Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon

Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon is a must play for any 3DS owner. The game was charming and fun as hell for pretty much the entirety of its run (save for one cheap boss, but oh well).

It eclipses it's predecessor by leaps and bounds, which becomes obvious pretty early on. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about the mission structure of the game, as I went in expecting to slowly unravel the mysteries of a mansion or two like in the first game. What you end up doing are (not-so-bite-sized as you might think - most missions take about 20 minutes each) missions wherein you have a general goal, and must figure out how to accomplish it.

Dark Moon is way more puzzley than it's predecessor, and is better off for it. You must not only *find* the ghosts, you must figure out how to capture them. It's not just a matter of blinding them with the flashlight than sucking them up with the Poltergust 5000 - you have to figure out how to lure them out of their hiding spots or figure out how to disarm them, etc. The environmental puzzles are fun, too - figuring out how to navigate the sometimes large mansions is a lot of fun. The mission structure also limits a lot of potential backtracking, because as soon as you complete an area, Prof. E. Gadd teleports you back to his lab and then will send you back right where you need to be most of the time.

I find the game is very well-paced, in that it starts with simple puzzles and easy combat and slowly ramps it up as you go along. The bosses got progressively more and more challenging and frankly, aside from one near the end (not the final boss), were excellent little puzzle battles. The team (apparently the same people who made Mario Strikers Charged, a game I was quite fond of back in 2006 or whatever, and also the recent Punch-Out!! for Wii) really took the vacuum suck/blow mechanic and ran with it. They pretty much give you every type of puzzle imaginable for those mechanics, and hide all kind of neat stuff to find. Having just beat the game, there's still plenty for me to go back and do. There is a Boo ghost hidden in every level, and I found not quite half of them while playing through the game. In all five mansions, there are hidden gems that you can find, which do who knows what if you find them all. The game ranks you on how well you beat missions, so at the very least you could always go back and try to beat your previous score. Having just played the single player mode to completion without going back to retry any of those levels or unlock everything, I clocked in at just over 12 hours. I paced myself over the past two weeks to really stretch out how enjoyable it was, and I'm glad I did, as I really didn't want the game to end.

One more thing is how charming Luigi is. I really enjoyed his comments and nervousness throughout the whole game. Charles Martinet really does an excellent job of making Luigi just a lovable guy who is scared yet courageous in his own way, as every time Luigi would quiver in fear he would make me laugh. I don't know exactly how to explain how much I love Luigi in this game, I really recommend playing it to see how well done he is. Next Level Games really knocked it out of the park on pretty much every level here.

It's another one of those games, too, that really uses 3D well - I found I needed it for a few boss fights, and the game felt weird without it turned on, so I played the majority of the game in 3D mode. I guess its this and Mario 3D Land so far for useful 3D games.