Bryce Holliday. Reputation +1.
Great job.
Wow, I want this so badly nowTbh the game has all the elements needed to make an absolutely fantastic Metroidvania to the point that im surprised it isn't the angle the devs went with for the game.
You could easily gate off progression and collectibles behind the various abilities (Burst, Blow, Dark Light, Suction Shot, Gooigi) and allow players to explore the mansion in a somewhat nonlinear order, with more rooms of the mansion opening up as you unlock these abilities. Hell, the beginning of the game is kind of structured this way, with numerous collectibles that you'll be able to see but can't obtain yet due to not possessing the needed item. It was a lot of fun going back and using my new tools to get these items (and hell the first few floors are even naturally interconnected like a typical Metroidvania) and it makes me wish the game took this approach.
Question: can I play co-cop from the start or does it unlock at some point during the game?
I'm going to play this with my friend and I don't want to start without her, but we can't see each too often so I don't want to waste hours on forced solo play while we're together either...
I wouldn't say an hour, at a minimum 45 minutes but it can fluctuate depending on how much you dawdleit unlocks after an hour into the game, maybe less if you rush a bit.
i would have loved this, but i know metroidvania style isn't everyones cup of tea. as a counter point, there were certain gem puzzles that i solved through persistent effort (because i KNEW it had to be able to be solved), that i probably would have given up on and assumed i didnt have the right 'gear' for if the game gave abilities at various points. maybe this is a good thing if i came back later and had the 'aha' moment then?Tbh the game has all the elements needed to make an absolutely fantastic Metroidvania to the point that im surprised it isn't the angle the devs went with for the game.
You could easily gate off progression and collectibles behind the various abilities (Burst, Blow, Dark Light, Suction Shot, Gooigi) and allow players to explore the mansion in a somewhat nonlinear order, with more rooms of the mansion opening up as you unlock these abilities. Hell, the beginning of the game is kind of structured this way, with numerous collectibles that you'll be able to see but can't obtain yet due to not possessing the needed item. It was a lot of fun going back and using my new tools to get these items (and hell the first few floors are even naturally interconnected like a typical Metroidvania) and it makes me wish the game took this approach.
it unlocks after an hour into the game, maybe less if you rush a bit.
I wouldn't say an hour, at a minimum 45 minutes but it can fluctuate depending on how much you dawdle
So I was battling themaid boss and couldn't figure out how to beat hear so she just kept moving into different rooms, eventually she went to the last room and then went through the front door and now I can't find her anywhere :( where did the maid boss go???
Use the darklight.So I was battling themaid boss and couldn't figure out how to beat hear so she just kept moving into different rooms, eventually she went to the last room and then went through the front door and now I can't find her anywhere :( where did the maid boss go???
I'm disappointed they did Polterkitty again. Even this game has some moments of padding. Luckily it doesn't take long to complete but it's not that fun, especially a second time. Up to floor 14 now and Luigi doing the Justin Hammer dance is the cutest thing
I rolled my eyes when it happened the first time. Reminded me of when Polterpup did it in LM2, and that annoying was too.i agree. chasing thepolterkittyaround the mansion was unnecessary and boring.
Well, you get something for getting all the boos, they don't tell you but I found it...It's still not great.I assume it was the boo flashlight
if there's one major gripe I have with this game it's that the collectables are almost worth hunting for some of the smart puzzles and entire side rooms you wont see otherwise, but they're also basically worthless which puts a damper on the whole process.
cash is everywhere but with nothing to truly work towards the process of scooping up cash starts feeling like busy work, yeah there's a ranking ala the original game but the original 's shorter length and variety of gems tucked away in the smaller space lend it to a much better high score game, LM3 is funnily enough too long to pull that angle off.
I can't remember entirety how LM2 worked here, though I recall boos and gems having the same basic pointlessness (though each area got one sorta lacking bonus mission), but money...did it lead to upgrades of sorts? If so I'm surprised they dropped it.
Hit the end credits today with 92/102 gems, 90k in the bank, an A rank, and over 29 hours played. I expected there to be some kind of money-based ranking system but didn't know what the benchmarks were, so I played the whole game while never spending any money—not on bones, not on hint locations. It feels very well tuned for experienced players this way. Obviously I'm not finished yet, as I still want to collect all the gems and I haven't even looked at the new ScareScraper, but after doing a full pass through every floor to mop up what I could, I thought I would succumb to impatience and see the final boss now rather than later.
This is an exemplary game. The highest compliment I can pay Luigi's Mansion 3 is that even though I put in nearly 30 hours, much of which consisted of revisiting floors to scrub every corner, it felt half as long, as it was just so pacy in delivering one idea after another from room to room: no padding, no downtime, just one lock-and-key mini-dungeon stacked upon another. (Despite the linearity of the room-to-room progression in most floors, LM3 may actually sport the best traditional Zelda dungeon experience on the Switch so far: just pretend the whole game revolves around the Gust Bellows, the Eye of Truth, and the Command Melody, and you're set.) Any sense of sluggishness or tedium is down to your own pace and acuity as an explorer. We commonly say that games are "packed" with content to say they have a lot of content—but no, LM3 really is packed, in the sense of cramming all of this so tightly with little to no interruption, apart from the rare occasions when E. Gadd forces you to head back to the lab, which I can count on one hand.
*
I think LM3 is one of the strongest cases I've ever seen for how interesting you can make a game without any kind of power progression. I love the key-item structure of Zelda dungeons or Metroid games, and initially, as your toolkit comes in piece by piece, it might look as though LM3 is setting up for something similar (acquire a power, go back to another floor to acquire a gem)—but what makes this game such a distinctive experience is that, with a few isolated exceptions, the collectibles aren't locked around powers or story triggers. They're locked behind observation; behind understanding how to read the environments, how to spot interactive or hidden objects, and how to use your Poltergust in ways that may not have been explicitly instructed by that point in the game.
There were a few gem locations on the lower floors where I initially thought, "Maybe this is locked behind a new power; I'll come back later"—but once I pushed through the middle floors with all gems collected on the first pass, and didn't see anything new come in after the major bosses, it dawned on me that LM3 is relentlessly fair about telling you: no, you're not missing a key-item or power—you're missing an insight.
Likewise, the 99-health limit (if you don't acquire any bones beyond the first one you get for free) and damage numbers feel reliable and balanced the whole way through. Your power progression in this game comes from your soft skills at problem-solving in the face of new environmental mechanics, one room after another, not from anything hard-coded. It's closer to what you might expect of a point-and-click adventure or a game like Zack & Wiki, and compared to LM1, here we see this concept stretched out over a long, long scale and tested to the limit: how diverse and varied can you make a puzzle-exploration game, LM3 seems to ask, with a static playable character?
*
The controls were my main reservation from start to finish. I worked with them, but I didn't love them. I completely understand the desire to keep menus and options lean and tidy for a relatively low-execution game designed to be so approachable for beginners, and I'm grateful for the options we do have, like the horizontal lock on the R-stick so my vertical movement was motion-only (a scheme that served me very well, despite the regrettable lack of motion-aiming on the horizontal axis, up until the final boss, where the timing windows for quick and accurate aiming were a little too tight for comfort), but the whole way through the controls felt less than ideal.
That goes for everything from your directional control while aiming the Poltergust to the binding of the Gooigi swapping to the R-stick. This game was a strong reminder of why I've always hated everything to do with clickable sticks; I've never encountered a situation where I liked them, and quite often, as here, they are outright bad. "Press once to swap, press twice to cancel Gooigi" is unreliable enough as it is in the heat of anything intense. But what's even worse is the difficulty of pressing the R-stick without nudging it, a problem for this game specifically when certain puzzle interactions require you to fire the Poltergust at an object with one character while swapping to the other. Eventually, playing on detached Joy-Cons, it got to the point where the most accurate way of doing this, I found, was reaching over to the R-stick with my left thumb while still holding the left Joy-Con in my left hand, while holding ZR with my right hand.
The combination of (a) support for single Joy-Con co-op and (b) redundancy of inputs between the face and shoulder buttons (necessary for pointing at things while turning with the R-stick, but ideally mitigated with better support for motion aiming) does a number on the available number of buttons, which is why we see so many cramped or overlapping solutions—press ZL+ZR for this, press L+R for that, click once or twice for this. I'm not sure I have a better default scheme in mind, but allowing the user to remap certain buttons away from these redundancies would have helped a lot.
*
There is one thing about the map design that felt like a bit of an unfulfilled ambition: the general lack of interaction between floors. It's nice to return to a contiguous, open format where you can run around the mansion at your leisure, without the constant interruption or fragmentation we saw in Dark Moon, but the "floors" (by which I mean the zones separated by elevator buttons) are pretty conspicuously compartmentalized, in a manner similar to Metroid II/Samus Returns: separately designed, separately loaded. Initially, from floors B1 to 2, you see a bit of light interaction where you can drop in from one floor to grab a gem in another—and it was unfortunate that this vertical connectivity was totally dropped after that. You do see some verticality in the sub-floor structure within the major numbered floors to emphasize the 3D-ness of the play space, most memorably on 7 and 10, but other than that, I think the game underuses the structure of a tower.
I'm not forgetting about the Polterkitty chases, mind you; what I'm saying is that I would have liked to see more inter-floor connections in the overall traversal of the mansion and the gem hunts—more of the unexpected stitching between zones that often makes for the best moments in Metroid, and something I vaguely remember being present back in LM1.
*
B2's boss was simultaneously unforgettable and frustrating. I don't mind fights that are so unorthodox, and I like that it rewards you for some light spatial reasoning, like firing the boss in a direction that allows you to get out of the water and reach him in time. But the rubber ducky traversal of B2 doesn't give you nearly enough practice for this. It's rare enough that you use the Poltergust to expel and propel with ZL, and the directional aiming/rotation with the sticks leaves much to be desired across the whole game, but on top of that you have to accustom yourself to the counterintuitive notion of pointing the stick toward the spiked wall that you want to push against, which is difficult to do in an emergency manoeuvre. The whole fight is like playing in a mirrored environment.
13's boss (the swimming pool) gave me a lot of grief because it took me ages to get the timing down for Gooigi to get to the valve without enough of a safety window to shut it off. I don't know that I ever felt like I was properly reading or manipulating the boss pattern, and every time Gooigi was spat on, it was a long walk back.
I died a few times to the final boss, including once to the timer on the final phase, and it was almost entirely because the timing windows for firing a bomb at the correct King Boo (which I only understood how to identify on my last, successful attempt) were so tight. Since the background behind King Boo is the blankness of space, you can't really follow a targeting reticule and adjust—you just have to point at him and hope you locked on. Perhaps there is some trick to the fight I never picked up, but unlike many other boss fights in the game, there wasn't much of an opportunity to be proactive—to make a risky and aggressive play to speed things up or strategically time your slams. Here, you just dodge and dodge and hope the pattern eventually comes around to giving you a bomb to lob back. In the final phase, if you have the health pool to do it, it's actually advantageous to take damage to cut off certain patterns, if your concern is beating the timer. It was neat to figure that out, but I'm not convinced it's great design.
Not many grievances otherwise. I'm being picky here, but most of the bosses throughout the game are terrific—top-tier work by Nintendo standards when it comes to their overall creativity, mix of problem-solving and execution, and phase-by-phase escalation.
Every now and then, an entry from one of Nintendo's off-and-on secondary series demands a seat at the big table. LM3 is one such moment. I think I last experienced that with Yoshi's Woolly World—and since we're on the subject of Next Level Games, that's also how I felt about their previous high watermark, Mario Strikers Charged, in relation to the Mario sports spinoffs on the whole. 2019, for the Switch, has been one of those years where a platform's exclusive library really comes into its own and defines its personality for a long time to come. LM1 was one of several games (alongside Pikmin, TTYD, and so forth) that did that work for the long-term legacy of the GameCube, and I have no doubt that ten or twenty years from now, LM3 will remain a fixture of the same conversation with respect to the Switch. It's such a high point for both its series and its developer that I can see it enduring for a good long while as the consensus model for what Luigi's Mansion should be.
Lol, the whole finding more money when searching for a floors last gem was cruel every time, especially when they could feel like taking more work than some gems..
I collected all the Boos as soon as the option to grab the last one was available, so I got to enjoy plenty of time with the bonus you get for that, and I actually rather liked it. I would have appreciated more cosmetic swaps like that.
I do think the abundance of pointless cash in this game, serving as nothing other than a high score counter and OCD bait for scrub-everything players like myself, doesn't have much of a purpose besides acknowledging that you checked a spot. Far too often, I thought I had uncovered something incredibly clever that must be the last gem on the floor—only to find a treasure chest with more cash. If you know that LM had a ranking system in the past, you look at this and say, "Aha, a reason to never spend any money!" but I don't think that's communicated at all. It's nice that a good rank indirectly correlates with forgoing bones and hints, though, if I correctly understand how it works.
I still haven't looked up anything about this game so the empty Rare Ghosts rack is still staring me in the face. And while I still have 10 gems missing, I'm not sure it particularly matters to me if there isn't anything functional at the end of 100%. I would have liked to see playable postgame content or even content per completed floor open up somehow, but didn't expect it from this game (despite what a good fit it would have been for a marathon arcade survival finale like the one in Captain Toad).
B2 question.
After you lower the water level, is there any way to get Gooigi back through this area? My vaccuum won't reach this to open the pipe up. There's a fuse box around to the left of the upper level I didn't open. I assume it's just money in it but I can't be certain.
Did you unlock the Poltergeist upgrade? If so, destroy that wall behind the electrical socket and use the tv to find the. Gem in a bag of popcorn
I've already gotten that one. I'm not sure which color it is off the top of my head. I'll probably just go ahead and try a gem finder
Hmm... I'm stuck on the 7th floor?
I got to the bathroom on level 3... I see a wheel you can turn behind the bench... The wheel gets a platform in and out of the wall but I'm not sure what else to do?
Ahhh duh... I slammed it on the bench but didn't try elsewhere. Thanks!This stumped me too! It was only by a stroke of luck thatI stuck a plunger onto that one empty plant holder, then realized I could just slam it onto the toilet. Viola! Dunno what's up with that weird wheel, though.
Hit the end credits today with 92/102 gems, 90k in the bank, an A rank, and over 29 hours played. I expected there to be some kind of money-based ranking system but didn't know what the benchmarks were, so I played the whole game while never spending any money—not on bones, not on hint locations. It feels very well tuned for experienced players this way. Obviously I'm not finished yet, as I still want to collect all the gems and I haven't even looked at the new ScareScraper, but after doing a full pass through every floor to mop up what I could, I thought I would succumb to impatience and see the final boss now rather than later.
This is an exemplary game. The highest compliment I can pay Luigi's Mansion 3 is that even though I put in nearly 30 hours, much of which consisted of revisiting floors to scrub every corner, it felt half as long, as it was just so pacy in delivering one idea after another from room to room: no padding, no downtime, just one lock-and-key mini-dungeon stacked upon another. (Despite the linearity of the room-to-room progression in most floors, LM3 may actually sport the best traditional Zelda dungeon experience on the Switch so far: just pretend the whole game revolves around the Gust Bellows, the Eye of Truth, and the Command Melody, and you're set.) Any sense of sluggishness or tedium is down to your own pace and acuity as an explorer. We commonly say that games are "packed" with content to say they have a lot of content—but no, LM3 really is packed, in the sense of cramming all of this so tightly with little to no interruption, apart from the rare occasions when E. Gadd forces you to head back to the lab, which I can count on one hand.
*
I think LM3 is one of the strongest cases I've ever seen for how interesting you can make a game without any kind of power progression. I love the key-item structure of Zelda dungeons or Metroid games, and initially, as your toolkit comes in piece by piece, it might look as though LM3 is setting up for something similar (acquire a power, go back to another floor to acquire a gem)—but what makes this game such a distinctive experience is that, with a few isolated exceptions, the collectibles aren't locked around powers or story triggers. They're locked behind observation; behind understanding how to read the environments, how to spot interactive or hidden objects, and how to use your Poltergust in ways that may not have been explicitly instructed by that point in the game.
There were a few gem locations on the lower floors where I initially thought, "Maybe this is locked behind a new power; I'll come back later"—but once I pushed through the middle floors with all gems collected on the first pass, and didn't see anything new come in after the major bosses, it dawned on me that LM3 is relentlessly fair about telling you: no, you're not missing a key-item or power—you're missing an insight.
Likewise, the 99-health limit (if you don't acquire any bones beyond the first one you get for free) and damage numbers feel reliable and balanced the whole way through. Your power progression in this game comes from your soft skills at problem-solving in the face of new environmental mechanics, one room after another, not from anything hard-coded. It's closer to what you might expect of a point-and-click adventure or a game like Zack & Wiki, and compared to LM1, here we see this concept stretched out over a long, long scale and tested to the limit: how diverse and varied can you make a puzzle-exploration game, LM3 seems to ask, with a static playable character?
*
The controls were my main reservation from start to finish. I worked with them, but I didn't love them. I completely understand the desire to keep menus and options lean and tidy for a relatively low-execution game designed to be so approachable for beginners, and I'm grateful for the options we do have, like the horizontal lock on the R-stick so my vertical movement was motion-only (a scheme that served me very well, despite the regrettable lack of motion-aiming on the horizontal axis, up until the final boss, where the timing windows for quick and accurate aiming were a little too tight for comfort), but the whole way through the controls felt less than ideal.
That goes for everything from your directional control while aiming the Poltergust to the binding of the Gooigi swapping to the R-stick. This game was a strong reminder of why I've always hated everything to do with clickable sticks; I've never encountered a situation where I liked them, and quite often, as here, they are outright bad. "Press once to swap, press twice to cancel Gooigi" is unreliable enough as it is in the heat of anything intense. But what's even worse is the difficulty of pressing the R-stick without nudging it, a problem for this game specifically when certain puzzle interactions require you to fire the Poltergust at an object with one character while swapping to the other. Eventually, playing on detached Joy-Cons, it got to the point where the most accurate way of doing this, I found, was reaching over to the R-stick with my left thumb while still holding the left Joy-Con in my left hand, while holding ZR with my right hand.
The combination of (a) support for single Joy-Con co-op and (b) redundancy of inputs between the face and shoulder buttons (necessary for pointing at things while turning with the R-stick, but ideally mitigated with better support for motion aiming) does a number on the available number of buttons, which is why we see so many cramped or overlapping solutions—press ZL+ZR for this, press L+R for that, click once or twice for this. I'm not sure I have a better default scheme in mind, but allowing the user to remap certain buttons away from these redundancies would have helped a lot.
*
There is one thing about the map design that felt like a bit of an unfulfilled ambition: the general lack of interaction between floors. It's nice to return to a contiguous, open format where you can run around the mansion at your leisure, without the constant interruption or fragmentation we saw in Dark Moon, but the "floors" (by which I mean the zones separated by elevator buttons) are pretty conspicuously compartmentalized, in a manner similar to Metroid II/Samus Returns: separately designed, separately loaded. Initially, from floors B1 to 2, you see a bit of light interaction where you can drop in from one floor to grab a gem in another—and it was unfortunate that this vertical connectivity was totally dropped after that. You do see some verticality in the sub-floor structure within the major numbered floors to emphasize the 3D-ness of the play space, most memorably on 7 and 10, but other than that, I think the game underuses the structure of a tower.
I'm not forgetting about the Polterkitty chases, mind you; what I'm saying is that I would have liked to see more inter-floor connections in the overall traversal of the mansion and the gem hunts—more of the unexpected stitching between zones that often makes for the best moments in Metroid, and something I vaguely remember being present back in LM1.
*
B2's boss was simultaneously unforgettable and frustrating. I don't mind fights that are so unorthodox, and I like that it rewards you for some light spatial reasoning, like firing the boss in a direction that allows you to get out of the water and reach him in time. But the rubber ducky traversal of B2 doesn't give you nearly enough practice for this. It's rare enough that you use the Poltergust to expel and propel with ZL, and the directional aiming/rotation with the sticks leaves much to be desired across the whole game, but on top of that you have to accustom yourself to the counterintuitive notion of pointing the stick toward the spiked wall that you want to push against, which is difficult to do in an emergency manoeuvre. The whole fight is like playing in a mirrored environment.
13's boss (the swimming pool) gave me a lot of grief because it took me ages to get the timing down for Gooigi to get to the valve without enough of a safety window to shut it off. I don't know that I ever felt like I was properly reading or manipulating the boss pattern, and every time Gooigi was spat on, it was a long walk back.
I died a few times to the final boss, including once to the timer on the final phase, and it was almost entirely because the timing windows for firing a bomb at the correct King Boo (which I only understood how to identify on my last, successful attempt) were so tight. Since the background behind King Boo is the blankness of space, you can't really follow a targeting reticule and adjust—you just have to point at him and hope you locked on. Perhaps there is some trick to the fight I never picked up, but unlike many other boss fights in the game, there wasn't much of an opportunity to be proactive—to make a risky and aggressive play to speed things up or strategically time your slams. Here, you just dodge and dodge and hope the pattern eventually comes around to giving you a bomb to lob back. In the final phase, if you have the health pool to do it, it's actually advantageous to take damage to cut off certain patterns, if your concern is beating the timer. It was neat to figure that out, but I'm not convinced it's great design.
Not many grievances otherwise. I'm being picky here, but most of the bosses throughout the game are terrific—top-tier work by Nintendo standards when it comes to their overall creativity, mix of problem-solving and execution, and phase-by-phase escalation.
Every now and then, an entry from one of Nintendo's off-and-on secondary series demands a seat at the big table. LM3 is one such moment. I think I last experienced that with Yoshi's Woolly World—and since we're on the subject of Next Level Games, that's also how I felt about their previous high watermark, Mario Strikers Charged, in relation to the Mario sports spinoffs on the whole. 2019, for the Switch, has been one of those years where a platform's exclusive library really comes into its own and defines its personality for a long time to come. LM1 was one of several games (alongside Pikmin, TTYD, and so forth) that did that work for the long-term legacy of the GameCube, and I have no doubt that ten or twenty years from now, LM3 will remain a fixture of the same conversation with respect to the Switch. It's such a high point for both its series and its developer that I can see it enduring for a good long while as the consensus model for what Luigi's Mansion should be.
About 13's boss
Did you stun the ghost with the volleyball? If you do that you should have plenty of time to drain the pool.