Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy
Jul. 4th, 2015 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe ancient Azran civilization left traces of their amazing technology throughout the world. Professor Layton and his many assistants have encountered fragments of it before, but are their puzzle-solving skills up to unraveling the truth of the Azran Legacy?
Built on the same engine as the previous game (Miracle Mask), which in turn was only a slight deviation from the four games before it. You know what you’re getting at this point from the series.
They dropped the puzzles that required tilting the 3DS, and nothing really uses the 3D much. Most of the puzzles were visual in nature, actually—very few brainteasers, and not as many number puzzles as in previous titles.
I’m not sure how I feel about the new minigames, but I don’t think I was wild about them: The “dress-up” game seems to follow in the vein of the tea game from Diabolical Box, which involved a lot of guessing combinations from unhelpful clues, and requires that you finish every other puzzle to find the pieces for it. Bloom Burst and Nutty Roller are…okay, I guess? I didn’t actually finish any of them. (And I did do 148 of the puzzles, so obviously the game was overall worth my time.)
Maybe my brain wasn’t quite in the right place for it—sleep has been rough and I’ve been running on empty for a while—but I found the early puzzles more difficult than the last few games. They remain pretty good about making “required” puzzles the ones you can brute-force or guess at. (And the last half-dozen plot-required puzzles are some of the easiest in that regard.) I did find that the hints for the puzzles that irritated me (mostly the block-sliding variants) mostly spelled out the solutions.
A number of the puzzles are a pain to find: You need to read the World Times articles unlock some of them, but nothing actually indicates this. There are also that show up in odd places at strange times that I ended up needing to use an FAQ to actually find. Nothing is truly missable, of course
SPOILERS AHEAD
The plot is poorly paced: You’re stuck in a straight-line path for three chapters, then have five sidequest areas (with tons of hidden puzzles) that take up half the game, then you’re back on the railroad. They crammed an irritating amount of revelation into the last half-hour: Emmy has been a spy for Targent the whole time, Professor Sycamore is really Descole, who is really Hershel Bronev, Leon’s son and Layton’s long-lost older brother. Because Leon Bronev, head of Targent, is the biological father who abandoned his sons, and Theodore Bronev was renamed “Hershel Layton” when he was adopted. Oh, and the Azran Legacy was killer robots. Like you do.
And following that: I was prescient in my last review: “…are we going to see the mysterious tragedy that haunted Layton from early childhood, too?”
Overall: It’s a perfectly worthy addition to the series, but I think the series is getting a little long in the tooth. Fewer puzzles really stand out, and the plot twists are getting past “clever detective work ending” and into “absurd revelations that you’d never be able to see coming”. I think they need some new gimmicks if they plan to continue the series.
Built on the same engine as the previous game (Miracle Mask), which in turn was only a slight deviation from the four games before it. You know what you’re getting at this point from the series.
They dropped the puzzles that required tilting the 3DS, and nothing really uses the 3D much. Most of the puzzles were visual in nature, actually—very few brainteasers, and not as many number puzzles as in previous titles.
I’m not sure how I feel about the new minigames, but I don’t think I was wild about them: The “dress-up” game seems to follow in the vein of the tea game from Diabolical Box, which involved a lot of guessing combinations from unhelpful clues, and requires that you finish every other puzzle to find the pieces for it. Bloom Burst and Nutty Roller are…okay, I guess? I didn’t actually finish any of them. (And I did do 148 of the puzzles, so obviously the game was overall worth my time.)
Maybe my brain wasn’t quite in the right place for it—sleep has been rough and I’ve been running on empty for a while—but I found the early puzzles more difficult than the last few games. They remain pretty good about making “required” puzzles the ones you can brute-force or guess at. (And the last half-dozen plot-required puzzles are some of the easiest in that regard.) I did find that the hints for the puzzles that irritated me (mostly the block-sliding variants) mostly spelled out the solutions.
A number of the puzzles are a pain to find: You need to read the World Times articles unlock some of them, but nothing actually indicates this. There are also that show up in odd places at strange times that I ended up needing to use an FAQ to actually find. Nothing is truly missable, of course
SPOILERS AHEAD
The plot is poorly paced: You’re stuck in a straight-line path for three chapters, then have five sidequest areas (with tons of hidden puzzles) that take up half the game, then you’re back on the railroad. They crammed an irritating amount of revelation into the last half-hour: Emmy has been a spy for Targent the whole time, Professor Sycamore is really Descole, who is really Hershel Bronev, Leon’s son and Layton’s long-lost older brother. Because Leon Bronev, head of Targent, is the biological father who abandoned his sons, and Theodore Bronev was renamed “Hershel Layton” when he was adopted. Oh, and the Azran Legacy was killer robots. Like you do.
And following that: I was prescient in my last review: “…are we going to see the mysterious tragedy that haunted Layton from early childhood, too?”
Overall: It’s a perfectly worthy addition to the series, but I think the series is getting a little long in the tooth. Fewer puzzles really stand out, and the plot twists are getting past “clever detective work ending” and into “absurd revelations that you’d never be able to see coming”. I think they need some new gimmicks if they plan to continue the series.
