My favorite video game of all time. I make sure to play it at some time every October, assuming I make it a full year before feeling compelled to play it again. I dunno what it is, no matter how many times I play it, I just never get tired of it. I consider it my age meter, the day it stops being fun is the day I'm officially old. The only negative I really have to say about it isn't even really its fault, and that's that my love of it often feels stifled by the fact that there's just so little of it. It's a short game, which is what makes it so replayable in the first place, but there's really only one of it. The official sequel isn't a bad game, but I wouldn't count it as a sequel. Yeah the story picks up where the last one left off, yeah it's got a 2 in the title, but it doesn't really expand on the previous game's mechanics, it swaps them all out with a whole new set of mechanics, making it more of a reimagining than a sequel. And 3 is even more not a bad game than 2 is, it's a downright fantastic game, but it only brings back and expands upon mechanics from 2, not 1, so it's a sequel to 2, which isn't really a sequel to 1, meaning to this day 1 still doesn't have what I'd consider a true sequel. And I don't feel like I'm asking for much here, I kinda just want the first game again with a new mansion, like it's not really a sequel I want as much as a DLC campaign.

Or at least that's what I thought I wanted until I had to consider that maybe what I really want is just to play it for the first time all over again, to feel again the very specific way it made me feel when I was a kid. And that's not very fair to hold it against the newer games that they didn't do that. How were they supposed to leave the same impression on me when I was no longer as impressionable? Though I also don't think that means nothing will ever make me feel that way again. For a while I thought it did, and I would just have to live with it, but I also thought the same about Kingdom Hearts until Persona 5 of all games pulled it off. I don't know how, because those two games have basically nothing in common, at no point when I was playing it did I think "this reminds me of Kingdom Hearts," until the credits started to roll, and although it didn't look or sound like Kingdom Hearts, it FELT like Kingdom Hearts. I'd love to play a game of "YouTube Reviewer:tm:" and explain scientifically with facts:tm: and logic:tm: why that would be, but I don't think it can be done. Video games are art, and contrary to what a lot of wannabe art critics believe, art is meant to be consumed with the heart, not the brain, not that the brain is unwelcome, but it needs a heart to chaperone it. So I like to be optimistic that someday that specific heartstring Luigi's Mansion tugged at over twenty years ago could get pulled again, if not by the inevitable Luigi's Mansion 4, then by something I wouldn't even expect to begin with