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syntheticgerbil

Professor Layton Series

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I'm just going to go ahead and start a thread for all Layton games, since like Toblix, I'm pretty sick of commenting on games in the "recently completed" thread. However, I don't like making a thread for every old game I finish, since I'm afraid I'll clutter up the forum, just like all these damn Swapper threads. I don't often have a lot to say either. But I figure Layton is popular enough with most here.

 

So about The Swapper...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or I really just wanted to talk about Unwound Future, as I finished it last week. The design and pacing was pretty uneven compared to Diabolical Box, but I think this may be one of my favorite stories in a video game. Somewhere in the top 10 or 20 at least. This one had me guessing all along and while the far fetched part of this game, which is

fake underground future London

, kind of sucks compared to the two I've played so far, it's maybe a bit more believable than Curious Village's far fetched part. Maybe Diabolical Box had a tighter mystery, but the emotion evoked in this Layton game was just unexpected. I guess because the whole series is built around how calm and collected Layton is, I actually teared up at the end when

Layton cried over Claire having to return to her time to die.

 

The mysteries had me guessing the whole time as well, but I suppose that's the usual. I'm really glad this series takes notes and reexplains things when certain parts of the mystery are solved because it took me months to chip away at this thing and I would sometimes forget plot details.

 

But as I said before, the design and pacing were the weakest here. Not much to say about it, typical Layton, but I didn't find the extra minigames as exciting as before and the puzzles were almost nonexistant for the first half of the game. I knew while this was happening that it meant that they would just throw a ridiculous amount of puzzles at me near the end in a large open area. I hope they don't do this in future games.

 

Er... also I watched the movie after that, The Eternal Diva, which I've been waiting to watch for a few years, since I want to watch the story unfold in sequence. It looked nice and animated well in some parts, but the story was crap. I guess Layton just doesn't convert well to movie form as the puzzles they inserted into the film were just strange and had solutions that were either obvious or came out of nowhere. Layton builds a flying machine with a chainsaw and some oars? Huh? The movie also seemed to just rush every mystery and character introduction to the point and I didn't feel like I was involved the way the games keep you going with lots of dialogue and events. I guess there's something to be said of throwing a bunch of game in between a linear story.

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I also liked The Unwound Future (De Verloren Toekomst in Dutch) best. The story and characters were just a lot more engaging than in earlier games. I liked the sense of urgency at the end and the time travel escapades. Future Luke was also just so much fun. A worthy 'end' to the first trilogy.

 

As for The Eternal Diva, it was a while ago that I saw it. I believe I had fun while watching, but the overall experience wasn't what I want out of Layton.

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Has anyone tried the iOS Layton Brothers game? I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't a proper Layton game, but it's nice and polished and there's at least nothing like it on iOS. I'm not too far but so far it has areal tendency to play itself almost. Just let me be a detective, damn it. Let me do my detecting and stop doing cutscenes to help me along..

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Has anyone tried the iOS Layton Brothers game? I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't a proper Layton game, but it's nice and polished and there's at least nothing like it on iOS. I'm not too far but so far it has areal tendency to play itself almost. Just let me be a detective, damn it. Let me do my detecting and stop doing cutscenes to help me along..

 

I beat it. It's very easy/handholding through the first 6-7 cases. The last 2-3 I liked because it gets a bit more complicated.

I thought it was ultimately worth the $6 (I think? maybe $5? don't remember) for the extra cases.

 

edit: also I picked up Miracle Mask but haven't dug too deep into it. Liking it so far though.

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I've only played Unwound Future and, more recently, Miracle Mask. In both cases I feel like I missed out on a lot of plot stuff from having not played the previous games, but for the most part really enjoyed the games themselves. I even 100%ed Miracle Mask, plus the daily puzzles keep me going back to it a lot more than expected.

 

I love that the framing device for these games is just "every person on Earth just really fucking loves puzzles."

 

 

Also I absolutely refuse to do sliding tile puzzles, so I immediately resort to a guide in those cases.

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I would like if the Ace Attorney Vs Professor Layton crossover would be released outside of Japan, but it is not currently looking like it's going to happen.
 

 

 

Has anyone tried the iOS Layton Brothers game? I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't a proper Layton game, but it's nice and polished and there's at least nothing like it on iOS. I'm not too far but so far it has areal tendency to play itself almost. Just let me be a detective, damn it. Let me do my detecting and stop doing cutscenes to help me along..


The GB Quicklook made it look super like one of the Ace Attorney games, but even more guided. (If it's even possible to be more guided than a visual novel, but the Ace Attorney games still have some good Eureka! moments.)

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I'd be very upset is AAvsPL didn't arrive here. No idea why not, they're two recognizable brands, and putting it at least on the eShop would mitigate the largest risk of the thing while tapping into a huge fanbase.

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Funny that this thread should pop up - I just now finally started the first Professor Layton and the Curious Village.  It's better than I thought it would be, but some of the puzzles drive me nuts.  Specifically, any time a puzzle relies on you finding some specific ambiguity in the instructions and exploiting it, while still discounting answers that exploit some OTHER ambiguity in the instructions.  This kind of "brain-teaser" has always struck me as unfair.  Essentially, it comes down to "I have explained this problem to you poorly, now see through my poor explanation and find a solution to the actual problem rather than the one I described."

 

/rant

 

That aside, I have mixed feelings about so starkly separating the puzzles from the plot.  It makes both pieces feel like placeholder until the next section.  When I'm reading dialogue, I'm thinking "Ok, just shut up and give me a puzzle already," but when I'm completing puzzles, I'm thinking "Ugh, I'll just guess at this until I get the right answer to move the plot along."  This sounds really negative, but this dynamic has the effect of keeping my short-attention-span brain occupied.  I've plowed through what seems like a solid portion of the game already.  We'll see if I still feel positively about it after I finish it.  (Is it just me, or is the plot mostly adorable nonsense?)

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Later games do a MUCH better job of integrating the puzzles - at least thematically - with the story. It's funny, because I remember specifically the puzzles of the first game as the freshest and most ingenious. There were a lot more smart gotcha's and tricks there, whereas later entries were more straightforward.

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I find it difficult to play Layton games because I assume they're trying to marry a Sherlock Holmes sort of character to a puzzle-filled story, and I want that. But unfortunately what almost always ends up happening instead is that the plot says "no, no, it's impossible to converse with the dead, in reality it's someone using extremely focused sound waves that are in practice also impossible" and treats that as a very clever reveal instead of a cheap trick. (This probably doesn't need clarifying, but that wasn't a spoiler.)

 

I am looking forward to PLvsAA because the writer of Ace Attorney is apparently handling the plot, and he is significantly better at writing mystery plots than whoever writes the Layton games. Many of them are equally improbable, but they're fair to the audience. In part this is because they had to clue them well enough that the players could work out the mystery, and at the appropriate time, but Ghost Trick, by the same writer, still kept it together without that handicap. So PLvsAA sounds like the kind of thing I've been wanting from the Layton series since it began.

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Unwound Future is the only Layton game I've played, and I absolutely loved it.

Part of it might have been my desire to find a game that used my brain more than my reflexes at the time (which that game did, absolutely) but I just could not put the game down. I remember doing programming for a game and having my DS by my side, closed and on standby, ready to work on the next puzzle whenever I had a spare moment.

I never hit a puzzle that I felt was unfairly difficult, (although, like Tegan, I despise sliding tile puzzles...) and I was always able to progress. And I enjoyed every minute of it.

The story was... weird.

I thought the underground future London was a weird idea that I kind of didn't like. ...and the fact that apparently there were people living there to make it convincing made the fact that portions of it got blown up around the end pretty disturbing. But I did enjoy the emotional impact of Claire's leaving.

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