


If Super Metroid felt like the fullest realization of what the original Metroid could be, Dark Moon does the same for Luigi’s Mansion.Īlthough Nintendo dropped the name Luigi’s Mansion 2 from the game here in the US (they did keep it in Japan and Europe), this is very much a sequel, picking up after the events of the original. To treat Next Level Games’ effort here as just a sequel though, is a serious disservice. The basics are the same: Luigi’s still using a souped up vacuum cleaner to capture spooks and specters while experiencing feelings of dread in basements and attics. Play Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon on a Nintendo 3DS for a few minutes, and the 12 year break feels well worth it, rejuvenating the simple fun of guiding Mario’s lanky sibling through a haunted house, catching ghosts as you go. Derided at the time as being at best a tech-demo for the just-launched GameCube, and at worst a stopgap letting Nintendo finish its grand follow-up to Super Mario 64, the original Luigi’s Mansion has aged into one of the last, great internally developed series from the company. Fox’s show 24 had just debuted, and Windows XP had been in stories for less than an month. When the original Luigi’s Mansion was released in the U.S., the first Harry Potter film had just been released.
