Review: Bending Genres in Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon

A look into the underpinnings of an unlikely sequel reveals the value of Luigi’s spin-offs.

By: Jeremy Parish
March 21, 2013

On the surface of it, Luigi’s Mansion seems a strange choice for Nintendo to explore in a sequel, especially one arriving nearly 12 years after the first (and only other) entry in the series. The 2001 GameCube launch title was met with resounding jeers and criticism at its debut, disparaged as an insubstantial piece of fluff that exposed the tragedy of a Nintendo in sharp decline. As one of he company’s first-ever large-scale critical duds, Luigi’s Mansion marked (in spirit if not in fact) the beginning of a very difficult console cycle for Nintendo — one salvaged by the Wii, though its spectre looms over the Wii U like the snickering apparitions Luigi is tasked with capturing in these solo outings.

Yet this counter-intuitive sequel works; and in fact Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon works not only as a game in its own right, but also in recontextualizing its predecessor as merely misunderstood rather than outright poor. Of course Luigi’s Mansion didn’t go over well. Every Nintendo console before the GameCube debuted with a core Mario title; we expected to be wowed with something revolutionary as the Emotion-Engine-crushing GameCube took to the stage. Instead, we got a compact confection of a side-story starring Luigi rather than Mario and shockingly light on anything resembling action — not to mention completely absent platforming.