DISCLAIMER: The purpose of this blog is not to always be against the general critics and opinions on popular games that are/were praised, but rather to provide a different perspective sustained on game design principles.
With the recent release of a Luigi's Mansion 3, It is interesting to take a look back on its predecessor, specifically on one of its missions called "Paranormal Chaos", which is part of the Treacherous Mansion level. A mission where bad game design practices make the game experience feel very frustrating.
Let's be honest, Luigi's Mansion 2 is far from being better than the first entry of the series that was released back in the GCN days. There are some interesting puzzle moments throughout the game, but the choice to drift away from the "Metroid-ish" formula that the first one established, to now focus almost entirely to puzzle solving was not the best choice (in my humble opinion).
With all that being said, let us jump back on what "Paranormal Chaos" is all about.
This mission is basically about revisiting previously explored rooms (most of them) that are now infested by ghosts.The goal is to clear these rooms out of enemies as quickly as possible by using the green portal shortcuts to move quickly from one infested location to another. And here goes the first big problem of this mission: no clear feedback about the time limit. I know, when you visit the Terrace the mission objective is displayed as "Capture all ghosts before it's too late", but this could just well be for sake of drama.
This time limit is communicated to the player on the map screen as color coded locations that go from green to red, indicating how urgent is clearing a room before another. They are all green at first so you get to choose where to tackle first.
The problem about realizing the time limit is that most of the attention of the player is shifted to combat the enemies and it is hard to notice the color change of the rooms on the map while engaging in combat. Yeah, when things on the locations are heating up, the player is advised through a non-explicit pop-up dialogue by Professor E. Gadd, but rather than clarifying what is going, it makes the player feel like he chose incorrectly what room to clear first. I think it would have worked much better to just get the time limit shown on screen from the beginning rather than when you are about to lose.
The second problem is the pacing. Right after clearing all locations from ghosts, you are told to go back to the Terrace where all the ghosts broke free from the portal ,to now fight triple the amount of ghosts you just fought, instead of just giving the player a break from all that fighting, they throw you into a much harder challenge, which leads to the third and final problem: the player's physical endurance.
When designing tight, long and tense combat moments in games, we often underestimate the player's physical endurance. This term refers to the physical stress that the player's hands are going through when being exposed to a prolonged time of performing inputs on the controller or in this case on the console itself (such as pressing down a button or holding the joystick in certain direction for too long). There are many factors that determine the tolerance to such stress ,like the difficulty of the input, the controller ergonomics, even if players have sweaty hands.
Believe or not there is some considerable stress going on the left player's thumb when pushing the joystick on the opposite direction of where the ghosts are trying escape, to capture them. Aside from my left thumb feeling stressed from holding the joystick in different directions for too long(until I sucked in that pesky ghost), my thumb was drifting away from the joystick due to sweat, making the challenge more frustrating.
The final challenge at the Terrace also feels pretty uncreative, it's like they didn't know how to make a harder challenge, other than just throwing you 60 ghosts to fight and even imposing a time limit again?
So these are my thoughts, I also have to be honest and say that I gave up on the game after this mission, I felt that my left thumb had enough of this game.
Please feel free to share your thoughts on the comments section below.
Happy gaming everyone!
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