Luigi’s Mansion 3 received a proper unveiling at E3, offering a whole host of horrors for everybody’s favorite lean green machine to ghostbust in search of his missing friends. At the big conference, Kotaku got a chance to talk to the game’s Nintendo producers, Yoshihito Ikebata and Kensuke Tanabe, who are working with Vancouver-based Next Level Games on the title. Here’s a rundown:
- The first game was well-known and beloved for its wide variety of boss encounters, while the second had a notably smaller number of unique encounters. The devs are looking to add a lot more bosses in the third installment: “More than anything we really wanted to put those unique bosses in the second one and we couldn’t,” said Ikebata, “so that’s why we’ve put so many of them in the third one.” Tanabe added that while replaying Dark Moon, he felt the urge to remake a lot of the bosses, and is looking to create really exciting battles.
- The choice of a hotel for a locale has a lot to do with keeping track of an overall layout in three dimensions. “We originally wanted to create was a gameplay system that really plays with the way the rooms are structured and laid out,” Tanabe said. In a developer interview for Nintendo’s in-house News Channel, he added, “With a hotel, it’s easy to envision how rooms are structured: they are lined up above, below, and beside each other. For instance, if you are in room 102, you would immediately know that room 202 was directly above you.” This will help track how rooms are interconnected and how they affect one another.
- Luigi’s Mansion 3 development started on the Wii U. Ikebata and Tanabe were big on pushing two of Luigi’s new moves, the “burst” and “slam”, which allow Luigi to hop with the Poltergust and slam ghosts into one another, respectively. They also highlighted Gooigi as a puzzle-solving implement compared to previous entries.
- LM3 is open-exploration like the first game as opposed to mission-based like Dark Moon.
- Multiplayer allows for up to eight players across four systems.
- According to Tanabe, Luigi isn’t that much of a scaredy-cat: “I thought Luigi must be easily frightened. When I spoke to the folks who are in charge of the character [intellectual property] they said, ‘He’s not that terrified. He’s a little bit terrified.’”
- In one amusing exchange, interviewer Stephen Totilo asks why the game isn’t called “Luigi’s Hotel.” Tanabe explains that they’ll call the series “Luigi’s Mansion” going forward, regardless of setting, and Totilo mentions the infamous Hotel Mario, asking if the producers know what that is. Tanabe: “We do not know. We do know, like, ‘Marriott.’”
For more details be sure to check out the full Kotaku interview.
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Written by Amelia Fruzzetti
A writer and Nintendo fan based in Seattle, Washington. When not working for NinWire, she can be found eating pasta, writing stories, and wondering about when Mother 3 is finally going to get an official localization.
