Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon (Part 1)

This year’s pandemic has led to pretty unusual situations. For one, at the end of March and for most of April, I’ve had very few customers at work, and several of my tasks had been cut – which meant that I had a ton of free time, waiting lazily behind the cash register until I had someone to ring up, or something else to do. Even reading the newspapers took little time, and besides, 90% of the news are related to that damned virus. So what did I do? I started carrying a novel and my Nintendo 3DS to work. Quebec has come out of lockdown since and activities have resumed, so I’m back to having the amount of customers and workload I had in early March.

For the duration of that month, I’ve mostly played Pokémon UltraSun, raising Pokémon, using them against the Elite 4, and breeding them. I didn’t see much of a point in carrying more games than that one, as the cartridge was already in the console. However, there is another game in the console’s memory. Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon came out on March 24th, 2013, as part of the celebrations on the Year of Luigi. I don’t own the cartridge; the game was preinstalled in the Nintendo 3DS I purchased back in 2014. And, to be entirely honest… I hardly ever played it. I had heard of Luigi’s Mansion for the Nintendo Gamecube, and thought it was interesting to see Luigi take centerstage for once, but I never played it. And while I was busy with Pokémon and other Mario games, I never bothered to play this one much.

Well, until April, that is! Bored after making three dozen eggs in Pokémon and unwilling to start the umpteenth Stephen King novella, I booted up Dark Moon. Hey, I gotta finish that one eventually, right? I had already started, going through the first mansion, and I got some progress done on the game throughout these weeks. Now things are in the process of going back to normal in Quebec, so I no longer carry games to work, but I decided to finish this one. So, what's the story?

"Having ghosts as helpers was a bad idea!"

Since the events of the first Luigi’s Mansion, Professor Elvin Gadd has become a bit of a famous man when it comes to scientific research on phantoms and other ghostly figures. He has taken residence in the Gloomy Manor located within Evershade Valley. This is a very peculiar part of the world, where a strange and legendary object called a Dark Moon shines bright in the sky, making the ghosts under its light friendly and helpful. In fact, Prof E. Gadd even has a group of helper ghosts in his lab! It may not sound like a smart idea, but the scientist thought he would be fine. He couldn’t expect the nasty King Boo to show up and blast the Dark Moon to pieces, which cancelled its soothing effect. As a result, the helper ghosts turned nasty.

Teleporting people through any screen; that sounds like
technology that could be rerouted easily for evil purposes.

The Professor checked his list of “People to call in case of emergencies”. It’s easy, it has only two names: Mario Mario, and Luigi Mario, and obviously one of these has more experience in hunting ghosts. E. Gadd contacts Luigi through his living room TV, and uses his crazy tech to Pixelate (read: teleport) him through the screens and into his bunker. Luigi really doesn’t feel like busting ghosts again, some of the encounters he had last time were pretty scarring. Not to mention what had happened to his brother!

And it’s not like there’s anyone else out there who can do the job; it’s not Mario’s jam, and Peter, Ray, Egon and Winston live in a different universe altogether. Good news, E. Gadd already has a shard of the Dark Moon. He also created a new model of the Poltergust, one that can do even better against ghosts. Bad news, he left it in the Gloomy Manor. Before Luigi gets a chance to say no, he’s pixelated to the Manor. The troubles of being a hero: You always get volunteered.

Item get!

I would describe the game as a combination of action, puzzle and exploration. Ghost-hunting makes up the greater part of the action. Luigi explores each mansion in order to fulfill the task given to him by the Professor, and he has to solve puzzles in order to progress. There’s always something in the way. The mansions are split into missions, and some rooms will be locked away due to not being necessary to finish the current quest.

After he finds the Poltergust 5000 hidden in a car in the garage, Luigi is all geared up. As is expected of a vacuum, the Poltergust can suck and blow, which is useful not only to catch ghosts, but also to carry things around without Luigi using his hands. The suck ability can take in drapes, clothes and spider webs, and some items sucked in can be tossed back with force afterwards. Next, Luigi has a Strobulb, an item that charges up and then emits a powerful blast of light that will stun ghosts for a moment, and only then will Luigi be able to catch them. Last but not least, ghosts have the ability to turn items invisible, like dressers, pipes, platforms, or even doors and windows; the Poltergust 5000 is equipped in a later mission with a tool called the Dark-Light, which can make these items appear again. Flashing an invisible object with it will make spirit balls show up, which Luigi must then suck in to make the item reappear. Thanks to this, Luigi can find all kinds of secrets.

With gameplay that prioritizes the use of a special vacuum, I need to be really careful what I say before I make really inappropriate innuendos. I can’t help it the entire game is Luigi sucking and blowing his way through five mansions, while flashing rooms… God! Damn! It!

Okay, it’s out of my system now.

The first mission in the Gloomy Manor sets up all three of the game’s genres fairly well. The puzzle aspect is apparent from the start, with Luigi having to find keys to open doors, and look for ways to progress. For this, he needs to explore the rooms and discover their secrets. As an example, Luigi finds a secret passageway that leads to a bathroom. And last but not least, every mission has several ghosts roaming around.

How catching ghosts works: All ghosts have HP. To be caught, they first need to be stunned with the Strobulb, then sucked in using the L button on the Nintendo 3DS. The suck function of the Poltergust 5000 will whittle down their HP as Luigi pulls the ghost in, also filling a gauge and at every slice of 10 HP, pressing A will pull the ghost in a little more. Filling up the gauge and pressing A after 20 or 25 HP instead of 10 will yield better results. The ghost is sucked in when its HP hits 0. Some rooms have several ghosts, who'll help each other; also, many will use sunglasses, shovels, and other various items to protect themselves from the Strobulb.

"Hello. I have a spectral mall of 5. What does that
mean? I don't know, I'm just a ghost."

After his first round of ghost-catching, Luigi is taken back to the Bunker and told by E. Gadd to send the ghosts into the Bunker’s Vault, where they will be stored by type along with info on their Spectral Mass (because, apparently, there’s a way to calculate the mass of ghosts?). I find it weird how E. Gadd borderline treats this adventure like a fishing trip. I can almost hear him say, “You’ve made your biggest catch yet!” when I show up with a ghost with a higher mass than the ones before. The Vault also stores other valuables Luigi can find, and shows the upgrades obtained for the Poltergust 5000.

Throughout his journey, Luigi can find and suck in the coins, bills, and gold bars he finds. That money will allow E. Gadd to upgrade the Poltergust, giving it more power against ghosts and increasing the Dark-Light’s potential duration, among other things. The final upgrades are obtained at 20,000 G. Now, don’t come ask me why the Professor needs money to upgrade something when he looks like he’s able to do it on the spot… I’m starting to think the weird scientist is in it for the money.

Ghosts like to compare their steals, apparently.

As is to be expected, the ghosts are never going to make it an easy task for Luigi, oh no. In order to access the northern area of the Gloomy Manor, the plumber needs to gather four gears stolen by brawny red spirits. Then, he can find a Poltergeist playing music in the library. It’s only in the following mission that Luigi finds the Dark-Light device in E. Gadd’s lab, and gets to make use of it. If something seems to be missing, you can look for it around, or shine that light in the empty spot. It might just appear, if the Mario brother can catch all of the little will-o-wisp orbs that sprout.

During that mission, Luigi will also encounter a Boo. If you like the Mario franchise, you know what these are. There’s one hidden in every main mission; time to act like a Trainer, gotta catch ‘em all. They work differently from other ghosts, though. They remain hidden and must be found using the Dark-Light, after which the Poltergust pulls them by their tongue (a fitting punishment if you ask me), and then Luigi catches them after they’ve lost their HP from being tossed around a bit.

Their puns are so bad, even I, a fan of wordplay, have to go "Boo! Boo!"

Apparently we’re not just ghost catchers, we’re a home-cleaning service too, as the next mission E. Gadd sends Luigi on involves sucking into the vacuum all the spider webs in the Gloomy Manor. Some of these are… really, really large. I have a feeling arachnophobes won’t like this one. Sure enough, in the mission immediately afterwards, we’re told that odd noises are coming from the cellar. What we find down there is a ghost… taking possession of a giant goddamn spider. And this one sheds some sort of phantom skin the first two times instead of getting caught; this allows it to return into the spider. Come on now, you know it wasn’t going to be so easy.

Why! Did it have! To be! SPIDERS!
KILL IT WITH FIRE!

After beating the spider and catching the powerful Possessor, Luigi recovers a piece of the Dark Moon. Two down, a few more to go. We can now move on to the Haunted Towers, two buildings that served as a botanical laboratory connected to a gigantic tree. Or, we can catch all the Boos in the Gloomy Manor, which unlocks an extra mission in which Luigi must attempt to catch several ghosts all over the place in the shortest possible time.

The Haunted Towers actually have a very easy access to the giant tree, it’s behind a barrier with a water-powered pinwheel lock system. Step 1: Repair the water system. Step 2: Blow the pinwheel to open the gate. Step 3: Climb up the tree. Step 4: Find the piece up there! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA yeah, no, that’s not even remotely what happens. Step 2 is interrupted when trickster spirits, named Hiders, show up and steal all but one of the pinwheel vanes. Must find them all, now! And they’re scattered around the many floors of the two towers. The mischievous phantoms are so annoying – you have to fight tooth and nail to move ahead an inch in this goddamned adventure.

There's a ghost behind the curtain. You might know it,
you might have played this mission 5 times before,
Luigi will still scream and the ghost wiull flee.

Now, the great thing about playing Luigi is that we have a character who’s bursting with personality; he reacts to things, has a lot of voice clips, can even be intentionally funny at times. Just put him right below a stream of water and watch him act like he’s under a shower, it’s hilarious. The downside is that on most occasions, Luigi’s behavior is scripted, AKA it’s miniature cutscenes that can sometimes be skipped. Alas, this means that frequently Luigi will get startled by ghosts, and by the time it takes him to regain his composure, the ghosts will have had time to flee. And the green-shirted hero is extremely easy to startle. It’s very annoying, especially later on when you replay missions and know what’s going to happen, but there’s no way to prevent these moments from happening. Sure, you can skip some of these cutscenes (as well as any time E. Gadd calls Luigi on his portable DS-like device), but it’s still infuriating.

Oh hey! Luigi, you have a fan!

On the next mission, Luigi repairs the gate, walks inside the tree… and just as he reaches the top, a big door closes and locks itself in his way. To progress, Luigi needs to look for a key in the backyard area. What he finds instead is a Toad trapped in a painting, which he frees with the Dark-Light. Oh good, this has become an escort mission, we needed this! What, it’s not annoying enough? How about a boss fight against three tough ghost ladies, all at once, while Toad is crying and pissing himself in the background? That sounds like my jam.

(No. No it does not.)

This fight was extremely annoying the first time I encountered the Three Sisters. The fight comes near the end of the mission, and I couldn’t figure out the strategy at first. Thankfully, the game is fairly generous when it comes to enemies dropping hearts at critical moments, that’s one good thing about it. If Luigi’s HP go down to 0, though? It’s complicated. In a normal situation, he loses and has to start the whole mission over from the beginning – and due to their exploration/puzzle aspects, missions can be pretty long to complete, and having to redo a mission from the start is demoralizing. That said, if Luigi found a golden bone earlier in the level and loses all his HP afterwards, a phantom dog called the Polterpup will show up, revive Luigi to full HP, and flee with the bone. You’re never told about that feature until you find out by yourself.

That dog is a big meanie, even if he revives me!

And of course, that doggone dog is watching from above.

Luigi takes Toad to a functional Pixelator and sends him to the Bunker. Afterwards, we must still find the key; using info from Toad, we can find it in the Poolroom of the Haunted Towers. Good! Some ghostbusting later, we almost get our hands on the key… then the Polterpup shows up and steals it. And in the mission that follows, we have to find the Polterpup by following its paw prints on walls with the Dark-Light. And he takes us ACROSS BOTH FUCKING TOWERS. I hate that fucking dog! Even after catching it, the Polterpup manages to escape from the Bunker, but at least we have the key. Time for the boss.

Reaching the top of the tree involves running up 20 rows of three sets of stairs. On each row, only one set of stairs allows Luigi to go up, the other two are traps set by ghosts, and if Luigi climbs them, that staircase will become a slide and the plumber will fall all the way down to the very bottom of the room. Yes, you can tell which staircase is the right one by looking at the lights around them, but the clues disappear quickly. And if you fall, you have to go up all the stairs, again, to go back to the top. Stairs, my worst enemy! I hated that section the first time I played it.

After this section, we get to the Treehouse, with another set of stairs taking Luigi to the Dark Moon shard. However, before he and go up to it, a Possessor appears and… takes possession of the staircase, then uses it to attack Luigi. OH, COME ON! Quote myself from 10 seconds ago:

What's the danger if I come too close to it - splinters?

Stairs, my worst enemy!

This ghostonce again requires some clever thinking to pull it out of the wooden staircase it’s locked itself into. It also needs to be sucked in three times to be defeated, just like the previous one. Once that’s done, Luigi accesses the shard and returns to the Bunker, where a new location has opened: The Old Clockworks.

In Part 2.