Luigi's Mansion (2): Dark Moon

Luigi's Mansion (2): Dark Moon
Developer: Next Level Games
Publisher: Nintendo
Original System: 3DS
System Played On: 3DS
Rating: 3 stars 

On February 26, 2022, I defeated King Boo and rescued Mario, thus finishing Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon for the Nintendo 3DS! In my playthrough, I fully upgraded the poltergust & dark light, captured 18 Boos and collected 20,600G (the in-game currency). And I did it all 14 gameplay hours over a span of about 1 1/2 months.

Nintendo must have heard the complaints about the first Luigi's Manson game being too short, for they definitely fixed that. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon took 5 hours longer than the original Luigi's Mansion. Unfortunately, their approach to expanding Dark Moon's gameplay time wasn't exactly the best. Their solution to adding more gameplay time? Add more mansions! Dark Moon has a total of 5 mansions that need exploring. Give or take, that means I averaged 3 hours per mansion. The problem with that is, in the previous game, I spent 9 hours in 1 mansion. More mansions mean less things to do in each mansion. Each mansion has a set of missions. Nintendo laid out these missions on a monitor in E. Gadd's lab, so the gamer selects each mission, pretty much on a home screen. I'm not sure if this was to pad gameplay time, make the game more accessible to casual players or to make smaller gaming sessions for a handheld system (as opposed to a console, in which gaming sessions last longer), but either way, it definitely robs the game of a unified world (mansion?) that was ever-so-present in Luigi's Mansion 1. Clearly the emphasis has gone from exploring (a) mansion(s) to hunting ghosts, and technically, Nintendo fails on that one, too. Portrait ghosts no longer exist. While I continue to praise Nintendo for not making the Boos the only ghosts of the game, the ghosts in this game seem generic, besides their different colors and abilities. It's such a shame because with all these different mansions having different themes, they could have easily matched mansion themes with portrait ghost personalities. [SPOILER ALERT!] At least the final boss battle was actually against Boo instead of a pseudo-Bowser boss battle. And I'm actually glad they revealed near the end of the game that Luigi is rescuing Mario again. Yes, it's not really a plot twist (quite predictable, actually), but it gave Luigi more motivation than just "E. Gadd's ghost assistants went haywire, and E. Gadd thinks Luigi is the best solution to this problem." [/END SPOILER]

Overall, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon succeeds as another "baby's first horror game." I even recognized some spots that may be considered "jump scares" for children. Ultimately, though, I liked Luigi's Mansion 1 better. Like I said in my review of that, Luigi's Mansion has more of the feel of "baby's first horror game," as I could make more parallels to traditional horror games, like Silent Hill. At times, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon felt more like a typical action/adventure game, just with ghosts.