In the long-running Professor Layton Nintendo DS series, the intellectual pursuit of solving logic puzzles, rescuing the distressed, and in general being jolly nice to everyone, what ho old chap, is the order of the day. Throughout the series, Professor Layton and his trusty sidekicks have journeyed through beautifully animated narrative and finely crafted puzzles, and both have been floated on the genteel, low voice of Layton himself. This, the sixth and touted to be the last Professor Layton title, is no different, and gives a grand and affectionate send-off to a series dedicated to a fictional Britishness that even Downton Abbey would be jealous of.
It's so refreshing to experience the gentle nudges towards progress these titles give. To a lifelong player of games, the world of Layton's puzzles feels like such a safe environment. I'm used to games providing an overtly hostile arena for my chosen avatar to exist in: most games are predicated on getting a task right the first time or severe, unpleasant consequences ensue. The last thing I played was Typing of the Dead: Overkill, and even though it's ostensibly a typing tutor, your character dies of snarling zombies if you're too slow typing words. In Professor Layton you are presented with a series of logic puzzles, mental arithmetic conundrums, and riddles, and all of them come with plenty of safety nets if you get answers wrong, and usually nothing so uncouth as the threat of death is dangled above you. Throughout Azran Legacy in particular, you can spend time investigating the pretty 3D-rendered landscapes to collect "hint coins" to spend when you are stuck. Or, as usual, should you submit the wrong answer, you decrease the amount of Picarat points you win by completing the puzzle, but this is like losing Nectar points in that you hardly care.
The Azran Legacy is a game that is broader-sweeping and more grand than the previous ones, and is imbued with the feeling that this is indeed a farewell – that Level-5 is aware that they might have a last shot at Layton's legacy. The places the characters can visit include, in a very Phileas Fogg way, picturesque fishing villages, a mysterious temple, a desert, a jungle, a tropical island, a walled city. Aboard the skyship Bostonius, Layton, his cheeky schoolboy assistant Luke, and his curiously restrained assistant Emmy all set off to protect the world from a mysterious and ancient Azran power that threatens to destroy world peace. The story is half told through wonderful Studio Ghibli-esque animations, the other through pleasingly detailed 3D backgrounds you can investigate with your 3DS stylus.
As if to remind you of his weird animal-chat ability, Luke at one point has a conversation with a squirrel. This enables the player to obtain a really great minigame called the Nut Roller, where you control an exceedingly cute squirrel who has to roll a nut out over a grid to get it into the desired square. There are two other minigames that are unlockable, Blooms and Shrooms and Dress Up, but neither of them are unlocked via squirrel chat. Blooms and Shrooms is also excellent, but Dress Up seems more of a way to use existing animations for characters than really providing any puzzle solving satisfaction. In any case, more sidekicks should have the ability to talk to squirrels.
I really appreciated the game's efforts to embed many of the 500 puzzles into the story, though at times it did feel forced. There was a concerted effort to give them at least a thematic link to the narrative – for example, one puzzle had Layton jumping from boat to boat on a moving grid in order to escape being seen by the bad guys. The action is often pleasingly represented in stereoscopic 3D, as in a grid puzzle about shelving books in a library, where the character on the 3DS's top screen would place the books, or remove them, as I figured out which tomes went where. This was also one of the puzzles most thinly connected to narrative, however. Luke walks into a library, looks at some books on the floor, and suddenly decides that he wants to tidy them in the middle of an urgent investigation at Scotland Yard.
I've given a lot of thought to what we might lose if Professor Layton games do stop being made (though he is doing a crossover with sexy 2D lawyer Phoenix Wright soon). What is remarkable to me about this series is the lens through which a lost or never-fulfilled Britishness is perceived. Just like the west orientalises Japan as a technology pop culture mecca of neon lights, robots and manga – and as a one-time resident of Japan, I learned this is mostly a perception the west has cultivated – occidentalism pops up in Layton as invented coat-and-tails Oxbridge English refinement.
To me, Layton's Britain is a place that sits in the imagination of most of the Japanese friends I made whilst living in Japan. Being Scottish, it was hard to explain that though I came from Igirisu (Britain) "English culture" was not something I'd ever taken part in. Generous Japanese friends, thinking it would make me feel at home, took me out to English-style cream teas with scones in dainty Japanese cafes, which were on reflection far better than the expensive cream teas I have paid for in London since. And although it pleased me to try to live up to their starry-eyed vision of the English rose they assumed I was (they were shocked at how I knocked back whiskey, for example), occasionally it worried me that one day they would visit London, be rained on getting the open-top to Madame Tussauds, or be served soggy fish and chips by a rude waiter.
I have since learned that this is exactly what happened. I have sent Earl Grey tea as an apology.
In comparison, the idealised Kensington High Street of Professor Layton is exactly the English rose, cream tea Britain I'd rather my Japanese friends could visit. In the genteel professor's London it hardly ever rains, people still wear top hats, and no one is ever rude to each other, all of which are things that are alien to the modern day Londoner.
I will miss Professor Layton's surreal British adventures. In Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy, the puzzles are solid, enjoyable and very varied with only a few repeat patterns, even if some are a little more mathsy than my brain would like. The narrative has mystery and whimsy aplenty, there's lots of small twists, cute animations behind which collectibles hide, and there are cameos to please the long-running fans. The world comes off more sprawling, with more choice and more ability to explore environments with your trusty stylus. There's also perhaps a little hidden lament in there, as the game comes to a satisfying and yet melancholy conclusion, a lingering feeling that perhaps the puzzlemaker himself, Akira Tago, might be sad to leave the imagined Britishness of the unique series.
