Adventure Gamers - Forums

The first Layton game published was amazing. It even had a reason for people to out of the blue, ask you to solve a puzzle.

Later games did not interest me nearly as much - the stories just didn’t hold up as well.

I say - to all that play adventure games on the Nintendo Handhelds, get “Prof Layton and the Curious Village” it deserves all the awards and high sales it got.

However, if you have never played a Layton game - this one might make a good starting point.

I played it when it was first released in Japan earlier this year and thought it was an okay game. Not as glorious an end to the current trilogy as The Unwound Future was for the first, but at least the little bits and pieces of plot are tied up nicely.

I liked the variety of puzzles better than Miracle Mask (which was the worst of the current trilogy, IMHO), but the middle part of the game is hit-or-miss. It’s a non-lineair chase-the-MacGuffins section, which gives you several small-scale side stories, but I thought the focus of the main story got lost because of that. If you have already played the previous two, I’d definitely recommend it, but you shouldn’t expect more than another Layton (though it does have a story with a larger scale than usual).

Speak of the devil again, I bought a 2DS earlier today as a backup device and saw Azran Legacy on the shelf. I’ve picked it up and look forward to playing it. I did enjoy the gameplay changes this series made moving onto the 3DS.

Kurufinwe - 11 November 2013 08:11 AM

The previous one felt very tired design-wise, and the story left a bad taste in my mouth, so I think I’ll just give this one a pass and wait a few months for Shu Takumi’s Layton vs. Ace Attorney.

Layton VS Ace Attorney was an excellent Ace Attorney I think, but a very boring Layton game. There were very few puzzle patterns and it offered nothing new compared to the normal series (in fact, it offered less), while the trial parts had all kinds of new mechanics. As an Ace Attorney game, the crossover offers much more new things than AA5 IMHO (which was to be expected from Takumi, I guess).

Will get this AFTER I’ve finished Ace Attorney 5 (which I’ll probably only get in a few months - I simply don’t have the time at the moment).
I’m sure this Layton game will simply be “more of the same”, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, after 5 near-identical games, that’s not necessarily a particularly good thing either…