This review contains spoilers
The hotel in Luigi's Mansion 3 doesn't really start out all that special. The first 4 or 5 floors you'll explore really are just a haunted hotel. The bosses are so vanilla and simple that I honestly didn't even realise the first 2 bosses I fought were bosses. It was an almost return to form, removing those more Mario-styled themed settings in favour of a kid-friendly horror game in an actual place.
Then we get to the music floor, and from that point onwards every single floor in the game is unashamedly a theme park attraction with every room on the floor being decorated like a museum, or a beach, or a music club. And the bosses creativity ramp up in just as drastically and consistently.
Whether this change is good or bad is obviously subjective. I like the straight spooky vibe of the original game, but I don't know how well they could have managed a 17-floor hotel like that. Personally I loved looking forward to seeing what crazy aesthetic the next level would take.
One thing I had heard a lot of about this game was that it brought back the portrait ghosts, which is only 30% true. At least for what I considered portrait ghosts, which was much more human-looking ghosts that felt like they really were people who died at one point. The "portrait ghosts" in this game (actually called boss ghosts) are a little more detailed than the average regular enemy, but still feel very cartoony and blend into the fantasy world much more naturally. And that's when they're actually human, some bosses possess things (think similar to Luigi's Mansion 2 boss fights) and one of them, even in base form, is a pirate shark.
But don't get me wrong, while I absolutely love the creepy vibe the original portrait ghosts gave off, there's no doubt that the boss battles in this game were by far the best in the series. After that initial few floors of very simple battles, every boss in this game is full of clever ideas and fun use of their theming. It's something I'm not sure you could accomplish if they did go for the more realistic approach of their designs.
In terms of gameplay this seems to be a lot more puzzle focused than before. Having the full Poltergust arsenal of the last game, along with new additions like the plunger and whatever the "shockwave" move is called add even more layers to interacting with the environment. Though weirdly, after Dark Moon removed elements from Luigi's Vacuum, and just had environmental fire puzzles scattered all over, this game further removes almost any trace of elemental stuff at all except for maybe one or two small fire based stuff.
Controls can be a bit awkward though. Using face buttons for most things is generally harder since you can't naturally use the right joy stick while pressing the buttons. Luckily the game offers the use of shoulder buttons to do pretty much any action you can do with those face buttons. But to use the light-dark light you need to press L+R together, but with a timing so awkward that it often just has you using the plunger (L) instead. I get that there's only so many combinations you can add to the shoulder buttons, but why is a function that has you constantly spinning around the room to search for hidden objects relegated to this double button press, rather than the plunger which generally just has you aim in one direction and shoot? And there's no button remapping!
Also speaking of controls, there's no dedicated run button now. Luigi just starts running faster after a couple seconds of build up. Not really the worst thing, but why? The B button isn't doing anything except allowing you to move with the left joystick without actually turning Luigi around. Maybe someone found this useful, but personally I'm not sure I ever found myself wanting Luigi to walk backwards while facing forwards.
The power of the vacuum has seemingly improved a lot too. It'll now be able to devour anything the size of a small dog, which lets you tear through rooms. Going to town on a whole shelf worth of random junk feels so satisfying.
Likewise the "press A to suck in ghosts faster" function from the second game returns, but now instead of just draining a lot of the ghosts health at once, you get to literally slam the ghost around for a few A presses at a time before they die or break loose. It is so much fun to slam ghosts into other ghosts, or even just the environment to destroy tables and the like.
I can't go without giving props to the incredible graphics and animations in this game. I'm not sure the Mario-verse have ever been so expressive.
As for Gooigi, I was initially worried that a mechanic that seemed designed for co-op would be a huge pain in the ass for single player, but I think they managed it well. I can't say for sure having not played co-op, but it feels like they balanced him around single player, and I guess just made co-op easy mode.
Not for the first time in recent memory I have to talk about collectables. This game features the exact same ones as Luigi's Mansion 2 - Boo's, Gems and Cash. The first 2 literally only give you a small aesthetic change to one of your Poltergust functions and only when you've collected 100% of them, so you'll literally only be able to change your plunger to a crystal skin in the final 10 minutes of the game. Yay?
But the cash is what baffles me the most. In Luigi's Mansion 2 money was used to get periodic upgrades to your equipment and was used as part of calculating your rank for each level. In this game there are no upgrades (except for anything you get automatically as part of the story), instead there's a store for money, in which you can buy...bonus lives (the same golden bones you got in Dark Moon, but which in that game were found by searching objects after getting 200 coins in a level), or hints as to where to find a Boo or Gem. They're pretty lacklustre options, especially as the main use is for completionists only. Except... money is also used in this game to calculate your overall rank at the end, like in the first game. And it only counts the money on hand at the end of the game, so any money spent is not counted.
That means the only thing you can really spend money on, except for bonus lives if you're really bad at the game, is stuff that helps you collect everything, but saving money is also important for getting that arbitrary top rank which would count as a completion criteria for most people who care about getting all gems and Boo's in the first place. Do you see the problem here? Why do the only 2 uses for money in this game work completely against each other??
Also I know that getting an ending rank was the only purpose of it in Luigi's Mansion 1 too, but there's some huge differences. That game was very short, so it was easier to do a run where you decide to get as much gold as you can without getting fatigued. Sure getting "A rank" isn't an amazing reward, but for a small amount of extra effort in a 5 hour game, it's fine. But also money in the first game is almost always just naturally thrown into the main ghost catching quest. There's like half a dozen times I can think of where you have to go out of your way to get large amounts of money. In this game there are so many puzzles and even full rooms that only really exist to give you more money. You spend probably 70% of your time in this game exclusively sucking things up to find money, solving puzzles to find money or otherwise gems (assuming you don't just skip past every non-mandatory thing).
I realise this is a lot of paragraphs for an issue that barely registers to most people, but it's just a design decision that makes no sense to me. You'd think between this being a longer game, and so much of the dev time being put into making hiding spots for $$$$ that they'd give you more use for it than a letter at the end. They could have made your Poltergust stronger at certain milestones like the last game, or even just extra costumes for Luigi's or something.
But with that long, yet small issue out the way I still loved the game and have mostly just praise for it.
I'd say it's a hard decision if I were to pick between this or the original as my favourite. This one definitely has by far more ideas and bells and whistles, but the original just had a tone that feels unbeatable in a very tight package. Luigi's Mansion 1 feels like an anomaly in the Mario franchise, something that doesn't fit the franchises image. This game (or I guess technically the second, with this expanding on it) takes the idea of Luigi's Mansion and fits it into Mario's world. Both are fantastic for different reasons.
Then we get to the music floor, and from that point onwards every single floor in the game is unashamedly a theme park attraction with every room on the floor being decorated like a museum, or a beach, or a music club. And the bosses creativity ramp up in just as drastically and consistently.
Whether this change is good or bad is obviously subjective. I like the straight spooky vibe of the original game, but I don't know how well they could have managed a 17-floor hotel like that. Personally I loved looking forward to seeing what crazy aesthetic the next level would take.
One thing I had heard a lot of about this game was that it brought back the portrait ghosts, which is only 30% true. At least for what I considered portrait ghosts, which was much more human-looking ghosts that felt like they really were people who died at one point. The "portrait ghosts" in this game (actually called boss ghosts) are a little more detailed than the average regular enemy, but still feel very cartoony and blend into the fantasy world much more naturally. And that's when they're actually human, some bosses possess things (think similar to Luigi's Mansion 2 boss fights) and one of them, even in base form, is a pirate shark.
But don't get me wrong, while I absolutely love the creepy vibe the original portrait ghosts gave off, there's no doubt that the boss battles in this game were by far the best in the series. After that initial few floors of very simple battles, every boss in this game is full of clever ideas and fun use of their theming. It's something I'm not sure you could accomplish if they did go for the more realistic approach of their designs.
In terms of gameplay this seems to be a lot more puzzle focused than before. Having the full Poltergust arsenal of the last game, along with new additions like the plunger and whatever the "shockwave" move is called add even more layers to interacting with the environment. Though weirdly, after Dark Moon removed elements from Luigi's Vacuum, and just had environmental fire puzzles scattered all over, this game further removes almost any trace of elemental stuff at all except for maybe one or two small fire based stuff.
Controls can be a bit awkward though. Using face buttons for most things is generally harder since you can't naturally use the right joy stick while pressing the buttons. Luckily the game offers the use of shoulder buttons to do pretty much any action you can do with those face buttons. But to use the light-dark light you need to press L+R together, but with a timing so awkward that it often just has you using the plunger (L) instead. I get that there's only so many combinations you can add to the shoulder buttons, but why is a function that has you constantly spinning around the room to search for hidden objects relegated to this double button press, rather than the plunger which generally just has you aim in one direction and shoot? And there's no button remapping!
Also speaking of controls, there's no dedicated run button now. Luigi just starts running faster after a couple seconds of build up. Not really the worst thing, but why? The B button isn't doing anything except allowing you to move with the left joystick without actually turning Luigi around. Maybe someone found this useful, but personally I'm not sure I ever found myself wanting Luigi to walk backwards while facing forwards.
The power of the vacuum has seemingly improved a lot too. It'll now be able to devour anything the size of a small dog, which lets you tear through rooms. Going to town on a whole shelf worth of random junk feels so satisfying.
Likewise the "press A to suck in ghosts faster" function from the second game returns, but now instead of just draining a lot of the ghosts health at once, you get to literally slam the ghost around for a few A presses at a time before they die or break loose. It is so much fun to slam ghosts into other ghosts, or even just the environment to destroy tables and the like.
I can't go without giving props to the incredible graphics and animations in this game. I'm not sure the Mario-verse have ever been so expressive.
As for Gooigi, I was initially worried that a mechanic that seemed designed for co-op would be a huge pain in the ass for single player, but I think they managed it well. I can't say for sure having not played co-op, but it feels like they balanced him around single player, and I guess just made co-op easy mode.
Not for the first time in recent memory I have to talk about collectables. This game features the exact same ones as Luigi's Mansion 2 - Boo's, Gems and Cash. The first 2 literally only give you a small aesthetic change to one of your Poltergust functions and only when you've collected 100% of them, so you'll literally only be able to change your plunger to a crystal skin in the final 10 minutes of the game. Yay?
But the cash is what baffles me the most. In Luigi's Mansion 2 money was used to get periodic upgrades to your equipment and was used as part of calculating your rank for each level. In this game there are no upgrades (except for anything you get automatically as part of the story), instead there's a store for money, in which you can buy...bonus lives (the same golden bones you got in Dark Moon, but which in that game were found by searching objects after getting 200 coins in a level), or hints as to where to find a Boo or Gem. They're pretty lacklustre options, especially as the main use is for completionists only. Except... money is also used in this game to calculate your overall rank at the end, like in the first game. And it only counts the money on hand at the end of the game, so any money spent is not counted.
That means the only thing you can really spend money on, except for bonus lives if you're really bad at the game, is stuff that helps you collect everything, but saving money is also important for getting that arbitrary top rank which would count as a completion criteria for most people who care about getting all gems and Boo's in the first place. Do you see the problem here? Why do the only 2 uses for money in this game work completely against each other??
Also I know that getting an ending rank was the only purpose of it in Luigi's Mansion 1 too, but there's some huge differences. That game was very short, so it was easier to do a run where you decide to get as much gold as you can without getting fatigued. Sure getting "A rank" isn't an amazing reward, but for a small amount of extra effort in a 5 hour game, it's fine. But also money in the first game is almost always just naturally thrown into the main ghost catching quest. There's like half a dozen times I can think of where you have to go out of your way to get large amounts of money. In this game there are so many puzzles and even full rooms that only really exist to give you more money. You spend probably 70% of your time in this game exclusively sucking things up to find money, solving puzzles to find money or otherwise gems (assuming you don't just skip past every non-mandatory thing).
I realise this is a lot of paragraphs for an issue that barely registers to most people, but it's just a design decision that makes no sense to me. You'd think between this being a longer game, and so much of the dev time being put into making hiding spots for $$$$ that they'd give you more use for it than a letter at the end. They could have made your Poltergust stronger at certain milestones like the last game, or even just extra costumes for Luigi's or something.
But with that long, yet small issue out the way I still loved the game and have mostly just praise for it.
I'd say it's a hard decision if I were to pick between this or the original as my favourite. This one definitely has by far more ideas and bells and whistles, but the original just had a tone that feels unbeatable in a very tight package. Luigi's Mansion 1 feels like an anomaly in the Mario franchise, something that doesn't fit the franchises image. This game (or I guess technically the second, with this expanding on it) takes the idea of Luigi's Mansion and fits it into Mario's world. Both are fantastic for different reasons.