercise after whipping on a boo a few times so we've got what makes the first game what it is to me let's shift more to the third one now I'll get this out of the way first the game is cute it's really charming and Goofy and well done watching Luigi jump at little things and interact with objects and activate new stuff just oozes a delightful charisma that makes me feel good and comfy while I play the game what's also cute is this little enemy called the Goomba they're always making mischief and messing with stuff just to mess with it and they serve their purpose pretty well is one of the standard enemy types in the game the next enemy type is the goob these little guys make a lot of trouble and then we have the goob of course they do things that aren't good and I almost forgot the goob boy let me tell you if you had one of these around wouldn't be good if you appreciated order in your life all right you get my point in the first game you encounter several enemy types almost immediately whereas you don't get to see anything more than these gube 'he's beyond floor bosses for a while it's almost like someone didn't tell the devs that there was going to be a lot more to this game and they only designed five basic enemy types the other four consist of this big square idiot which smashes its face into the ground these pricks which throw things and hide grabby boy 2.0 and gimmick ghost lord of gimmicks and fetishes of course these all have a few alternative forms which include the likes of being faster being bomber and being uninspired these three flavors actually only appear in the scare scraper side mode which isn't a huge loss for the main story mode honestly but the story mode variants really only include four differences three of which are goob based well besides the possessed objects which are yeah they're enemies all right I just don't understand how you have 18 years to come up with more designs and the best you can do is what if we make them smaller it just feels like they could have done better what about a Goomba type ghost that you have to use the new burst jump mechanic to stop you can also vacuum them up like normal ghosts but they're a lot easier to give the suck if they're flattened what about a ghost that makes a room look really nice just like how the rooms looked at the beginning of the game it poses no threat but it does keep the room from looking how it normally would so finding it is ideal to progress when you expose it it pops out as a lump in the wall and start zooming around the room if you take too long to catch it it settles back in and reverts the room to its nice form again or how about a genie ghost it pops out of an object and offers you a treasure it could be a bar of gold it could be a pearl a gem whatever once you take it though it gets angry and starts spinning around rapidly with its big arms the spinning creates a giant gust of wind and depending on the type of genie it either pulls you towards it or pushes you away from it you could even build trap rooms based off of this concept but as much as this is a pretty severe point for me I think the biggest piece of the puzzle and the most egregious difference between the first and third gamer the portrait ghosts or in threes case the boss ghosts now the boss ghost definitely have personality but most of them are so much less than the first games ghosts in my eyes Luigi's mentioned one has most of the portrait ghosts minding their own business they hang out do what they did when they were still alive and they don't really do much to interfere with you unless they're particularly mischievous or you mess with them of course I mean hell there's a psychic fortune-teller ghost who helps you find your brother and more or less just allows you to vacuum her up when it's her time and one of the best parts about portrait ghosts is the fact that they're just randomly in rooms sprinkled throughout the mansion with three there's just one boss ghosts per floor you're not gonna be surprised by a janitor ghost who is just trying to clean up the bathroom or a fat otaku ghost who just wants to eat his chips and watches Chinese cartoons no the only surprise that you're going to get in this game is Miyamoto emailing you to ask you if you enjoyed Luigi's Mansion three enough to buy the DLC the maid boss on the fifth floor in particular just kills me design-wise she grabs a briefcase that you need and your whole objective is to plunger her and forcibly give her a tour of the room but the issue is that once you've slammed her a few times she just floats off to another room she epitomizes every annoyance I had with the booze in the first game and she's a floor boss but I will say that she's probably the worst boss in terms of design most of the rest of these boss ghosts have pretty fun personalities in their own way but nearly all of them are just outright hostile towards Luigi and I get that you can argue that the four area bosses and a couple of others in the first game were openly hostile also but the whole game is supplemented with these other side character ghosts which regard Luigi is a funny distraction or not at all until he pisses them off that being said I did like a lot of the boss personalities with my favorites being the security guard crawler the be honest Amadeus wolf Geist and the director Morty I just feel like most of my time exploring a floor is spent looking forward to seeing what the bosses at the end of it because after the initial interest of a new area wears off it's really all I'm thinking about speaking of area design there's a staunch difference between 1 and 3 and how the settings are handled with the first game setting being a mansion most of the rooms are what you'd expect to find in a big old house you've got bedrooms bathrooms a banquet room a ballroom and exercise room a kitchen and then you've got some unique rooms which stick out like the ceramic studio the armory the clockwork room and my favorite room the observatory the first game takes a mansion model and sprinkles and surprises which is about as well as I could expect a singular setting to be designed now that being said 3 takes the whole haunted hotel model and just blows it out with its settings as much grief as I've given it for the lack of interesting enemies and surprises the very best part about Luigi's Mansion 3 besides its charm and cuteness is its floor settings it starts out pretty average with hotel rooms a grand Lobby elevator areas a theater etc but then suddenly you find yourself in a medieval castle amusement park complete with a gladiator arena or you'll step out of the elevator and onto a movie set or an Egyptian sand area filled with traps the unfortunate part about this is that after you get used to the setting a lot of the level layout in the game is pretty mediocre the garden suites in particular are a heinous example of repeating the same rooms over and over while changing the flavor ever so slightly each time bedroom bathroom bedroom with a buzzsaw bathroom with watermelons all the way up this winding corridor it's unreasonable and then you get up to the top and Luigi gets kicked in the nuts again because that's really all this game is Luigi finds something that he needs and then he gets kicked in the nuts it happens a few times on several floors before he can finally get the next elevator button and it's annoying because if the devs wanted to extend the game that badly they could have easily had Luigi obtained the next floor switch quickly without fighting a boss only to make that boss have something else that he needs later on or something to that effect so now let's actually break down the mechanics of each game so the first game has your vacuum complete with the patented super suck and blow technology you can blast a ghost by turning off your flashlight and then surprising them when you turn it back on which briefly stuns them then you can suck them down this is pretty much your main weapon beyond elements element ghosts infuse your blowing power with cinnamon cool mint or big flavor which in turn affects certain ghosts adversely and are also used to interact with objects to make them do a thing so with Luigi's Mansion 3 you're introduced to a bevy of new technology to help you clap ghosts at a record pace this new tech includes an anti flashlight called the dark light which is actually from the second game which reveals invisible ghosts and objects that have been possessed by ghosts to be invisible it also includes an air hover which is reminiscent of a lesser hover jump from Super Mario Bros to a plunger which can be shot out and used to pull and slam objects with terrifying strength and the most jarring and interesting addition Guji Guji is a clone of Luigi that's harnessed from the finest hentai slime technology that Japan can afford it can suck it can blow it can plunge it just ironically can't get wet it's a fun new mechanic that should have been more capitalized on but it kind of just turns out to be a gigantic gimmick with the way that it's used after 15 minutes of figuring out its capabilities it's pretty obvious when you need to use gooey G which is kind of a shame the actual level layout of these floors ranges from pretty fun to really boring all of the puzzles are based around mechanics which are introduced early on which would be fine and all but there's only so many times that I can look at something and go okay do I use my dark light here now do I slam something with a plunger nope do I use gooey G yep I don't feel particularly vexed with any of the puzzles and I guess it just bugs me because there's a lot of potential for them to be fun and unique in this game with Luigi's Mansion 3 I feel like the solution is almost always to use GUI G in some way or another or shine your dark light on some invisible object and not doing some kind of cool and unique thing to proceed so let's gloss over the specifics floors 1 & 2 are your standard hotel room type stuff with not a lot of wiggle room for creativity the boss ghosts involve a bellhop who throws suitcases at you and a chef who spins to win floor 3 involves you rating the gift shops which feels kind of high ste and cool but isn't anything super unique from a level design angle the boss is funny but that's about all it's got going for it floor 4 is the theater and it's incredibly short the music is the focus and it's nice and ominous but the thing took me 15 minutes to run through and grab all of the gems not including the boss fight which I actually enjoyed a lot floor 5 is more of the same as the first two floors with the boss being that annoying maid fight that I mentioned earlier the sixth floor was the first floor to really impress me with its medieval castle setting and its puzzles and dangers that put you through work pretty interesting the boss fight is a bit more theatrical much like the fourth floor but it is repetitive and it's a bit of a letdown after all of the posturing that the King does floor sevens design is god-awful like I mentioned before and the boss is okay I guess I will give it credit for utilising the floor specific mechanic of taking a table saw and cutting down plants with it but then we hit floor eight now floor 8 is pretty much perfect it does everything right and it makes my heart ache for more well-designed floors the entire premise is a movie set of which the ghost director is lamenting the loss of his megaphone so it's up to you to retrieve it so that he stops crying and hopefully gives you the next floor switch in order to do this you need to visit each set and use GUI G to shoot a mini film these films intertwine with each other as you use a piece from each set to ultimately obtain the megaphone when you bring it over to the director he looks you over and decides that you'll be perfect to shoot a Godzilla inspired film where you fight a goob in a dino costume when it's all said and done the director thanks you and gives you the elevator button and then he flies away you don't have to catch him he doesn't attack you for no reason the puzzles were fun in the way that they were connected and the whole thing was funny and cute this really could have been the turning point for the game but do you know what happens next Luigi gets kicked in the nuts I want you to imagine being in charge of Gamze direction it's up to you to make it as great as it can be now Luigi just got the ninth floor button what happens next if your answer was ghost cat comes out and eats the button and you have to chase the ghost cat through the whole entire floor and then part of the previous floor because you have to fight it three separate times then you how can you be on such a roll with the eighth floors design and then go wait let's waste the players time for a bit you want to know why it's because of the ninth floors design I was gonna talk you through it but I actually found rare unheard footage straight from Nintendo's offices when they were designing floor 9 hey mr. Smith just wanted to update you on the dinosaur boss progress oh yeah oh it's coming along great it's got some pretty fun mechanics involving GUI G and it looks really good then afterwards we have the floor boss pop out and started whacking away with the bone Club it's it's really great hey that sounds pretty damn good how's the other rooms coming along other rooms you mean the entryway where we put literally all six jewels mr. Smith hello to make up for floor nines pitiful showing floor b2 is pretty damn long and features a lot of mechanics that are exclusive to it I enjoy the new idea for sure but after about 20 minutes the whole water level theme becomes pretty tedious as is the tradition for water levels apparently I did like the creativity but the whole thing is a slog of sammy looking brick and water the boss is a good old boy who likely sounded exactly the way that he looked in life and also makes up one of the more interesting boss fights in the game I do gotta say my favorite part is the music at the beginning of the level it's very reminiscent of left 4 dead two's menu music in a way floor 10 rivals floor aid and even gives it a run for its money the entire thing is Egyptian pyramid based and I loved every moment of it the scenery the puzzles and the boss were all fantastic I initially thought it was going to be another museum situation because the whole thing appears to be one room with a one room pyramid at first glance but then you get tossed down to the bottom and you have to claw your way out of the facing down three puzzle chambers with the punishment being death every time that is so goddamn cool when you make it out of the pyramid into this boss fight the ghost inhabits this giant sandy head that slowly creeps its way towards you it's really unsettling and I I love it it just sucks that it took until the latter half of this game for it to start getting really cool the 11th floor follows up this coolness with a series of magician themed rooms it's a big floor with a lot of little rooms all filled with magic themed tropes such as sawing a box in half with two people inside a chained up water tank dice cards etc it's a very cool theme and I'd honestly have no issue with the floor whatsoever until you finally make it to the end and suddenly the layout of the area flip-flops so that you don't know which room you'll wind up in now this would be no issue if it weren't for the fact that they decided to make every room spawn a bunch of ghosts until you get back to the boss room I don't know it doesn't ruin the floor it's just tedious to go back through everything again when the area was already so large the boss fight is cool though alright we're almost done here so the 12th floor has you collecting an upgrade before you can proceed through it which has you going through the entirety of floor b2 again for no reason I lost the footage for this because apparently my capture card is a fickle but the whole thing involves picking up this toad by a soft head and ricocheting him off brick walls until they break it's kind of like an escort mission except you don't care if your escort dies anyways the prerequisite backtracking makes the 12th floor very short as well the aesthetic is cool but the boss fight is pretty repetitive and kind of long the best part besides the overall aesthetic is the starting bit where you plug your vacuum into the wall and Wizard of Oz this ship out of existence the 13th is a gigantic gym slash fitness area which is a weird area to find so high up and so far into the game in my opinion you got pirates castles magicians the entirety of Egypt and then the scariest place of all for Americans the gym anyways this area is OK at best and the boss of this gym stands tall in the swimming pool ready to show off his water polo skills so onward to the second-to-last floor why why dude the game has enough content sure some floors are short as hell but the game is pretty long why are you cheapening it this way it honest-to-god makes no sense my brother Luigi is out here Lance Armstrong it from the amount of times he's had his nuts kicked how do they keep getting away with it anyways the 14th floor is another one of those really short floors that looks cool as hell again I like the Bible lot but it took me maybe 10 minutes to get through it which really just lends itself to the pattern of the devs putting all of this extra curricular into the game to pat it and make it longer the final floor is a puzzle floor in which you dance around lasers in four different rooms before obtaining a key it doesn't feel as interesting as some of the more fantasy based floors but the puzzles are solid to a degree and the whole floor is a medium length you face down Helen gravely who's probably one of the more unique boss fights in the game but also a little too long since the mechanics don't seem to shift into more phases beyond what you're faced with initially and then finally you throw down with the mighty king boo who's admittedly much more difficult in this game than he is in the first and that's really it for the specifics of every floor in Luigi's Mansion 3 the game is much much longer than the first one which is a blessing when it's done right and a curse when they're just throwing things in there just to throw them in there I did have fun the game is adorably cute funny and interesting to explore for the most part but some of it did feel unfocused and a lot of it felt really dull it really sucks because some of these settings are incredible and some of these puzzles are very fun but a lot of the mandatory backtracking and the floors which felt like they really needed to be reined in with their lack of excitement kind of puts a damper on the whole game they repeat the same kind of skit over and over again where Luigi grabs an important item and then suddenly it's gone from his hands and then he has to track it down because apparently Luigi is the Michael Jordan of and ball torture I'll admit it I honestly went into this video expecting the third game to really just disappoint me in every way and I can't say that it met that expectation because it really does start to pick up around the movie set part of the game is it perfect after the halfway point the two cat chasing sequences and overall amount of backtracking should tell you that no it's absolutely not but it is pretty good and that's the problem I bought this game when it came out and I got bored with it during the first half I shouldn't have had to push myself to the later phases of the game to start to get more enjoyment out of it I would say that maybe Luigi's Mansion as a series was meant to be a set of shorter games it's hard to say if that assessments right but it hasn't been proven wrong in my eyes yet either it's my hope that one day they can really knock this series out of the park and start to take the things that it did great in both of these games and fuse them together in the best entry yet but until then I'll just be replaying the first game every here and there and waiting for that to happen thanks for watching I've been meaning to get a capture card for a while so I can start hitting switch games so this was a lot of fun to put together for me hopefully I can hit a few others switch exclusives down the line but until then I have a twitch where I stream when I can I have a Twitter where I tweet when I can and I have a discord where I am interact but when I can and that's about it have a good one [Music]

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 173,232

Rating: 4.3037724 out of 5

Keywords: Luigi's Mansion, Luigi's Mansion 3, Nintendo, Gamecube, Switch, Mechanics, Evaluation, Comparison, Sequel, Mario is Missing for sure, Boss, Portrait boss, Floor boss, Breakdown, Analysis, Poltergeist, Gooigi, Dark-light, Dark light, Ghosts, Gems, Gold, Kruller, Maid, Elevator, Dissapointment, Spirit, Collection, Collecting, Goob, Hammer, Oozer, Slinker, Spirit ball, Trapper, Repetitive, If you're reading this you're cool, King Boo, Amadeus Wolfgeist, Hotel, Haunted, E. Gadd, Ranking, Plunger, Suction cup

Id: HKEIJ6FOR0M

Length: 30min 31sec (1831 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020