Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy (2013)

Every time I pick up this game, I always think of how cute the illustrations are and how cute the characters can be. Rook and Bishop reminded me of Bryan Brown and Sam Neil from the TV programme, Old School.

The music was fantastic. Did I hear a guitar in the theme tune? Or was it a similar instrument? The puzzles seem more cute than the other games, and they were fun to solve.

I was laughing the whole time while I was investigating the residents of Phong Gi. It must be a play on words with fungi, because they all had mushroom haircuts.

The story really did Emmy Altava dirty. And it's always my favourite characters, isn't it? They have to use my favourite characters to make some big plot line (which didn't add up to the suspense, by the way), just so they could say Descole isn't really that bad, because he saved Luke's life. Blah, blah, blah.

I think it's funny how every single villain in the series seem to know Layton, but somehow Layton doesn't know them until their backstory is revealed. Don Paulo, the guy who went to the same university as Layton and Claire, and Don got envious of Layton's love for her. Clive Dove, the boy whose parents died in an explosion, Layton saved his life and Layton didn't remember him until after Clive told him he saved his life twice in an explosion. Descole, who turned out to be his long-lost brother Hershel Bronev. Leon Bronev, who turned out to be his biological father.

Layton's adoptive parents were so selfish. When you adopt a child, you are supposed to be doing it from the bottom of your heart. You don't choose the child's name. You're not supposed to just go, "Oh I don't really care if the younger one's name is, I just want the one named Hershel because Hershel sounds better than Theodore." I got very upset, they should have thought about the child's safety, not the name of the child!

It was so obvious that Descole was Professor Sycamore. The previous two games (and the animated film), Raymond was Descole's sidekick. So I knew at the very start Descole had to have been Professor Sycamore. Emmy, Layton and Luke didn't expect it because only the player saw him, and it would've been impossible to know Raymond was helping Descole escape, thanks to all the smoke.

I wanted to enjoy this game as much as the previous ones, but the story just felt so jumbled. It felt like they pull all the ideas they wanted to do in previous games and just threw it all together in this one game; there was barely any lead for some of the reveals towards the end, so it just seemed off-putting.

Story

This is the final game of both the prequel series of Professor Layton (which contains Last Specter and Miracle Mask) as well as the whole Layton series. This game starts with a contact from Professor Sycamore asking for Layton help as he found a living mummy. The group (Layton, Emmy, and Luke) travel with Sycamore and his assistant Raymond by airship, the Bostonius. They find themselves traveling all over the world to many different places as well fighting against the evil organization, Targent.

For the most part, it was enjoyable until the last two chapters where everything went off-kilter. I wasn't super fond of having to travel to so many different places, but the airship was a really cool concept and Professor Sycamore presented his own characteristics to complement the others. Some of the places could have been developed more into a separate game, like San Grio and Froenborg, as they expressed a lot of potential with the character interactions.

Puzzles

They are starting to get more repetitive, but I think anyone who has played all the Layton games notice this as well. Some of the puzzles are more mathematical, which might annoy some individuals and some will repeat itself (e.g., Reggie's Slidy Ride 1, 2, and 3) often. However, there are some really clever ones as always.

Characters

It's hard to talk about this without spoilers, but essentially, this game wraps up the prequel set of the Layton series and answers many questions about characters that were asked in games past. For example, one character I was fond of, Inspector Grosky, was a character who has great significance in the beginning of the sequel series, and then became quite minor in this game. Some characters get totally brushed off, which reminds me of poor Flora in the first three games.

Overall

If you played the first five games, or even the 4th and 5th game, then you will want to play this to get the full story. If you're entering the Professor Layton series for the first time, this is not the first game you want to pick up (really, it should be the last one you play)- there are a lot details that will be quite confusing if you haven't explored any of the other games. Furthermore, if you really want to start fresh and don't want to slog through 6 or 3 games, you can just wait for the Lady Layton game coming out later this year with all new characters, story, and puzzles.