Not a bad nor good game. The problem here is that it's a Layton's game.
The episodic format makes the misteries easy to guess, and the history of each is too short and simple because the duration of the cases. After finishing the game, Level-5 don't answer the most important questions: who is sherl and why is a talking dog? and where is Professor Layton? (literally is called Layton's Mystery Journey and it's never discussed in the game).
The big problem here are the puzzles, from someone who has played the six Professor Layton games (and the crossover), they are very easy, too easy to resolve. The absence of akira tago is noticeable, besides the dificulty, some others have the "thinking out of the box" with stupid and nonsense answers.
It looks like it's oriented to the casual public that has never played a professor's game, but that leads to what was said above: simple history and easy puzzles, making those who have played the entire saga find it simple and boring. Hopefully Level-5 learned and don't do this in The New World of Steam 🙏

Avoid this game if you like this series, since its by far the worst one so far.

Katrielle does a poor job at following his father's legacy and ends up being a really bland and forgetable character. For someone who claims that will solve all of London's mysteries, its quite curious how she doesnt even bat an eye to the sight of a talking dog, or how the main mystery of the game, Layton's disappearance, is quickly overtaken by short, boring and predictable mysteries that no one cares about. The expectations may be the biggest problem of this game, just reading the premise and playing the prologue, you get certain ideas of what the game will be about, only for those to be proven wrong and go into a totally different direction shortly after.

Aside from the story being really bad, the puzzles are quitte horrendous, not really creative and I felt most of them were trial and error rather than a way to exercise your brain and enjoy your sweet time thinking about how to solve them. In other Layton games, I felt rewarded after solving a puzzle I spent a lot of thinking on. Cant say that feeling ever showed up while playing Katrielle.

We can only hope next game will be better than this; which, tbh, its not really hard.

The weakeest narratively, and the weakest in a while puzzle-wise, it's sad that this is the note the Layton games go down on. Mobile was the death of Layton and the episodic structure kept real mysteries from building up. The episodes are still good fun however.

I would rather recommend the anime than actually playing the game, since not only do you get more adventure and sense of community, but you also get some Professor action and Kana Hanazawa as Katrielle. That said the game has tons of QoL for completionism which I highly appreciate.

Incredibly disappointing entry in one of my favorite series. I really wanted to like Katrielle and Ernest, but they both feel very flat compared to Layton and Luke. Sherm exists, and while I enjoy him a bit, I think the game would've been better off without him. This takes the problem I had with Azran Legacy (stretching the story too thin) and doesn't do much to ameliorate the issue other than setting all of the stories relatively close to one another so that they can (sort of) come together for a big conclusion.

Worst of all, the puzzles are bad. It feels like more than half of them are gotchas in some way, which really sullies the series' reputation.

I'm very conflicted about this game. On the one hand Katrielle and Ernest are adorable characters and I love them both a lot. On the other hand, the story is fairly weak and the puzzles are not as hard as in the other games. Feels very disconnected from the rest of the series, which Layton Brothers did as well. But in that game the gameplay and tone were So different that it feeling disconnected was warranted. They tried to do the same thing here, but with such a similar game style to the original six games the disconnect feels off and weird

I never managed to finish this, mostly because the Switch came out while I was playing it, but also because it's just not as engaging as the other Layton games. In the end, I'll give it 2 stars because it's playable, not problematic, the cutscenes are nice, and a kid might even like it. To be honest I'm pretty sure that's the target audience.

But the 3D graphics don't suit the Layton style, the characters just aren't as interesting, and the puzzles are way too easy. Also, while I don't mind focusing on cute little detective stories over the main plot, the main plot that is there really isn't interesting enough to keep you playing. Not only that but the only good plotline didn't even get resolved here because they were trying for another trilogy.

The anime based on it is better than it in many ways though, strangely enough, maybe because it's in 2D or because they actually resolved the only interesting plotline.

This is as creatively bankrupt as it gets. From the outset this game just looks like an incredibly mediocre Layton game, but when you actually play it it's almost remarkable how poorly thought out it really is. It's not even mediocre, it's straight up bad.

Layton games are carried by three things: Fun puzzles, intriguing stories and mysteries, and charm. Layton's Mystery Journey fails in every one of those categories. The puzzle designer for the rest of the series, Akira Tago, unfortunately passed away before this entry was released and it shows. The new puzzles are terrible, either being incredibly mundane and pitifully easy to the point where I solved a few on accident, or having downright stupid solutions. Trick question puzzles are common in this series, but Mystery Journey uses them in the worst way possible. As an example, one puzzle requires you to look at a stack of boxes on a picture on the top screen from an isometric perspective and then input how many squares are in the image. This puzzle type has been used before so LMJ took the creative liberty of making it suck balls. The solution to this puzzle is simply one, because the only actual square on the top screen is the picture displayed! Didn't you know that bro?! Aren't we so clever hahahahaha we should make more puzzles where the solution doesn't require any critical thinking and the answer is just 1 or 0!!!!

When I first played Curious Village I interacted with every last object in the environment I could because I wanted to find puzzles and hint coins. I thought the puzzles were fun and satisfying. Here however, at a certain point I deliberately avoided interacting with anything that could trigger an optional puzzle because of how unfun and frankly moronic they were. If you make it where I want to inspect everything as little as possible in your adventure visual novel then you've failed miserably.

If the puzzles didn't tell you to quit then the story will. There is no overarching story, just individual hour long cases that have the depth of a toilet bowl. The mysteries are incredibly obvious and uninteresting because they have no longer than an hour to get fleshed out. Why am I supposed to care about these 7 millionaires if each of them have no more than an hour of screen time and have as much character as a stale piece of bread? Not even like the main cast is much better, there is never any attempt at character development outside of a twist villain who gets to be a villain for 5 minutes and does literally nothing in that timespan. Instead of spreading the game thin by making 12 individual stories why didn't they just make one continuous one to let characters develop and bigger mysteries take shape?

There is nothing positive to take away from this game. Even from a visual standpoint it's not even that impressive compared to the previous titles, same goes for the soundtrack. Also, London is such a stale setting for a game like this. Every other Layton game had memorable locations to serve as the stage for each mystery, meanwhile here all you get is more British dick riding. Look guys it's the Big Ben!!! The Thames!!!! Isn't this place so cool?!?! Even though literally every other game or movie that takes place in London feels the need to shove those landmarks down your throat. It turns otherwise cool places into tired set pieces that makes each game that includes them blend in with one another. Unwound Future took place in London, but it was complimented by a future London with different visuals and locations that made it into a more hostile setting. The final case has a cool mansion serve as the final location, it gives off some Diabolical Box vibes, but it still could've been cool if more than an hour of the runtime was spent there.

I can't think of one good thing to say about this game. I know some might think I'm over exaggerating, but as someone who doesn't have as much free time as he used to, I value the time I spend with every game I play. I want there to be something to take away from each experience so that ,even if the game is bad, there's some aspect or part of it to think about that makes me not regret playing it. There's nothing interesting about Layton's Mystery Journey. Absolutely Level 5's worst work yet and I hope it never gets topped. Level 5 is a studio I have a ton of respect for, their games are incredibly ambitious and charming, sometimes too ambitious to the point where it causes problems (Yo-Kai Watch 2, Azran Legacy, etc.). But at least the heart is still there. There is no ambition in Mystery Journey. It's a pathetic attempt at trying to appeal to a larger market of mobile gamers that probably would've preferred a regular Layton game anyway.

Level 5's greatest asset and weakness is their ambition, but what do you get when that ambition isn't there? You get nothing, and the worst thing you can do with your time is play a nothing game.

I hope New World Of Steam is good : (