It’s about fricken’ time, isn’t it?
Satoru Iwata, in his Nintendo Direct presentation today, declared 2013 to be “The Year of Luigi” as the company is giving the man in the green hat some much needed recognition. They’ve got a few good reasons to back it up, including a list of games that he’ll be starring and co-starring in this year:
- Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is the highly-anticipated follow up to the GameCube launch title Luigi’s Mansion, first released in 2001. We’re going to have a big preview of the game within the next week, so make sure you stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook to find out when!
- Mario & Luigi: Dream Team is another entry in the Mario & Luigi series that brings awesome role-playing elements and strategy to the classic franchise. The game’s combat system reminds us of Paper Mario a bit, but this one is all about Luigi’s dreams. As he sleeps, Mario enters his dreams to take control, and you have to interact with Luigi on the 3DS touchscreen to make him move and sneeze to affect the levels in the game. It’s pretty awesome (if not a bit disgusting) stuff and we’re looking forward to getting our hands on it!
- New Super Luigi U was probably the biggest surprise of the presentation because it promises downloadable content on such a large scale that it rivals a full retail title. New Super Luigi U eschews the “Bros.” moniker because this is all about Luigi as he navigates the same world as the original game but in entirely new levels spanning the entire game. This is really amazing stuff, and the levels we’ve seen already seem to be truly unique content above and beyond the original levels included in the game.
- Mario Golf: World Tour is exactly what it sounds like: a new entry in the Mario Golf franchise. That’s not a bad thing at all, as the games have a tendency for being quite good, and the developer, Camelot, has a lot of experience with the series, and also recently developed Mario Tennis Open, which we took a look at last year.
Luigi will be making an appearance in quite a few titles this year, and probably more than are mentioned above. We wouldn’t be surprised to see him make at least a small cameo in Mario & Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move and he’ll certainly be a playable character in the next iteration of the Super Smash Bros. franchise, though we don’t know if we’ll end up playing that this year.
Nintendo is doing good to show that Mario isn’t necessarily their favourite child, but we still think Luigi should get more love than he’s been getting. Perhaps a Paper Luigi series or Super Luigi World? Games like that would go further to extend the already great lineup of Nintendo core titles than another sports franchise, we think, but maybe big-N knows something we don’t!
Forget the Year of the Snake. This is The Year of Luigi!