Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD Preview – Revisiting one of the best 3DS games

thesixthaxis.com:

Luigi might not light ghost hunting, but after a trio of adventures battling spectral miscreants, it’s pretty clear that he’s a dab hand at it. After the popularity and success of the third game a few years ago, Nintendo has decided to revisit the second game in the series, remastering Luigi’s Mansion 2 (AKA Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon) for Nintendo Switch.

Up until Luigi’s Mansion 3, this series always felt like more of a niche spin-off than a mainline franchise. Sure, the original game was a GameCube launch title and a technical showcase, but what everyone really wanted was a new Mario game. Then, over a decade later, Luigi’s Mansion 2 wasn’t coming to the home console Wii U, but to the 3DS instead – in retrospect, the more significant Nintendo console of the early 2010s.

By far and away the biggest part of Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD is the simple increase in resolution. The 3DS gave just 400×240 per eye, which ensured that pretty much every game on the handheld suffered with huge amounts of aliasing – something only amplified if you went for the larger screened XL machines. Just jumping up to 720p on the Switch screen makes a huge difference to the clarity of the visuals, and it just looks really clean and sharp before you consider any other tweaks and improvements that have been made. Assets have been replaced with higher poly count versions, so there’s more detail on Luigi’s dungarees where you can also see the stitching and denim texture, while there’s a more rounded appearance to his nose or the many door knobs he’ll tentatively reach out to open doors.

That said, you can still see that the framework of the 3DS original is still there in various places. It feels most obvious between missions, when you’re zapped back to Professor E. Gadd’s base, and you’ll notice the flatter lighting across Luigi’s face without the nuanced self-shadowing of the sequel, the short and limited animation loops and more. Put Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD up against its sequel more generally, and you