Nintendo has gained a reputation, and not unfairly, for double- or even triple-dipping on its beloved catalog of classic games. From Super Mario All-Stars on Super NES, to the Classic NES Collection on Game Boy Advance, to modern HD remasters like Metroid Prime and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Nintendo has never been shy about capitalizing on its history. As we move into an increasingly digital era, Nintendo has also been noticeably slow to adopt a single, cross-generation digital library akin to PlayStation and Xbox. We've seen lots of speculation over whether Nintendo will finally break this trend as it moves into the era of the Switch successor--and recent remasters like Luigi's Mansion 2 HD show why it's so necessary that the company follows through with this pro-consumer move.

Luigi's Mansion 2 HD is a remaster of a 2013 3DS game, and a pretty good one at that. I enjoyed revisiting the 3DS game on a modern system and felt it was paying homage to its history. But it's precisely because this appealed to me as a historical artifact that I couldn't help but think about what it means for my digital collection. Luigi's Mansion 2 is, so far, the middle chapter of a series that has already grown past it. It's nice to have the game unshackled from the 3DS, but that won't matter if its destiny is just to get shackled to the Nintendo Switch instead.

To be blunt, Luigi's Mansion 2 is good but slight. It's an enjoyable little chapter and a neat way to see how the Luigi's Mansion series has developed, but it's lower on the tier list of vital remasters than games that are older, more in need of modernization, or just difficult to find. The mere existence of an HD remaster of Luigi's Mansion 2 shows how Nintendo is filling its release calendar, which is a fine strategy as the Switch lives an especially long time for a console. And it's far from the last. At its June 2024 Nintendo Direct, the company announced a remaster of Donkey Kong Country Returns, a game that was already ported to the 3DS shortly after its initial release on the Wii and is now making the journey to Switch.