Review: Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy (3DS)

[miko]

This is the sixth game in the Professor Layton puzzle game series. I've played... most of the others, though I think I missed one or maybe two. I picked up this game and promptly played through it in all my spare time: you're looking at about 30-35 hours of gameplay, plus the daily puzzle downloads.

If you've played previous games, this game is exactly what you'd expect. No big changes to the mechanics, just different puzzles/minigames and a new story. I didn't find the story all that compelling, although it was the culmination of the last three games... it had the "go to five places to collect fives objects" gameplay that's so common as to be dull. Thankfully, the puzzles remain fun as always - only a few "gotcha" ones, most of the rest were true puzzles. I found them perhaps a bit easy, other than the types that I've never enjoyed (sliding tile puzzles, for instance).

There's a new Streetpass minigame that is not at all obvious - I failed to activate it until I was already done the game, because the icon seriously looks like a "help" button, so I never clicked it, and it's not lined up with the other minigames. Weird design choice. Anyway, once you do find it, you can click around to find objects on screen as sort of a treasure hunt, and then set up three-item lists to share with people you streetpass for them to find. It's not a functionality that's been at all useful to me: I don't think I've streetpassed a single other person playing the game. It's a bit surprising, actually, since the last one was pretty popular. Thankfully, the "demo" hunt gives you some points so you can get the last object for your collection... it was troubling me to have 19/20, which is why I eventually looked up and found out about this.

3D wise, I thought it was handled pretty nicely in this game. When you search an area, the view scrolls around with you nicely and if you can handle having the 3D on, it's pleasantly done. The game doesn't require it, though, although one of the types of daily puzzle is stupidly hard to parse without it on (the one where you knock over rocks - can't tell the stacks apart very well without the 3D).

Overall, solid Layton game and I'm looking forward to the daily puzzles getting hard enough to be interesting. The early ones are kinda meh. If you played the last game, the daily puzzles have changed up for new mechanics with a couple exceptions (the alchemy one is still there, as is the laser knights).