Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon team “always wanted it to work with a single circle pad”, Toad’s Zelda connection
The original Luigi’s Mansion made use of dual analog controls. Its sequel, Dark Moon, does not.
While the development team did experiment with Circle Pad Pro implementation for Dark Moon, according to director Bryce Holliday, “it didn’t add anything.”
In an interview with IGN, he said:
“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.”
Later in the interview, gameplay engineer Brian Davis spoke about how Toad’s involvement in Dark Moon is somewhat comparable to Link to the Past’s first mission in which players escort Zelda out of the castle:
Davis: 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.
IGN: So Toad is Zelda.
Davis: [laughs] Not officially.
Holliday: Inspired by…
Davis: Yeah. It was something I was thinking of while I was working on that mission.
