Video Game / Luigi's Mansion (Series)

I am not afraid of you, fool!

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear."

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

(For the first game in the series, see here)

Luigi's Mansion is a Spin-Off series of Super Mario Bros., notable for being the only one featuring Luigi, the brother of the eponymous plumber, as the player character. Mario is in fact the one you have to rescue this time, not from Bowser but from a horde of ghosts led by King Boo. Turns out, while the Boos in the main series are shy and rather adorable, their leader is far more sinister and holds a deep hatred for the Mario Bros in general and, as the series develops, Luigi in particular.

This time, the games are not platformers, and while Mario has been in many game genres, Luigi's is all his own. These are third-person adventure games in fixed-camera "dollhouse" maps, à la Resident Evil— you might even call them kid-friendly "horror" games. Luigi cannot jump on enemies (not that it would help against ghosts). To deal with them, he uses a series of modified and tricked-out vaccums (called the Poltergust (3000, 5000 or G-00 depending on the game), given to him by debuting character Professor E. Gadd, a ghost researcher, to defeat Boos and others spectres.

It all started with the first game, released in 2001 as a launch title for the GameCube. At the time, the game bemused audiences. While the game was good for showcasing the capacities of the console, the fact that it wasn't a traditional Mario game and didn't capture the same atmosphere was criticized, as was the short length of the game. Fans eventually warmed up for the game after the release of Super Mario Sunshine. The game even got a remake on the 3DS in 2018.

Luigi's Mansion was officially established as a series 12 years after the first game in 2013 with the release of Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon on the Nintendo 3DS. Dark Moon put Luigi's Mansion in new hands, with it being developed by Canadian team Next Level Games, rather than in-house by Nintendo EAD. This entry is stylistically distinct from the first game and adds and changes several mechanics, as well as featuring a more linear and broken-up mission structure.

Next Level Games eventually reprised the series with a third installment simply titled Luigi's Mansion 3, released for the Nintendo Switch in 2019. The game continues much of the work NLG established before, but with some choices being walked back to be more similar to the first game and a more open-feeling structure.

The series consist of:

• Luigi's Mansion (2001)
  • Luigi's Mansion, remake on 3DS (2018)
• Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon (2013)— published as Luigi's Mansion 2 in Japanese, Chinese and European languages
  • Luigi’s Mansion Arcade, Rail Shooter adaptation by Capcom (2015)
  • Luigi's Mansion 2 HD, remaster on Switch (2024)
• Luigi's Mansion 3 (2019)

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The Luigi's Mansion series provide examples of the following tropes:

• Absent-Minded Professor: E. Gadd is a brilliant paranormal scientist and technician, but he has some seriously dangerous lapses in attention and care which have imperiled his Toad assistants and allowed for the escape of a safely-contained King Boo.
• All That Glitters: In all games, you obtain the gem on King Boo's crown after defeating him, but it's always the least valuable treasure. It is worth 5000G (as much as a single coin) in the first game, has no value at all in Dark Moon, and outright vanishes after grabbing it in Luigi's Mansion 3.
• Alternate Species Counterpart: The Nintendo 3DS version of the first game introduces Gooigi, a sentient lifeform made of goo that resembles Luigi. He reappears in the third game.
• And I Must Scream: King Boo's main plan across the games involves trapping Mario and Luigi in a painting where they are fully conscious but unable to do anything.
• Artifact Title: In Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, Luigi is busting ghosts in several different places, and only two of them are mansions, neither of which are his. Luigi's Mansion 3 features no mansion(s) whatsoever, instead taking place solely in a haunted hotel.
• Bed Sheet Ghost: Nearly all enemy ghosts in the first game resemble sheet ghosts, and some in the second do as well. Every other ghost appearing in the series has Fog Feet instead.
• Big Bad: This time, it is not Bowser, who is completely absent, but rather, King Boo.
• Big Boo's Haunt: The setting of each game is this. The first game features the eponymous mansion, the second the multiple places of Evershade Valley, and the third game, a hotel called The Last Resort. Across the games, many flavors of haunted settings are explored.
• Blinded by the Light: To be able to vacuum the ghosts, Luigi has to first stun them with his light. In the first game, he has just a mundane flashlight which can stun ghosts for the briefest of seconds, requiring very keen timing and use of the light, while the sequels introduce the Strobulb, a charged flashbulb that will stun ghosts for a few seconds and makes them easier to handle.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: In Dark Moon, the ghosts are actually nice and docile until the eponymous Dark Moon is destroyed, making them hostile. Though since the Dark Moon seems to be fabricated for the purpose of pacifying the ghosts, their switch to evil may actually be the opposite.In Luigi's Mansion 3, the ghosts are under the influence of the gem in King Boo's crown.
• Character Development: Being the series that finally gives Luigi his spotlight, this is to be expected. Luigi is here portrayed with more personality as a shy, easily-scared but nevertheless brave hero, and these traits have colored his portrayals in the rest of the franchise.
• Classical Anti-Hero: Compared to Mario, who is portrayed as an Ideal Hero, Luigi is more flawed, being shy, dorky, and cowardly. He is still just as heroic as his brother and finds strength and success by facing his fears in the name of his loved ones.
• Console Cameo: Each game has one, used for such things as displaying maps and being the receiver for when E. Gadd contacts Luigi:
  • The Game Boy Horror from the first game, a parody of the Game Boy Color
  • The Dual Scream from the first game, parodying the Nintendo Dual Screen, also known as Nintendo DS.
  • The Virtual Boo, or VB for short in the third game. Obvious parody of the Virtual Boy.
• Cool Crown: King Boo's most distinguishable feature is his crown topped with a gem. It actually grants him most of his powers.
• Cowardly Lion: Luigi is really scared of ghosts, but that doesn't stop him from facing them when he need to save his brother.
• Cute Little Fangs: Many ghosts have fangs, and despite the danger they pose, are of them are portrayed as at least a little bit endearing.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to the usual happy and colorful world of Mario, Luigi's Mansion allows itself to be more sinister and suspenseful, with the first game in particular coming across as a toned-down take on Survival Horror.
• A Day in the Limelight: This is the first time that Luigi got the main role in a game. Before that, he was just existing to be the second playable character and a partner for Mario, with little characterization. This is the series that defined him as the Lovable Coward that he is.
• Denser and Wackier: While the original game had a somewhat sinister and menacing atmosphere, the sequels haven't maintained it:
  • Luigi's Mansion has a reputation for being the closest Mario has ever come to the full-on horror gaming genre. The mansion is genuinely dark and realistically dingy and ornate, with only the proportions feeling caricatured, and the one track you'll hear while exploring the house is dreary and heavy. All of this captures the tension of exploring a scary place at night. The enemies, though cartoonish, are still menacing through a few designs and sound effects that feel truly freakish, and the way they can suddenly spawn in the dark can genuinely catch a player off-guard. At the core, much of the gameplay of the gameplay consists of wandering around true darkness until something pops out behind you! While there are comedic moments in the game, they tend to be in the writing more than in broad slapstick visuals. The Portrait Ghost bosses also play into the melancholy of ghost stories by having a few grim death backstories and, in the mansion, repeating their living routines with a sense of tragic obliviousness, especially since some don't seem to acknowledge or see you until they're attacked. The game overall has a sense of eerieness to it that can be genuinely unsettling for kids.
  • Dark Moon features a lighter visual aesthetic with nothing feeling as dark to navigate through, and the visual style, while having a spooky edge with a quirky crooked aesthetic, feels just as cartoony overall as the main Mario games tend to. The comedy in the game is a lot more light-hearted and much more takes the form of visual slapstick as well. The boss ghosts are mostly not indicated to be spirits of the living, and the only three who are (and who form one battle) look less humanoid, don't have a creepy backstory, and aren't portrayed with a sense of melancholy.
  • Luigi's Mansion 3 keeps the wacky feel of the previous game, while walking a few things back to be a little more serious. The ghosts are still goofy, but aren't made out to be as adorable, and the aesthetic continues the look from 2 while being more detailed and atmospheric to bring some of 1 in with less fear factor. The boss ghosts are designed more humanoid again, but no backstory is given to them, and they are all fully aware of Luigi and mostly antagonistic, leaving them far less sympathetic or sad.
• Distressed Dude: Here, instead of being the one who rescues Princess Peach, Mario is the one who must be rescued. Toads must also be rescued in both sequels, and Gadd (briefly) and Princess Peach join in in 3.
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: In the first game, the Boos were portrayed without their middle two fangs, and were atypically translucent to match the other ghosts. King Boo himself was the same size as a regular Boo, had no undereye shadows and his tongue was blue instead of purple. 2 would make the Boos as opaque as they typically are in all other Mario games and make their teeth match too, as well as updating King Boo's look and increasing his size. 3 would then reference the design discrepancies in 1 with King Boo's clone attack, wherein the fake copies of himself that he creates have only the two outer teeth like the Luigi's Mansion 1 Boos.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first game is noticeably different from the sequels in many ways, mostly due to being developed by a different studio and the series being dormant for many years:
  • The atmosphere is much more sinister, and the ghosts aren't as Laughably Evil as they would later become.
  • The flashlight system is very different. Ghosts are stunned for a fraction of a second when the flashlight beam hits them, making it optimal to hold a button to keep the light off until you need it on again while the light will face a ghost. In the sequels (and the first game's remake), the Strobulb is added. Ghosts won't be stunned by the default flashlight beam, and instead the player must press a button rather than release one to flash the ghost with a stronger light that will stun them for a more reasonable amount of time.
  • Money is completely useless outside of being used as Scoring Points for an end-game rank.
  • The Game Boy Horror provided a first-person camera view with the ability to scan objects. This let the player look at the otherwise invisible fourth wall of rooms to find a few things, scan boss ghosts' hearts for hints on their weaknesses, scan random objects for flavor commentary from Luigi, or scan mirrors to warp to the house's foyer. The scan feature did not return in the later games, nor did any of its functions.
  • Mario is fully animated within his portrait and will even cry out for help, suggesting a proper And I Must Scream fate if he isn't rescued. In each subsequent game, characters captured in portraits are represented with still images and are suggested to be unconscious, making it more of a Faux Death until release.
  • King Boo isn't nearly as well-established as a villain, being little more than a King Mook who only appears during a brief cutscene mid-way through the game and the ending, where he barely appears during his own boss fight and instead dukes it out in an illusory Bowser disguise. Later games would give him much stronger story presence and development into his own distinct character, finally giving Luigi a proper arch-nemesis to parallel his brother and Bowser.
  • The Poltergust upgrades in the first game took the form of elemental effects—Luigi could vacuum up elemental wisps near elemental sources and then expel the elements from his Poltergust to interact with objects and ghosts. The sequels make the Poltergust add-ons more tied to the vacuum's gadgetry and the paranormal, with upgrades including stronger suctions with a charge meter, plungers to fire and pull objects with, and the Dark-Light Device which appears in both sequels, exposing and restoring objects made invisible and incorporeal by ghosts, as well as show ghosts that are invisible or hiding.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Each game in the sub-series takes place within a single night.
• Ghosts Abhor a Vacuum: Luigi's weapon is the Poltergust, a modified vacuum invented by Professor E. Gadd for the express purpose of catching ghosts.
• The Ghost King: King Boo, ruler of his own species and also of other ghosts through means of supernatural creation or subjugation.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: All ghosts have these, though they are particularly glowing in the case of King Boo.
• The Goomba: Gold Ghosts in the first game, Greenies in the second and Goobs in the third. In the second and third games, the weakest enemies have the tradeoff of being the most resourceful and prone to picking up objects as weapons and Strobulb protections.
• Hat of Power: King Boo's crown, or more specifically the gem on the crown, is where he gets all his powers from.
• Haunted House: The settings of the series, obviously. The settings diversify significantly past the classic house after the first game, though, with 2 including a factory, chalet mine, and museum, and 3 being set in a huge eclectic hotel that comprises over 15 flavors of haunted settings.
• Haunted House Historian: Professor E. Gadd is this in the first two games, being established as a researcher of the locations Luigi goes to. Since he's lured into the mess of 3 by a ruse, he doesn't get "on the case" there until Luigi rescues him.
• Hearts Are Health: Luigi has to collect hearts to refill his health. In the first game, the ghosts' health is also written above a heart visible within their torso while stunned and being vacuumed.
• Improbable Weapon User: Luigi uses a Poltergust to suck up ghosts: it's essentially a vacuum cleaner with an attached flashlight, which in later games comes with a black light attachment.
• Inescapable Ambush: Done all the time in the games, with areas that immediately have ghosts show up, then lock Luigi in until all of them are caught. In the case of Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon and Luigi's Mansion 3, it's not a door being blocked, but a magical gate popping out of the floor and barricading anything from an opening to a set of stairs until all nearby ghosts are caught. In these games, this is also marked by the lights immediately going off whenever an ambush occurs.
• Knight of Cerebus: While the series as a whole got Denser and Wackier, King Boo did just the opposite. In the first game, he's a very standard final boss for the Mario universe - little more than a King Mook who, while behind the events of the game on paper, has very little screentime to really give his status as the Big Bad any weight. From the second game onward, however, his motivation evolves from disliking the brothers for the trouble they cause Boo-kind throughout the series to just hating Luigi in particular, not only seeking revenge but deriving sadistic pleasure from the distress caused by his repeated capture of his brother and friends. Combined with an overhaul to his design that makes him a lot more ghoulish, a new crown that , and much more robust visuals to really sell him and his illusions properly, expect the ghostly hijinks to come to a nasty halt whenever he appears.
• Living Drawing:
  • King Boo's method of imprisonment consists of turning people into paintings. They are still alive while it happens.
  • Vincent Van Gore has the ability to paints ghosts who can come to "life", with the implication that he created all of the non-Boo enemy ghosts in the game.
• Metal Slime: Each games features a rare variation of the weakest mook that drops tons of money when caught—the Speedy Spirit in the first game, the Gold Greenie in the second and the Golden Goob in the third.
• Mission Control: Professor E. Gadd in all games, who communicates to Luigi to give advice and mission goals through the Game Boy Horror, Dual Scream, Virtual Boo, or whatever communication device that particular entry uses.
• Money for Nothing: Each haunted area explored by Luigi is filled with money, from coins to bills to gold bars to jewels. Getting a lot of money is easy but it acts as Scoring Points rather than currency. The sequel adds shops, but the implementation is still minimal.
• Monochrome Apparition: Most enemy ghosts are defined by a single color for their body, with the ghosts in the sequels having just a body color and the glowing white of their eyes and mouths. Boss ghosts have multiple colors, particularly the humanoid ones in 1 and 2, and a few enemy or boss skins in the ScareScraper modes in the sequels have more elaborate designs.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: The core gameplay of each game is set during a harrowing night. The happy ending mansion screen in the first game, and the "you won a mansion" map in the first game and the arrival at the hotel in the second game both invoke sunny imagery as something safe and happy for a "too-good-to-be-true" deception.
• Non-Human Undead: Spooky and Polterpup are both ghostly dogs, and Polterkitty and Captain Fishook are a ghost cat and a ghost shark.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: The nature of ghosts is multifaceted and sometimes vague.
  • The enemy ghosts in 1 are indicated to all be the product of Vincent Van Gore's paintings, and he's seen bringing them to life from his canvases.
  • The Portrait Ghosts in the first game, including Van Gore, are all indicated to be the spirits of formerly living humans, with many having backstories about how they died, and the ghosts being depicted in loops of the activities they were attached to in life.
  • Boos in the first game are emphasized as drawing their power from numbers, as the Boos can shoo Luigi away from accessing the Final Boss if he hasn't caught enough of them, and they form the Boolossus boss, a giant Boo made of several small Boos that shrinks after it's popped and the small Boos are sucked up. However, whether they are meant to be spirits of the dead or just another species of monster is unclear.
  • Dark Moon indicates its enemy ghosts are more like a natural paranormal species rather than spirits of anything that was formerly alive, and it shows them under the mass influence of an ancient artifact capable of pacifying their natures. Only three ghosts in the game, the Three Sisters, are portrayed as human spirits.
  • The enemy ghosts in 3 are unspecified in nature, but likely to be within the same concept of a "paranormal species". Humanoid boss ghosts are prevalent in the game, though this time, it's not actually explicitly indicated that they had ever been alive.
• Out of Focus: While King Boo himself is the main villain of each games, the Boos as minions have become less and less relevant. In the first game, they were properly introduced and necessary to capture to finish the game, one was even a boss. In the second, they are no longer required to reach the ending, and in the third, all you get for catching them all is a Cosmetic Award. The Boolossus boss is also less significant in 3, since it's exclusive to the multiplayer mode, while previously, Boolossus (or, depending on the translation, a giant Boo-made-of-boos boss) appeared in the main game in climactic spots in both previous titles.
• Portal Picture: King Boo's favorite method for capturing Luigi's friends is trapping them inside pictures. The only time Luigi has ever entered into the space of one such painting in gameplay is in the first game's final boss battle.
• Prophet Eyes: No ghost has pupils (unless you count the Boos, which are all pupils). The second game on features a more classic glowing white, and in Dark Moon, the ghosts lose their pupils as a sign that madness and aggression have taken over and made them antagonistic.
• Punny Name:
  • Professor Elvin Gadd, whose name is a pun on the old-timey exclamation "Egad!"
  • All the Boos' names are puns on words which include "Boo" or are made to include "Boo", such as "Booldog", "Bootine" or "Bootique".
• Scoring Points: The money accumulated through a Luigi's Mansion playthrough is used at the end to build a new building, with the rank of the player and quality of the new structure being based on how much money they have.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The primary method to defeat the enemies is to imprison them into the Poltergust via vacuuming. They are eventually fully secured within paintings or canisters in a vault.
• Self-Parody: The parodies of Nintendo consoles such as the Game Boy Color, the DS and the Virtual Boy. For the VB, they even make fun of the Virtual Boy's infamous sales failure.
  To help you out, I'll give you one of my greatest inventions yet! I call it...the Virtual Boo! VB for short! It's a state-of-the-art virtual-reality device fitted with a fancy red screen! Really cutting-edge stuff! And red is all the rage, you know? Just wait until I finish the marketing materials on this! It'll fly off the shelves! Heh heh heh!
• Silly Spook: Most of the ghosts encountered are rather goofy and playful. Some aren't even hostile at all.
• Spooky Kids Media: The first game was quite able to frighten many young players. While the series later lightened up on the whole, it still has its fair share of startling or eerie moments.
• Villainous Breakdown: A series-wide example. King Boo gets progressively more unhinged with each game in the series, primarily from Luigi constantly foiling his plans. By the end of the third game, he absolutely loses it and threatens to kill Luigi, a far-cry from his calm demeanor with a passive dismissiveness towards Luigi in the first game.
• Weapons That Suck: The Poltergust in all its variations is a vacuum cleaner at its core which pulls and sucks up ghosts.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Nearly everything that needs to be done in this series boils down to using the Poltergust, whether it be vacuuming ghosts, opening the curtains, grabbing money, throwing balls, grabbing a rope...you name it.
• Who You Gonna Call?: Luigi has to fight ghosts if he wants to save his brother, but only the second game, where E. Gadd's ghost collection escaped, has Luigi entering the game on the pretext of hunting ghosts.

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