very fun to play, but flawed. its reliance on fetch quests can make it drag, way too many things are unlocked by going to a specific location in an open world game (if you dont want to go northwest, youre not unlocking fairy fountains. same with depths and autobuild, same with the fucking paraglider). Building is great, but due to the complexity of the system and how long it takes to put your ideas into fruition, its not the best fit for a puzzle game.

I got 2 of the sages, theyre difficult to control when there are only two, imagine the chaos of four. ive had my fun, and i dont feel guilty for putting it down.

Luigi's mansion hasn't aged very well. The graphics are dated, the animations feel stiff, a lot of the game design is questionable, or at least, would have been done differently today. Often, you're required to continue doing one thing for far too long, without very much feedback.

This age and experimentalism is luigis mansion's biggest weakness, but also it's biggest strength. We may never see another game in which luigi is characterized this way. You can see it in the dialogue reactions, and the prompts that show up when scanning an object with the gameboy horror. nowadays, mario is so sterilized that we will likely never get ideas like this again, and that's to say nothing of the humanoid portrait ghosts throughout the entire experience. They just don't make games like this anymore.

One particular issue I had is how your progress is wiped after beating the game. I had missed one portrait ghost, and didn't really feel like replaying the entire game just to get to that point. But that really only feels like a nitpick. The ranking system and boos encourage multiple playthroughs well enough to make this a bit of a moot point. There isn't much to justify going back and playing it a second time if you've done most of the content the first time around, but that's because I a depressed adult with not a ton of free time, living in 2023 where video games are so saturated, it just isn't worth my time to replay it again so soon.

It really does feel like a game from 2001. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is for you to decide. Personally, I had a fun time, and it's short enough for me to reccomend.