[Warning – this
post was originally just about the one game, but now that it’s easily doubling
the length of any other post so far, I feel I should mention that at least
seven games get discussed, and all of them spoiled. And all of them are
Professor Layton games.]
I love things
that make me feel smarter – I love puzzles, brainteasers, riddles, trivia
competitions, Trivial Pursuit, quiz shows (the British ones, too, because
they’re clearly the smartest) – so along with Puzzle Agent, Puzzle Agent 2,
an awesome DOS one from my childhood called Blockman,
and just about every point-and-click game in existence, it was inevitable that
I’d love anything Professor Layton. I’ve also read every Poirot book, so
clearly Phoenix Wright would be my thing, too.
Well … sort of.
The Layton games hardly ever gave me any trouble, but goddamnit, for a game
that the Internet tells me is aged “10 and up” for complexity, Phoenix Wright
kicked my arse. I got stuck on the third trial of the first game, then had to
return it to my friend from whom I’d borrowed it because I was taking too long.
She told me I’d need a walkthrough, and I didn’t believe her, so I staunchly
refused to use one. On the one hand my pride is intact, but on the other, I
never cleared Edgeworth of murder, so I guess my arch-rival got lethally
injected, like, a year ago. Uh … victory?
Thankfully, Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney let
you use Layton’s hint coins to help you with Phoenix’s trials, so I only had to
consult a walkthrough once to find out when to present evidence – and that was
only because I’d accidentally clicked the wrong thing, and then didn’t know if
I’d mis-clicked or whether my real answer was just bad. I can’t believe how
smart Layton makes me feel, while at the same time Phoenix makes me feel like I
drank ferric chloride because I thought the iron boost would help my brain
think gooder.
The game: Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney
Why I didn’t finish it earlier: Like Stick of Truth, I
broke the rules and bought it last week. I knew it would only take a couple of
days. But if something were going to stop me from finishing it, it would’ve
been the ending. OH MY GOD WHAT GAME NEEDS AN EXPLANATION THAT LONG?
Comments: I haven’t really
played enough Phoenix Wright to know how well this one performed in comparison
to the previous games, so I’ll be mainly talking about the Layton side. That
said, both lots of characters and playing styles seemed very true to the
originals, so good on them for not totally sacrificing either.
Now, I won’t go
out of my way to say that the Layton games are the best. I love them, but let’s
just say if we were in a relationship, they’d be calling the police on me for
abuse every night as I took them to bed, professed my love, and then threw them
against the wall while ignoring their cries for mercy. I absolutely adore the
first and third games, don’t mind the second and fifth games, kind of dislike
the fourth game, and utterly loathe the sixth game. Jesus, I didn’t realize
there were so many of them until I typed it. If you don’t know, the structure
of the Layton games is basically, the Professor and his apprentice Luke arrive
in some mysterious location (aptly named something like ‘St. Mystere’),
discover that some weird crap is going on, and spend ten to fifteen hours
solving small puzzles in order to find the solution to the overarching mystery
of the weird crap. So, I only have three criteria for these games:
1. The small
puzzles are good;
2. The big
mystery has a good, airtight solution; and
3. The ending has to make me cry.
I’m not sure how
many other people cry at games aimed at pre-teens, but I say it’s as acceptable
as crying at a slightly worse written, somehow less plausible version of Toy
Story.
I … tend to cry
at stuff.
The first one (Curious Village) had excellent puzzles
because the game was fresh. Finally, puzzle writers could exercise their
creativity and unleash all their head-scratchers into the world! The
overarching mystery had a satisfying ending that tied up all the crazy loose
ends (turns out, the secret of the curious village was that it was robots). And
I don’t remember if I actually cried, but it had dead parents and a sad orphan
girl being looked after by freaking robots. Come on, the only thing that would
make it sadder is if a seven-leaf clover and a dog with a time-travelling owner
was involved.
The second one (Pandora’s Box) still had great puzzles,
and mini games that were way cooler than the first one. Making tea for
disgruntled villagers? Yes, please! Spot-the-difference? Hell yeah! But the
overarching mystery was less cool. This strange
town was weird because the residents believed a vampire lived in a creepy, old
tower, but it turned out there was a massive gas leak and everyone who came
near it started hallucinating and … thinking they were immortal or something.
Still, the ending involved an old man who didn’t realize he was old meeting the
granddaughter he didn’t know he had, and then maybe dying on her. My memory’s a
bit fuzzy on this, possibly because I was watching it through so many tears. So
it was pretty good; I just found robots more believable than mass
hallucination.
The third one (Unwound Future) was about time travel,
which immediately made it awesome. Also, by this stage I was used to the games
revealing that whatever ‘magic’ seemed to exist was total bullshit, so I spent
the whole time going, “Okay, it’s probably not really time travel. So how the
hell do they have a future-Luke, future-Professor, and a whole goddamn
future-London? And also, if it’s not really time travel, who the fuck is this future-Luke that brought me to
the so-called future in the first place? I don’t care how smooth-talking and
Yuri Lowenthal-voiced he is; I don’t trust him!”
And … well, I
was so correct that the pride still hurts sometimes. It wasn’t the future: it
was a massive underground recreation of the city made by some rich kid with
enough money to exact revenge on people he hated. Otherwise known as, the
ultimate fantasy of everyone ever. There was also a dead girlfriend involved,
so hooray, more crying!
Then, by the fourth one (Last
Spectre), things started going off the rails a bit. For starters it was a
prequel, which rarely bodes well for anyone (I’m looking at you, Arkham Origins). Second, the puzzles
were running out of steam: they’d used up all their tricks and classics and resorted
to things like puzzles that involved counting cat silhouettes, an easier
version of a Sudoku with cat-shaped paperweights, and running a cat through a
maze. Even for Japan, this was overloaded with felines. Seriously, I haven’t
even brought up the puzzles ‘Cat Catcher’ and ‘Coax the Kitty’, nor the fact
that a cat is a somewhat-major character. But hey, when a franchise has given
you almost seven hundred puzzles, some of them are bound to be duds.
The real problem with Last
Spectre was that the big mystery – what is this spectral monster that
rampages through the city at night? – doesn’t involve robots, nor hallucinations,
nor spoiled rich kids. No; the solution to this one is that it’s actually a monster, just a slightly
different monster than everyone expected. Um, right. That gave me no pridegasm
whatsoever. Also, there’s a dying girl that people don’t like for some reason,
who’s actually not dying for some other reason, and she probably lives happily
ever after, but I didn’t care about her enough to really remember that part.
There may have been some vague anti-pollution implications at the end, too. You
think that’s going to make me cry,
game? What do you think you are, Animals
of Farthing Wood?
Jesus Christ. Just … I
can’t believe that show existed.
Sigh. Okay, I decided to give the fifth game, Miracle Mask, a chance. And it was a bloody big chance, because I
bought a 3DS specifically to play it. Looking back on it, I’m not entirely sure
why I had so much faith.
Thing is, I really liked the overall story. Not necessarily the
mystery about this amazing, magic mask (shock horror, it’s not magic, and
doesn’t really do anything at all), but the fact that it’s all about Layton’s
dead childhood friend, Randall, and the fact that his (Randall’s) butler got
rich and married his (Randall’s) college girlfriend. Only, as they find out at
the end, Randall wasn’t really dead, and he was pissed off. How good is that? I mean,
dead-guy-who’s-not-actually-dead is overdone, but who cares? By the time it was
revealed, it was pretty obvious what was going on, but just imagining all the
horrible guilt and pain all the characters must have been going through as all
the hints and signs came together … I wanted to write the goddamn movie.
Only, the game is a kids’-and-only-kids’ game, and as such doesn’t
like to go too overboard with characters experiencing emotions besides
inappropriate enthusiasm and mild bewilderment. So when Professor Layton
finally came face-to-face with the man he now knew to be his long-dead bestie,
he gave nothing more than a bemused frown and a chastising speech because
Randall had been mean to the butler.
The puzzles were adequate, although weirdly action-y. I had to run
away from spinning, slicing robots and ride horses through an obstacle course.
Normally most of the Layton gameplay is staring at the screen, so I was not
prepared for this amount of finger-moving and button-pressing. The overarching
mystery was … well, irrelevant, really. The ‘miracle mask’ was of no value to
anyone, especially me. So all this game really had was its cry value, and it
had so much potential. Like, all the
crying fuel in the world was contained in a few boxes of text, so much so that
I wanted Layton himself to burst into tears. And when he didn’t, I was upset. I
was angry that the opportunity had been wasted. I wanted more sobbing than my
last Toy Story marathon, and instead
I got all the sobbing of a Legally Blonde
marathon.
You might think that meant no sobbing at all, but you clearly
haven’t seen me watch Legally Blonde.
There were still some sniffles here and there, but more at the concept of what
the game could have been, rather than
what it was. What it was, was an affront to emotion itself.
All the bad stuff aside, this one energized me for the sixth one, Azran Legacy – the first game that I
ever watched Bill play over his shoulder just to see if he’d get as furious at
it as I did.
It got high ratings on all the review sites, so I can only assume
the reviewers had never played another Layton game, nor any game that wasn’t
designed by molluscs in vaguely-humanoid form. There was practically no big
mystery, only about three of the puzzles had any kind of difficulty, the
mini-games were awful, and most irritating of all, the characters stopped to
have a conversation or give you a tutorial on
every single screen. You move from one back alley to the next – and believe
me, in these games, you do a lot of alley-scrounging – and suddenly Layton is
teaching Luke the wonders of tapping your stylus on garbage can lids or
reminding him how feet work. Worse still, the previous installments laugh at
you if you haven’t clicked on every man, woman, child and object at least three
times, so you can’t possibly just skip over certain locations.
This just … wasn’t a Layton game. It felt so utterly different,
didn’t even care about revealing that magic was fake, and didn’t make me cry
even a little bit. Not one stupid tear.
So.
That was my last thought about all things Layton before buying Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney. I had
been burned, but I remained optimistic. The tables had turned: now the game was
my abusive partner that had somehow
managed to convince me to not only stay, but also to give it heaps of money.
And … it was all right.
Well, actually, I can say it’s all right now, but it’s the sort of
game where if I go to read reviews and they’re all overwhelmingly positive,
I’ll start to get annoyed and talk about how shit it is and how it’s insane
that people don’t see it. Kind of like Final
Fantasy, or The Dark Knight Rises.
I love the puzzles, and I love the trial mechanics, but let’s be
honest: this game had problems. Weird problems. At one point it actually
glitched out on me, not giving me the correct answer options for a puzzle. I
didn’t even know hand-held games still had
glitches, but then, I guess I haven’t been on the lookout for them since
Missingno. Luckily, like the previous Layton installment, this game pretty much
removes all possibility of actually getting a question wrong and gives you
infinite attempts without any punishment, so it wasn’t exactly a GTA-style
gamebreaker.
Another issue was the instructions in the puzzles. Normally this is
very straightforward: you get a box of text on the top screen of the DS,
telling you in about three sentences what you need to do to solve the puzzle,
and a nice little picture on the bottom screen to admire and maybe click on.
Example.
Now admittedly, that was an easy one. But compare that to this one,
in which you have to shuffle sixteen dolls of a variety of colours around a
grid of rooms:
Or maybe that doesn’t seem too bad, either? Well, there’s always the
fact that no, in this puzzle each doll does not
speak for its entire colour set, and you have to only focus on one specific
doll for the entire thing, ignoring literally all the others. If the blue doll
said, “Don’t put me next to a red one,” then that just means one blue doll has to be not next to a
red one. All the other blues and reds could deal with it. I mean, I thought that might have been an
important detail, and that by saying the exact opposite the game was kind of
lying to me, but whatever.
Some puzzles’ instructions, I just didn’t even understand. I’m not
sure what was going on, but it felt like the Japanese-to-English translators
had given in their two weeks’ notice and had just stopped giving a fuck. And
some of the puzzles introduced mechanics that were never explained, nor ever
used again – right at the end there’s one where you can scroll left and right
between multiple screens, and it took me far too long to figure that out, but
seriously! I spent the entire game not scrolling,
why would I suddenly do it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world now?
I just never had this kind of trouble with the other Layton games.
They made sense. The instructions were clear, and if they introduced any new
methods of puzzle-solving, they at least strongly hinted to you what you were
supposed to do. I may have had issues with the stories, but the technicalities
were always solid. I’m not sure what was different here. Maybe if I actually
read the credits I’d be able to pinpoint whom to blame.
Okay, enough about puzzles. Let’s get into the incredibly mediocre
story.
Basically, the main characters from both original series get sucked
into a book that takes them to a weird village. The weird village is medieval
and likes to hold witch trials and murder adolescent girls. The characters
happen to take a shine to the most witch-accused girl in the village and spend
the game trying to prove her innocence, while also getting accused and murdered
themselves.
Now obviously, with my Layton mindset, I assumed all the magic was
bullshit and there’d be some eccentric rich guy paying a lot of money to kill
the women he didn’t like. I mean, you actually see women getting locked into
boxes and thrown into flames; they wouldn’t put that kind of brutality into a
kids’ game, would they? But the thing is, I don’t know much about the Ace Attorney games, except that one of
the characters is an honest-to-god spirit medium who can channel the soul of at
least one dead person into her body. Would the writers of those games object to
having real magic in this one? So I had to be tentative about calling bullshit.
And, well, the magic at the start was pretty convincing. Statues
come to life and start attacking a guy’s car, crazy alien-looking witches fly
around London, and you actually see the characters get sucked into the book
after seeing their own pictures in the illustrations. I don’t think there’s any
non-magical way to explain away all that.
Well, this game has a very nice, neat way of getting around that
little problem. Queue drumroll…
and…
They just ignore it!
That’s right. Of course, the witches and murder in the mysterious
book-village are all fake and given an extremely tenuous explanation involving
hallucinogenic flower juice and the inability to see the colour black. But the
thing is, all that only applies to the book-village, which of course is
actually a top-secret government research facility. The entire introduction to
the game takes place in normal, everyday London, and not a goddamn word is said
about how witches were able to fly around the Tower Bridge? How the fuck did regular English statues come to
life to attack a protagonist’s car? Because that was kind of the moment I
assumed that at least a little bit of magic was real, and I feel pretty ripped
off that my right to correctly solve the game’s mystery was impeded by a total
plothole.
Googling ‘Layton Ace Attorney plot hole’ yields a number of results
that must be awkward for the designers, but quite frankly most of the
complaints are things that even I know you have to let go. Layton games are
based on the premise of ridiculously-implausible-but-kind-of-possible-I-guess,
so issues like, “Why didn’t anyone ever run into the invisible machines?!”
aren’t really on the same level as, “If the magic was a result of invisible machines
and hallucinogens, how did Layton see the magic before he’d set foot near a
machine or inhaled a whiff of hallucinogen?”
As a side note, to all those people posting on forums that the court
cases were too easy: fuck you. Seriously, fuck you all hard.
I had other gripes, of course. Mainly about how they completely
disregarded the coolest character in the game, Inquisitor Barnham, after all
the awesome work they did building him up at the start. He was the prosecutor
in almost all the court cases, hell-bent on burning the witches, yet also
sympathetic to Phoenix Wright’s insistence that truth is more important than creating
more teenaged girl ashes. But then at the last moment, one of the maybe-evil
characters has him arrested so he can’t be involved in the final trial. And
then... nothing. He just kind of sits around in jail until a cutscene right
before the credits shows him driving a boat. Um, good for him, I guess?
Also, while most Layton games involve a little bit of cry-worthy
death, in this one, death was handled kind of clumsily. While no witches were
actually burned, a shit-ton of people die. A dude commits suicide and is
subsequently strangled by a kid who didn’t know he was already dead, for one
thing. More importantly, the whole witch fiction exists in the first place
because two girls accidentally caused a fire that engulfed the entire fucking
village, killing everyone who lived there and traumatizing the aforementioned
girls for life. This is serious business. And yet, the only time a main character
is faced with death, the interaction goes a little bit like this:
DYING GUY: Daughter, I’m dying.
DAUGHTER: What? But our fraying relationship was just starting to get better!
DYING GUY: It’s incurable.
DAUGHTER: My fragile heart is breaking!
DYING GUY: But don’t worry, I was lying about it being incurable. I’m going in
for treatment tomorrow.
Yeah.
It’s easy to talk about the bad parts of a game. Usually more fun,
too. But to give credit where it’s due, there were some things I really loved. They
balanced out the Layton bits and the Phoenix bits quite nicely, crossing them
over well. I loved having Layton in court and Phoenix solving puzzles. It was
extra great when the characters were split up due to geography or being
fake-murdered, so you got to laugh a bit at Phoenix being crap at puzzles. And
when Phoenix was sucking in court, it was amazing when Layton came to the
rescue. Actually, a lot of the game was at Phoenix’s expense. I’m okay with
that.
The voice acting, even though there wasn’t much of it, was actually
really great. It’s really weird being so used to high-class English Layton and
then being given a giant dose of American in the form of Phoenix, but I liked
it. There was one particular actress, Carina Reeves, who voiced one of the main
witches, and there’s a fantastic scene of her character being interrogated in a
trial, when she just snaps. She’s laughing maniacally, repeating her defence
over and over again while taunting you that you can’t find any holes in her
story. And she just sounds excellent. It was only like three sentences, but it
was a real highlight for me.
Finally, you can’t ignore the fact that this game is a crossover,
and any crossover has to have massive amounts of gratuitous fanservice. Not,
like, in the cleavage-y sort of way, but more in the
Thor-fighting-Captain-America way. The audience wants Layton in a court room,
and that is what they get, and it is freaking amazing. Layton shouts,
“Objection!” Layton and Phoenix yell, “Take that!” simultaneously. There’s one
point where Layton hints that he’s going to go against Phoenix in court, and when I saw that, I got little happy
chills. Then it actually happened, and I started squealing with happiness. In
the game Professor Layton vs. Ace
Attorney, they actually did go versus each other! It was wonderful. Layton
wasn’t as ruthless a prosecutor as would have been hilarious, but still. What
more could you want?
I mean, y’know, apart from all that plot and puzzle stuff.
It was very good, apart from that.
Aaaand maybe the ending was a bit too ridiculously drawn out. I also
lost the last trial on the last possible decision of the game, and had to go
through all the explanation of the entire
solution twice. That was a bit of torture.
Aaaand one little thing that bothered me was that there was a baby
in the book-village research facility. Who lets a baby be born in a research
facility centered around hallucinogens? What a bunch of psychos.
Aaand the game was a little bit sexist. I get that Layton’s all
‘gentlemanly’ and ‘chivalrous’ like he is in the other games, but in this one
he turned it into overdrive and didn’t think girls were capable of doing
anything for themselves.
But somehow that moment of Layton and Phoenix shouting, “Take that!”
makes it all better.
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