Luigi's Mansion 2 is a great game, that accompanied me in my childhood. Of course, I was super happy to see a remastered version of that game for the Nintendo Switch. Interestingly, the remaster wasn't developed by Next Level Games (the original devs of LM2), but by Tantalus Media. They were also responsible for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD on Wii U and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD on Switch, so they aren't new in this field. (Source)

When I started streaming the game over on twitch, I noticed that some things were off. Some game bugs happened, but the biggest issue for me was the audio. In this blog post, I will talk about what audio issues I found, compare them to the original version of the game and even give you videos showing the issues.

Issue 1: The remaster is "stereo"

This may sound dumb. Of course it's in stereo, what should it be else? Mono? Well... it's not that easy because the stereo that the remaster produces is not really great. Audio is often only on the left, or only on the right channel.

Have a listen:

You might have noticed, that almost all sounds that play in the 3D space are affected. It sounds like Luigi only has a small part in front of himself that is being recognized as "yep, this sound is hearable from both sides". I can't imagine what they're doing, but let's hope it's not a calculation based on the pixels of the screen. (Though, why should they do that? I can't imagine any reason why this would be a good thing to do!)

If you've listened closely, you might also have heard, that sounds (like the piano playing in the beginning) sound like they're playing from behind you.

That's obviously not great, but this, combined with the constant switching of sides, resulted in me getting motion sick, as it's confusing to the brain when the sound comes from behind you, while you're playing a game on a screen that is in front of you and hearing something that is in front of the camera / player, so I had to play the whole game with mono audio. That's not great, as by doing that, I had a hard time with some challenges in the game, where you need to listen to the sound cues to find invisible ghosts.

Issue 2: E. Gadd's theme

Another issue has something to do with the music in the game, at the end of every level. Have a listen:

As you can hear, Luigi's Mansion 2 HD plays the theme that plays in Professor E. Gadd's lab twice in this sequence, even though it shouldn't play there at all. Some may argue that this could be a deliberate decision, but even if it would be one, I still don't think that's correct. The game is a remaster of a 3DS game, so it shouldn't change something like playing music while playing sound effects that were specifically made for a scene where no music would be playing.

I know, this is something that might need a discussion. I'm just saying that a remaster shouldn't change things like that - but that's my opinion.

Conclusion

At the time of writing this, there is still no update to address these issues - and I don't think there will be one any time soon. Even though I don't know specifically why these issues exist, I'd love to know, so if you have the knowhow to look into this, and got inspired from reading this blog... I'd love to read your findings! (Because blog posts are cool! 😎)