After years of waiting, the sequel to GameCube classic Luigi’s Mansion is finally upon us. Once again the brother in green has his chance to take the starring role, kicking off the long overdue “Year of Luigi” with the fun-filled Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon

But why did it take so long? And why are so many mansions haunted in Evershade valley? And what’s this about legendary Nintendo icon Shigeru Miyamoto upending the tea metaphorical table? The answers to all these questions and more are revealed in my interview with Nintendo developers (and Luigi’s Mansion 2 supervisors) Yoshihiko Ikebata and Ryuichi Nakada. We were also joined by a pair of Next Level Games developers - LM2 director Bryce Holliday and gameplay engineer Brian Davis.Read on for the full scoop on Luigi’s latest… if you dare.

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: To start, tell me about the basic idea behind Luigi’s Mansion 2.: First, to introduce myself, my name is Yoshihiko Ikebata. I work in the SPD group here at Nintendo in Japan. I’m the supervisor on Luigi’s Mansion 2.: I’m Ryuichi Nakada, and I also work in SPD here at Nintendo. Like Mr. Ikebata, I have a supervisory role on the title. Mr. Ikebata is more of the main supervisor and I was the sub-supervisor.: Luigi’s Mansion is really a game about using the vacuum, and how much fun it is to use that to suck things up. Of course one of the things you interact with are all the ghosts that inhabit the mansions within the game, which leads into the next point – the mansions themselves. They’re filled with all these traps and gimmicks. This is the playground that you explore throughout the game. That’s one of the other main features of this title.: You use the vacuum to solve the puzzles all through the mansion. You can use it in all kinds of ways to navigate and interact with the ghosts. It’s really a game about using the vacuum.: I assume Evershade Valley is somehow connected to the Mushroom Kingdom. So are all mansions in the Mushroom Kingdom haunted? There are a lot of haunted mansions in this franchise…: Just to clarify one thing there, Evershade Valley is not located in the Mushroom Kingdom. But back to your main point, yes, all the mansions here are home to lots and lots of ghosts. [laughs]: Can you tell me about how Luigi’s new adventure came about? It’s been a long time since the original GameCube game.: After the GameCube version, there were a lot of folks here at Nintendo that wanted to make a sequel. We all enjoyed the game. We thought it went over well and we thought it would be a good candidate for a follow-up. We also, during the course of developing the GameCube version, did some experiments with 3D effects. We were pretty happy with what we accomplished during those tests. We kept all that in the back of our minds, and then when we developed the 3DS handheld hardware – where, of course, one of the main features is the stereoscopic 3D – we said, “Hey, here’s this device that can do 3D the way we envisioned it in our experiments with Luigi’s Mansion. Let’s go ahead and move forward with making a new Luigi’s Mansion on this hardware.”: What role did Shigeru Miyamoto play in the development of this game? I know the first one was very near and dear to him.: He was very deeply involved with this project as well. The main development of the title took place with SPD and all the good people at Next Level Games, but we did meet with Mr. Miyamoto once every two weeks or so to show him a ROM and give him updates on the progress of the game. He was able to provide feedback based on looking at our reports and playing with our game ROMs.: For Miyamoto-san’s direct involvement with Next Level Games, he was kind of like a mentor. I believe he uses the word “shepherd.” He would often come in and steer the ship in a new direction when we were getting off course. We were able to play within the framework that he had set up, and the two gentlemen, Ikebata-san and Nakada-san, were kind of like the gatekeepers or the keepers of the rules. We would constantly be pushing the boundaries and seeing where we could get to, and then they would bring us back.: Was there any point where he just upended the tea table and made you redo something completely?: Yeah… I think officially he said there was no true tea-table-flipping on this title. [laughs] But at one point he threw out all the bosses of the game and made us start over. From our angle that was kind of a tea-table-flip. But maybe it just had bad legs and was wobbling or something. He often challenged us to not go with our first idea, or to experiment further on different things and then cherry-pick our best ideas.: Luckily, with that many tea-table issues… that was toward the beginning of the project. We had only completed one boss. We had designed the other ones, but we hadn’t implemented them yet. What he wanted for that was, he wanted bosses that could only be in Luigi’s Mansion. If you saw a boss, you’d say, “That’s a Luigi’s Mansion boss!” I think that was the right choice. It allowed us to be very creative.: It seems to have worked. They’re very, very “Luigi’s Mansion.”: Fighting a staircase is something unique.: I’ve never fought a staircase before, no.: Spoiler alert!: One other point to add, Miyamoto-san also, for the development of the gameplay… the project was very long, and he allowed our gameplay team to say, “We want to focus on this right now and get this feeling into the game.” Once we got that feeling, he said, “I want you to focus on this now.” Even though a long development is very difficult, allowing us to have that focus… You can see how we were able to bring the quality of the game up over time.: Was there anything that didn’t make the cut for the GameCube version that you were able to incorporate into the sequel?: When we were working on the GameCube version there was a lot of feeling internally that we wanted to include some multiplayer mode or multiplayer aspect. Obviously that wasn’t included in the GameCube version, but we were able to implement it here in Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon.: And the 3D. [laughs]: Along those same lines, was there anything you weren’t able to fit into this game because of time constraints, anything that could carry over into another sequel?: Now that I think about it, not really. I think we were able to pretty much include everything that we wanted to.: Everything we experimented with that was good ended up making it. All the things that were kind of…that wouldn’t fit into the product, we just stopped experimenting with them and eventually cut them from the game.: I have a notebook where I write down every little detail that I want to put in the game. Everything was scratched off in that notebook. We were lucky to be able to get all that in.: That’s a sad little notebook, full of scratches.: I’ll keep it forever… [laughs]: What would you say is the main thing that sets Luigi’s Mansion 2 apart from the original game?: Probably the biggest difference would be the fact that in the GameCube version, everything was connected, from the very beginning when you picked up the controller to start the game to when you finished. It’s one large story that you play through. With the 3DS version being on a handheld system, we wanted to make it easy to pick up and put down. We made it more of a quest-based game, just to enable that pick-up-and-play feeling. We wanted that quest-based structure instead of one huge storyline.: Further to Ikebata-san’s point, the game is set up and chunked into missions. The idea was that you’re taking a gaming break, because it’s a handheld system, and then in 15 or 20 minutes you feel the satisfaction of completing something. Whereas with the first one it was four or five hours of continuous story. It’s hard to know when to let go and take a break from that game. This is set up a bit differently.I think another point that makes it different from the original is that there’s no dual analog control. The control scheme changed. Dual analog sticks are kind of inaccessible for a lot of people. They’re tricky to handle, and there isn’t a second stick on the 3DS. We had to take the core mechanics… it was a fishing-style game in the first one. In this game it’s still fishing, but the paradigm is more like tug-of-war. You’re pulling back on the ghost as he’s pulling on you. When you start losing, you tend to ski around the environment or yank him back towards you and do more damage. That’s a big difference. The controls are deeper, strategically deeper, because there’s this A-pull mechanic, but they’re probably easier to pick up and play, because there’s only the one analog stick.: Did you ever toy with the Circle Pad Pro?: We always wanted it to work with a single circle pad. When we moved to a second analog stick, because we’d actually changed that gameplay mechanic paradigm to the tug-of-war, it just wouldn’t work. There was nothing to do with the second stick. By changing, at the beginning of the project, the high-level strategy around the ghost fishing, we found that when we did experiment with the Circle Pad Pro, it didn’t add anything.: I was also going to say, because of the mission structure of the game, it allowed our level designers to almost reset the levels, to set up entirely new gimmicks. Every mission you play has a lot of things for the player to find. If you’re going to go out and look for stuff, there might be something new there for you. The density of the game is a lot greater than the first game. There are also multiple mansions, which allows Luigi to be in different settings.: Yeah. There’s no backtracking through areas that you’ve already defeated like there was in the first game. You can use the break in the missions to re-stage the entire mansion. You can believe that the ghosts were doing that while you were in the safe room with E. Gadd. It’s kind of nice – it doesn’t feel like the game’s tricking you or being unfair.: I couldn’t help but notice that Luigi uses a device that looks remarkably similar to an original DS. Does that mean the game’s been in development since the original DS, or is that just a throwback to the last generation of portables?: Well, it’s not because we were in development for that long! [laughs] Really it’s more of an E. Gadd thing. E. Gadd is as much a tinkerer as he is an inventor. He likes to repurpose other materials and find new ways to use them. We thought that the DS was a great device that E. Gadd would take and repurpose to do something else. That’s why we had that in the game this time.: That sounds like E. Gadd. I’ll buy that. So there’s a variety of different ghosts scaring Luigi this time around. Was it fun coming up with new enemies? What was that process like?: One of the first vision words that came in from Nintendo was this Japanese concept of “karakuri,” which is these automaton dolls from the 18th century that move as if they were alive. They’re actually made out of wood and mechanical parts. Karakuri, roughly translated, means “surprise and delight.” So Nintendo and Miyamoto-san wanted us to build up the anticipation for the player to lead them into a gag, whether it was something funny or something scary. You constantly have this surprise and delight as you move around the mansions.The existing set of characters that are in the game are probably a subset of a wide range of different characters that we tried out. Some didn’t make it, wound up on the chopping block. It was a blast to use the Mario characters. We do keyframe animation, so it’s a little bit more cartoony. Our animators had a blast doing things like the stretch and squash and finding new ways for the ghosts to scare Luigi. If you’ve been playing for a while, you might notice that the ghosts get scared by Luigi as well. It works both ways. They’re both kind of hapless and goofy.: I don’t think he’d appreciate that…: [laughs] He’s a reluctant hero at his core, I think. But it was a lot of fun playing with that idea.: For me, the most fun I had working with a character was the Toad character. I’m not sure you’ve played with that character yet, but there are missions where you have to find Toad, free him, and escort him out of the mansion. There’s a connection between you and Toad. The ghosts can scare him, which causes a disconnect between the two of you, and he doesn’t enjoy that. He’s very scared. As a player, you want that connection between you two. For me, when I was developing that, it reminded me of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. In the very first mission, you go and find the princess and try to lead her out of the castle. I tried to keep that in mind, to kind of honor the original designers of that game and have a little anecdote in there.: So Toad is Zelda.: [laughs] Not officially.: Inspired by…: Yeah. It was something I was thinking of while I was working on that mission.: You did an exceptional job of hiding some of the collectibles in the game. It’s kind of evil sometimes, actually. Were there any hidden items or particularly hard puzzles that made you think you should maybe make it not quite so evil?: Of course we went through a lot of balancing with these things. There’s always some discussion like, “Maybe this one is a little tough. Maybe we should make this easier.”But at the end of the day, clearing a game 100 percent should never be something that’s too easy. We settled on a level that’s right for this game.: “Evil” is an interesting choice of words. [laughs] One of the directions that we agreed to early on was this concept of Miyamoto-san’s “going left.” You might remember that all sidescrollers in the beginning traveled to the right. You could never come back until… I believe it was Mario 3. Or was it Mario 2? Anyway, his high-level sensei direction is, “Reward the player who goes left, and the further left you go, the bigger the rewards.”Sometimes there are these little nuances in the world that are really hard – or evil – to acquire, but when you get them and there’s a Boo or a gem there and it finally completes your collection, you’re going to have that memory imprinted a little bit stronger. That was kind of the core philosophy behind it. Even when I played the final version, I had to go to the strategy guide for the last few gems in the game. Even as the director! [laughs]: Everyone’s going to know now.: I know, right? The QA guys had to help me out with the last few things. I was having a tough time getting 100 percent.: That’s a good sign.: There’s one place in the game that Ikebata-san and I worked on a lot, which is the staircase. It’s a giant staircase. We wanted to make sure it was challenging, but not…evil. [laughs] We wanted to make sure that it was challenging enough that when you got to the top, you really felt like, “Holy cow, I beat this!” You get that sigh of relief. That was very important, feeling that emotion when you reach the top. There’s a fine edge to balance on there.: So you think that part’s evil, you’re saying?: No, not quite.: It’s as if you climbed the stairs yourself in reality. You get that satisfaction when you get to the top. “Whew! It’s done.”: So we do keep that in mind, to create certain emotions for the players.: Is there anything special, like Easter eggs or cool references, that players should be on the lookout for?: In each of the mansions, there are either multiple special rooms, or there’s a special room in each mansion that’s hard to discover.: There’s so much stuff in the game that I haven’t even found yet. So I don’t know.: I don’t want to give away too much, because those who explore more will get more, but if you just let Luigi stand there for a little bit, he’ll start to hum. It’s kind of a throwback to the original. He’ll actually hum the new theme as you start to walk around. It’s a cute little tender moment. You might also want to put Luigi under water sources for some interesting interactions.Also, look for every little crack in the walls, because sometimes you can spot the ghosts doing things when they don’t think Luigi is around. They tend to be a bit more…boisterous when they think Luigi isn’t watching. Actually, I think Nakada-san said he picked this picture of Luigi on the box, where Luigi’s looking around a corner, to represent the amount of peek moments we have in the game, where Luigi can find little cracks in the walls or look through windows to see the ghosts in their natural element. I believe that’s why this pose was chosen at the beginning. I think Nakada-san said that a couple of days ago.: Yeah. While we were in development we thought we would like to have a lot of instances where Luigi can peek at things in the game. When we were getting ready to work on the package, I went to the folks putting together the artwork and said, “Hey, why not something that hints at that, or represents that?” So yeah, we did have that conversation.: Whose idea was it to have Luigi go, “Hellooo!” every time you press on the D-pad? They deserve a raise.: Basically, we wanted to use the control pad as a communication feature for the multiplayer mode. When you press on the control pad while you’re playing multiplayer, Luigi would say something to chat with the other players. We thought that was a neat idea – we liked the image of it – so we said, “Let’s just include that in the single-player game as well.”: My final question is the most important one. Why is Luigi scared all the time, and is he green because he’s envious of Mario?: You know, Luigi’s basic personality is that he’s a bit of a coward. If you put Luigi in a mansion full of ghosts and you scare him, he’s going to do some pretty fun things and have some pretty funny reactions. We think that’s an easy thing for us to focus on, displaying that portion of his personality. Given the setting, we think it’s pretty appropriate for him to be scared. As far as being green with envy, that’s not a saying that exists in Japanese – there’s no equivalent idea. Green and envy don’t have a relationship, so that’s not the reason behind his color choice. So why is Luigi green? To be honest… I don’t know.: A happy coincidence?

Audrey Drake is a Nintendo Editor at IGN. She is also a lifelong gamer, a frequent banisher of evil and a wielder of various legendary blades. You can keep track of her wild adventures by following Aminka on IGN, @GameOnAminka on Twitter, oron Tumblr. Game on!