3.5/5 ★ – jared_c's review of Luigi's Mansion 2 HD.

While loving the first game on Gamecube, seeing the incredibly divisive reviews for the second entry when released on the 3DS made me not jump to pick it up. It took years later and a re-release on the Switch for me to finally jump into this game. Not sure if that was for better or worse. Luigi's Mansion 2's story makes King Boo from the first entry somehow escape his prison and shatter a large crystal object that has a pacifying effect on ghosts in the valley setting of 2, making them hostile again. The professor from 1 contacts Luigi again to come save the day once again. Nothing crazy here story wise except another excuse for a second adventure. The biggest change in the game play of 2 comes in the overall setting. Where 1 has you going through one large mansion through the entire game, 2 has 5 separate "mansions" and changes to a mission based structure. This I felt was the biggest flaw in the game, as things would be getting interesting exploring then you would have to go back to the Professor's bunker for him to make some "sly" comment, see some stats about how your mission went, then after some other short cutscenes go back into the mansion, but unfortunately not back to where you just came from. This breaks the flow of the game constantly. The second biggest issue I had was the CONSTANT interruptions from the Professor. Any time you do anything, at all, the professor contacts you for a short interlude. The problem being you do something in the game, then start walking. Luigi freezes for a second as your ds device the professor uses to contact you starts ringing. A prompt comes up "Press A to Answer", press A, Luigi takes the ds out, opens it up, then professor may give you a hint as to where to go next. Or he says something short like "Go back to this room!" or other similar one sentence bit. Then Luigi puts the ds away, then you can resume walking. Any given mission (averaging maybe 20 minutes long?) You may have to go through this sequence of interruption 4 or 5 times. It's hand holding or micro managing to the extreme. Once again, breaking any sense of flow the game starts to establish. The different settings are nice at least, even if it comes at the cost of the different mansions, and there are a few new ghost ideas that are introduced. The controls are passable, but whether it was a leftover from the fact this was built for the 3DS there were some parts where the perspective made things difficult to see or figure out what to do. Nothing game breaking, but just adding to some more frustration. This review does sound really harsh on the game, but I did still (mostly) enjoy my time with it. I'm just glad that most of what they tried here in the second entry, they decided to throw out when they made the third game.