Hands-on: It’s scary how much better Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD looks

It’s rather fitting that Nintendo’s bringing a ghost-themed remaster to The Console That Won’t Die™.

As we now approach seven and a half years since the Switch’s launch and everyone eagerly awaits the successor that will finally put it out to pasture, Nintendo is still maintaining its bewilderingly reliable ‘one big game a month’ approach, ensuring players still have a steady stream of new titles.

For its June 2024 entry, Nintendo has thrust its arm into the 3DS Remaster tombola and pulled out Luigi’s Mansion 2 (known as Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon in North America), a much-loved adventure that was released 11 years ago.

Naturally, given that the 3DS’s top screen resolution was a mere 240 pixels high and the Switch has four and a half times as many to play with, a straight upscale might have looked a little on the shonky side. That’s why Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD is more than that.

We aren’t talking the Resident Evil 2 remake or anything here, to be clear. At its core, this is still very much the 3DS game, so if you played through that you’ll know what to expect here.

That said, there’s been at least some work to redo some textures, improve the HUD and, most interestingly, replace some of the previous character models – most notably Luigi himself – with more detailed, expressive ones.

It’s hard to picture this sort of thing without the original as a comparison. When we first started the game it felt to us like it just looked the same as the 3DS game. In reality, that’s just how we remembered it: put it side-by-side with the Switch version and the difference is stark.

In fact, we did just that. The below video shows the intro for the 3DS version (captured directly from the handheld), compared to that in the Switch version, so you can see the changes not just in resolution, but in textures and Luigi’s character model.

For those who missed out on the 3DS game the first time around, Luigi’s Mansion 2 opens with King Boo shattering a Dark Moon (hence the original North American title), shattering it into six pieces.

The moon’s shattering has an adverse effect on the friendly ghosts of Evershade Valley, turning them all aggressive. It’s up to Luigi, with the assistance of Professor E. Gadd, to visit the valley’s mansions and collect the Dark Moon shards to restore order.

We’ve played the first couple of hours of Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD and so far, it seems to be a faithful recreation of the 3DS game without too many changes beyond the obvious graphical upgrade.

The dual-screen nature of the original meant the map was shown on the bottom screen while gameplay took place on the top. This is remedied by moving the map up to the corner of the screen, but it’s not large enough to get in the way.

One improvement is the game’s control system. Because the 3DS only had a single analogue nub, controlling Luigi’s trusty Poltergust 5000 was a little fiddly, with players using either the B and X buttons to aim up and down, or using the handheld’s gyro controls.

While both these options remain present in the Switch version, the dual-stick controls offer the ability to move the vacuum with the right stick. It’s still not perfect – a couple of hours in it still feels a bit clunky – but it’s an improvement nonetheless.

Time will tell if it just takes a little longer to start feeling second nature, but we still found things quite awkward to control, especially during more frantic battles against multiple ghosts where you’re aiming the torch one minute and the vacuum the next.

The controls aside, so far we’re happy with the upgrade Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD provides, even if it’s mainly a visual one for now.

The game is still packed with charm, from the ghost’s humorous animations to the way Luigi – still using the same Charles Martinet voice from the original game – nervously hums the music from time to time, and the improved Luigi character model means he’s more expressive (and therefore funnier).

It’s not yet clear if there’s going to be anything here that sets the game apart from the 3DS version. Typically, Nintendo remakes and remasters that add extra content tend to do so at the end of the game, so it’s hard to tell a couple of hours in if that’s going to be the case here, or if it’s just a straight port content-wise.

Although we haven’t yet tried the ScareScraper multiplayer mode, Nintendo has already confirmed that it will support online play – something the 3DS version no longer offers after all online multiplayer for the handheld was shut down in April – so it at least boasts that over its predecessor, if only by default.

It’s so far, so good, however. We’ll have a full review of Luigi’s Mansion 2 on the site some time before its release on June 27, but from what we’ve played it seems like it’s going to be another quality Nintendo title, albeit one that’s a little safer than usual.