Today, we’re going over how to complete one of the most time-consuming challenges Nintendo has provided for us this year: Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD 100 percent completion.
At first glance, it might not seem like there’s a ton to do in Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD after clearing the main story. This isn’t quite the case, however. Clearing the Dark Moon quest alone isn’t enough to earn you full 100 percent completion. When you do fully complete the game, you’ll have three gold medals on your profile at all times. These show to people you play with in multiplayer ScareScraper lobbies, too. Each gold medal is unlocked with a different set of criteria, and believe us – it’s going to take you a long time if you want to get all three. It took us around 50 hours, and that’s probably on the lower end of the time you can expect to burn here.
Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD 100 percent guide
As we mentioned earlier, there are three gold medals to obtain, and that’s technically what counts for full 100% completion. That being said, there are a few things you can do that the game itself doesn’t quite count – for one, you can unlock all the ScareScraper modes. By clearing 25 floors of Hunter, Polterpup, and Rush modes, you’ll unlock Endless for each one. If you clear all three of those modes, you will unlock Surprise Mode. Clear Surprise Mode on 25 floors and you’ll unlock Endless Surprise Mode. One of the gold medals requires you to grind the ScareScraper for a huge number of hours anyway, so this small task shouldn’t take you out of your way at all.
The first 100% completion medal requires not only clearing the Dark Moon Quest, but getting 3-Star Gold Medals on each stage. This includes boss battles, too. To earn a 3-star medal on a stage, you need to clear it as fast as possible while taking absolutely minimal damage and collecting as many ghosts and as much treasure as you can. Generally, we found that treasure is most important here, and that you can still get a 3 star medal if you took 20 or 30 damage throughout the whole level. Do note that if you heal back your health and take more damage, that counts against you – you want to avoid taking damage entirely, if at all possible. With most of the standard levels, you will just want to suck up ghosts with the highest Poltergust level you can – at level 3, ghosts you capture will drop gold bars, which goes a long way in increasing your treasure count. Do that while searching for hidden money and avoiding damage, and you generally should be all set.
Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD 100 percent completion gets difficult when you move on to boss battles, though. In many cases, boss battles don’t have any treasure at all. This means avoiding damage becomes even more important. One of the later missions in the game, Ambush Maneuver, has you fighting against a Big Boo in a train area. Indeed, this mission has no treasure, and the only way you can get a 3-Star Medal on it is by taking no damage whatsoever and shooting all of the individuals Boos into the train carts within around 4 minutes. King Boo’s final boss battle also requires you to avoid damage wherever possible, though there is more leeway here since the chase sections are filled with gold.
The second completion medal requires completing the Vault, which entails multiple smaller tasks. For one, you’ll need all the collectible Gems and Boos, but we have you covered there with our guides! You’ll also need to collect enough Gold to obtain all of the Poltergust and equipment upgrades, which unlock automatically as you earn money. None of these are that bad, right? Well, this is where Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD 100 percent gets real: you have to catch at least one of every single ScareScraper ghost. This is the task that turns 100% completing this game into a 50-hour nightmare. It’s such a gargantuan task, in fact, that we’ve given it its own section.
How to get ScareScraper Ghosts
Basically, there are 45 unique ghosts exclusive to the ScareScraper that you cannot catch anywhere else. Every 5 floors, you’ll fight a boss – and it’ll be one of these 45 ghosts chosen at random. It’s important to note that the final floor’s boss will always be an Ancient Poltergeist, so if you only ever do 5 floor runs, you will never even encounter any of the 45 exclusive ghosts. Before we talk about how to farm them in more detail, do be warned – Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD 100 percent becomes quite frustrating and time-consuming when you add these ghosts to the mix. Unless you’re absolutely sure you want to fully complete the game, we’d recommend maybe just playing ScareScraper for fun instead of for completion.
At the time of writing, the online ScareScraper servers are decently active. One good way to stock up on ScareScraper ghosts is to open an online lobby in Hunter mode with 25 floors. This is because Hunter mode is the easiest one to understand; all you have to do is catch ghosts. Rush is technically faster, but often times a single player in the lobby won’t realize the objective and will wander around, elapsing the timer and losing the run for the whole team. With Hunter and 25 floors, you will be able to encounter 4 exclusive ghost battles. Do note that it doesn’t matter which player sucks up a ScareScraper ghost; all four players will receive it for their vault if someone defeats it.
Unfortunately, Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD must have spotty online servers or something. In our experience, we’d be playing online with random Luigis and all three of them would disconnect all at once, leaving us to finish the ScareScraper alone. While that’s certainly possible on Normal difficulty, it becomes difficult to do that on the later floors and especially against the boss ghosts you’re looking for since they always call for backup. Eventually, we got to a point where we would just quit the lobby as soon as the others disconnected to try again. If you have a group of three friends you can play with, you’re golden – but that may be rather unlikely. Another good strategy for ghost farming is to do solo 25 floor Rush modes and run to the exit as fast as you can while collecting time clocks. Even this isn’t a guarantee though, because Gobbers will often spontaneously spawn in and block the door you want to go through. Since they have 100 HP and you have 30 seconds to find the exit, this often ends the run. Still, on Normal difficulty you can often run right to the exit, get to the first boss floor on 5F, and quit the match and try again if the ghost is a repeat.
Where Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD 100 percent really becomes a struggle, however, is when you obtain about half of the ghosts. Even if you play ScareScraper on your own, it does not even come close to guaranteeing a new ghost spawn – you will get many, many repeats. There is no way to guarantee or even really increase your odds of getting a new ghost, which turns this into an absolutely brutal grind. If you obtain every ghost except for the last one, you will have to continue farming away at ScareScraper until you hit that 1 in 45 chance. That being said, if a Greenie-type boss appears on floor 5 and you already have all the Greenie-based bosses, no more of them will appear for the rest of the run. As one last tip, Endless mode doesn’t help either because the game always picks one of the yellow-category ghosts (of which there are only 5) after you clear the 25th floor. That means we recommend 25 floors and 25 floors only.
The last gold medal is easy, by the way: beat King Boo at least once, regardless of how well you perform on the level. That brings you to three. 3-Star ranking every mission is challenging, but not too bad. Collecting every ScareScraper ghost, on the other hand, is challenging and very bad. Make sure you really want to achieve Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD 100% completion before you go for it – it’s brutal! In the meantime, we do have plenty of guides available for the collectibles, and you can check those out via this link. Will you go for full completion, or will you stick to a normal game playthrough? Feel free to let us know in the comments below.
Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD is available now for Switch. Check out the official site here.
