_nerdtaxi
i dressed up as professor layton, in the sixth grade, for halloween. it was one of the only times i'd ever felt very very passionate about what i was going as, even asking if my grandmother in france who loves to sew could construct my very own layton jacket like the one he wears. on the front right breast pocket it says "p. layton" to imply that professor is his first name. i still have it with me.
of course nobody recognized me that night, or the day prior at school for the costume party, where most of my attempts to recommend the title to anyone who'd listen was rebuked w the observation that the first syllable of "layton" had a pretty funny rhyming word. with the benefit of hindsight it's easy to see why: not only was i already nearing the age where newer nintendo games and systems were enjoyed by a smaller and less vocal minority of schoolmates for the next few years (it being the late 2000s and the dynasty of infinity ward), but also quite simply professor layton and his games /do/ in fact, look """kinda gay, dude""". partially due to the equal parts cheese-filled and charming aesthetic of 'sophistication' that amazingly doesn't have to operate on any level of irony, and partially due to the fact that it is in fact a game centered around solving more or less extra credit questions from your last math test. the layton series is not what anyone would call fast-paced (the climaxes always and frequently grind to a halt when you have to solve several of the game's hardest puzzles in a row and you wasted your last hint coins) nor does it feature any real level of violence despite it's vaguely early 20th century date and time (indiana jones without nazis or guns or sex, more or less).
but here's where i stop dumping on my beloved professor to explain why after all these years, I'd still readily consider professor layton and the curious village for nintendo DS one of if not THE greatest children's adventure game in the last 2 decades, and why it motivated me to still talk about the time i cosplayed as him 12 years later. to best understand why it's important to know what, or rather WHO we're dealing with here when it's time to talk about what makes the good professor t i c k, it's primary development house, Level-5. now see i never played any of the dark cloud games (hang on before you toss out my credibility), BUT i did play their dragon quest games, both in fact, and while ix is a can of worms in of itself i'll grapple with one day (suffice to say i do not agree w/ the perceived lack of enthusiasm for it and like it quite a lot for mainly personal reasons), the one I wanna focus on is dragon quest viii: the sky, the sea, the earth, and the journey of the cursed king (or sora to umi to daichi to norowareshi himegimi, in it's original language). dragon quest viii is another masterpiece from the company, yes, and i'd imagine way less people would be taken aback by THAT statement than if i were to call curious village a 'masterpiece'. And yet what makes both games great at their core is precisely the same thing: m o o o o o o d. or, more precisely, maybe tone. or presentation, or whichever, but all these words are in use to describe the slick levels of polish applied to nearly EVERY facet of these two games, which YES, /is/ a valid trait a studio can have (i'd argue such a mantle is best upheld by somewhere like kojipro, nowadays).
in dragon quest viii, the entire game structures itself as far more of a traditional 'fable' than the others in the series; while dragon quests i-vii feel very much like d&d campaigns, there is a 'dreaminess' to the whole of viii (ironic given VI's scenario) that makes the whole thing feel far more personal, almost fairy tale like. maybe it's due to the very fully realized and personable party, compared to the somewhat wooden presentation and writing of vii, maybe it's the fact that both dhoulmagus and rhapthorne seem straight out of a harlequin puppet show, while making you feel you're not just watching but openly taking part in such a performance. or hell it's most likely the fact that it still looks gorgeous, closing in on 2 decades later. the fact is, the amount of care and dedication went into the worldbuilding of this game is something to behold, and i'm not trying to dump on any of the other DQ's (except II) believe me; level-5 prez and the game's director, akihiro hino, even elaborated in a 2018 interview that he only got the job to develop the next entry after giving the producer of VII an itemized list of why it sucked. this stamp Level-5 branded onto dragon quest to make it their own was VERY much it's own personal chef's kiss, returning the series to it's myth-feeling roots that hino remembered from playing dq III for the first time. and that's why dragon quest VIII rocks but what's this got to do with the good professor.
well hino, who is also layton's beautifully shaggy-haired creator and main series producer, after finishing VIII and during the protracted development hell that was IX's production (where squeenix basically acquiesced to fan death threats that yeah, removing the turn based combat WOULD be a dumb idea hahaha) , had the brilliant idea to try something they had never done before: develop their first fully self-funded, self-released game. at a time when the company was under extreme pressure from IX's development, this is
a respectfully MANLY move from a beautifully MANLY man, and i give him my belated commendation, however despite only limited documentation of this period of the company (suffice to say everything seems to point towards 'a tad under duress'), it would not be a big stretch to call it a precarious time to work on it's own home-grown franchise, especially when (while they couldn't have known it at the time) the development of layton's 1 thru 4 would all end up overlapping heavily with their work on the IXth dragon quest, something squeenix couldn't have been overjoyed about. yet the company persisted on, finding beautiful source material in the many untranslated pages of real-life professor (actually doctor) Akira Tago's homemade puzzle books. already having been in publication for decades, you might be surprised to find a copy of some of the early books and note 'hey these are all exactly like the puzzles in professor layton and the curious village on nintendo ds !', and you'd be correct ! all but 30 of the game's 130+ puzzles, or damn near close to 80% of them, come from the pages of the pre-existing books, the one's made exclusively for the game being designed specifically with the touch screen in mind (later entries would feature far more of these kinds of puzzles as the amount of untapped material from Dr. Tago's books ran dry, imo to mixed results). the actual puzzles within layton are very cut and dry: if you don't like brainteasers, even if you dig layton's aesthetic, there's definitely a good chance you are not gonna have anywhere close to a fun time with this series; as obvious as it sounds, i'm mentioning this to partially explain why i've really ignored the whole 'puzzle' aspect of this PUZZLE adventure game. because, as noted earlier, these puzzles are almost separate from the game itself; they are great, definitely, but they come from not a game at all, but a big ol book designed to simply house a smorgasbord of them. these puzzles, ironically enough, are NOT what makes layton layton. rather, it is layton, that makes the puzzles come alive.
i brought up dq VIII because, while level-5 handled it's direction and overall development, the scenario was still all yuji Horii, like every game, and the art was still Toriyama, just like every game and the music was all still The Homophobic Guy, also like every game. Level-5 was given a dragon quest game essentially on paper, and was tasked with re-inventing the very framework that surrounded dragon quest; how it felt, played, and overall presented itself. if heartbeat was brought back to make viii, it would be 180 hours long, span 3 discs, look just like VII/the ds remakes, and probably feel like the equivalent of eating two massive steak dinners for your appetizer before the feast(i truly don't mean to bash heartbeat so much, I really love VI and think they got basically abused and sucked dry by Enix Co., but these are mostly addressed to VII). what makes professor layton such a perfect adventure game is that, level-5 did the exact same thing as w viii, except instead of contriving a reason to make a dude save his horse princess gf and her toad dad, they are contriving a reason for you to solve 130 brain puzzles and NOT feel like you're in school. and this is level-5's specialty.
the village is so curious because it wants YOU to be as well, and the devs make sure to make nearly every corner of this town and it's citizens 'curious'. the game, like most point and clickers on the nintendo dual screen, uses the dual screen to point and click. this means every corner of the village has some kind of clickable object, trinket, or hidden away feature or puzzle. in typical adventure game fashion, tapping on background elements can elicit a moving response, and while it's not as expansive as some of it's pc cousins, there's enough here to really entice you to poke around everywhere you can. it helps that said little details are expressed and sprinkled about so lovingly in the world, every character design itself a personality description, every building seeming both disjointed next to it's neighbors while simultaneously in it's perfect spot to give the village it's own signature warped skyline-and yes I do mean SKYline, as despite being a noticeably 20th-century France inspired village, it contains it's own massive Bastille-esque skyscraper at the center of town that only prods your curiosity more and more until the thrilling conclusion. Each facet of the town defies explanation ("so why does it need a drawbridge exactly") while still somehow seeming warm and welcoming, helped perhaps by the bumbling and toothlessness of the game's antagonists; while the main one has some pretty malevolent desires, even the somewhat more 'threatening' townsfolk can't seem threatening enough to erase their charm. The entire project just OOOOOOZES the level-5 wonder and polish from every orifice, perhaps motivated by it's status as their first and potentially last self-made project, but it shows. oh it so, so, shows.
and i didn't even talk about the actual plot yet, perhaps because i'd really like it to be best experienced blind, like any good mystery (or Mystere, eh??????), but for the sake of the eager reader who is interested enough to finish this piece but not the game, i'll bite. london archeological professor Hershel Layton, and his trusty boy sidekick Luke Triton, venture forth to the French village of St. Mystere to investigate not so much the death of the illustriously wealthy Baron Augustus Reinhold, but rather his last will and testament, which promises his fortune to whoever can figure out his final riddle, the Golden Apple, with clues left scattered throughout the village and its residents. after arriving, the drawbridge in and out of town is even more mysteriously pulled up, and whoever was behind that absconded with the lever to bring it back down, so it looks like the prof and Luke are stuck in this mess
till the bitter end. The game tells it's story using GORGEOUS animated cutscenes by P.A. Works (the studio behind Shirobako) that are truly inspired enough to leap far off the DS's 240p screen, with a whimsical enough soundtrack to match. and i know i used an indiana jones comparison up above but this really is much closer in tone and spirit to the Tintin series of books by Herge, as both this and that excel at not being afraid to get a little /silly/. now i already said I would avoid spoilers, but to simply mention, the layton series has received it's fair share of criticism over late-in-the-game asspulls, which while fair, is also a point strongly in it's favor with me at least. it avoids anything too dumb in this entry (at least not COMPLETELY unbelievable), with suspension of disbelieve firmly being yanked out by the third game's jaw droppingly loud and incredibly silly final act (to say nothing of game 2's bizarre climax), yet honestly by the end of it all I'd be very surprised if you're not at the very least along for the ride. and while this game also avoids some of the more emotional moments the later ones get to (anyone not brought to tears by Unwound Future's ending frightens me deeply), that's not to say you won't end up developing strong feelings for even the slightest of side characters (which does pay off to longtime fans; subsequent entries bring back certain characters for quick but enjoyable fanservice) and locations.
"Attachment" is a great word to truly describe curious village's, layton's, and indeed level-5's own ethos as a developer. what akihiro hino picked up on as a kid, grinding through the tough as nails famicom DQ's, was that to truly entice and hook a player into your world, no matter how ramshackle or filled with holes, you need only be welcoming, and happy for their arrival, even if they never do arrive. and a lot of people really did not, as despite the high sales for each game (high enough for each one to be localized by Nintendo themselves, at least), it has more or less remained dormant sans a couple phone remakes since the release of it's final entry, & the Azran Legacy, in 2013 in Japan, closing in on nearly a whole decade without the good professor. There was a single spinoff game featuring his adopted daughter, who despite her colorful personality and design, really did not end up setting the franchise, or anything for that matter on fire, as well as a few other mobile spinoffs, but no true follow up. This doesn't mean they did not try, though-2015 brought the reveal of the absolutely bizarre, and still un-resurfaced Layton 7, a confusing looking project that only seemed to serve to plaster the Layton franchise onto some type of gatcha-text chat-card game abomination. not the best direction, and having lain dormant for the past 7 years i think level-5 thought similarly.
or rather maybe Layton doesn't necessarily need to return (outside of perhaps an HD collection for switch ??), like everything must nowadays. layton's story is fully told, fully finished, and despite the degrees of quality varying for each title, every single one maintains a level of dedication towards depicting the good professor and his chums as a friendly bunch of travelers, removed from the real-world horrors of 19th/20th century euro archeology and it's never ending colonist hunger, through it's dedication towards building a charming, friendly world that exists only to serve you neat lil brainteasers. such a framework isn't really necessary anymore; while Dr. Tago's puzzles were quite good (and his unfortunate passing in 2016 means we have indeed solved the last of his works), modern adventure games find newer ways to shove in their brainteasers a bit more organically into the world (hell they were doing it already when this came out), and hence something like Layton comes off a bit more blunt. the best evidence of it's sticking-outedness in it's smartphone port, where, sandwiched on the app store between puzzle games that organize themselves as an even less subtle list of challenges, numbered 1 to 1000, comes a series that tries to tell the player that these puzzles are found all around you, in every day life, from people you know and love, or have never met before. And so professor layton and the curious village for nintendo ds doesn't just get an A for effort, it gets the whole freakin gradebook (that's how grades work right). it finally figured out the answer to get kids interested in working with numbers, crafting a gorgeous and truly Ghibli-esque world to explore, and it figured it out without a single hint coin. well done, hino-san. please come back soon <3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNarlVNOn0s
of course nobody recognized me that night, or the day prior at school for the costume party, where most of my attempts to recommend the title to anyone who'd listen was rebuked w the observation that the first syllable of "layton" had a pretty funny rhyming word. with the benefit of hindsight it's easy to see why: not only was i already nearing the age where newer nintendo games and systems were enjoyed by a smaller and less vocal minority of schoolmates for the next few years (it being the late 2000s and the dynasty of infinity ward), but also quite simply professor layton and his games /do/ in fact, look """kinda gay, dude""". partially due to the equal parts cheese-filled and charming aesthetic of 'sophistication' that amazingly doesn't have to operate on any level of irony, and partially due to the fact that it is in fact a game centered around solving more or less extra credit questions from your last math test. the layton series is not what anyone would call fast-paced (the climaxes always and frequently grind to a halt when you have to solve several of the game's hardest puzzles in a row and you wasted your last hint coins) nor does it feature any real level of violence despite it's vaguely early 20th century date and time (indiana jones without nazis or guns or sex, more or less).
but here's where i stop dumping on my beloved professor to explain why after all these years, I'd still readily consider professor layton and the curious village for nintendo DS one of if not THE greatest children's adventure game in the last 2 decades, and why it motivated me to still talk about the time i cosplayed as him 12 years later. to best understand why it's important to know what, or rather WHO we're dealing with here when it's time to talk about what makes the good professor t i c k, it's primary development house, Level-5. now see i never played any of the dark cloud games (hang on before you toss out my credibility), BUT i did play their dragon quest games, both in fact, and while ix is a can of worms in of itself i'll grapple with one day (suffice to say i do not agree w/ the perceived lack of enthusiasm for it and like it quite a lot for mainly personal reasons), the one I wanna focus on is dragon quest viii: the sky, the sea, the earth, and the journey of the cursed king (or sora to umi to daichi to norowareshi himegimi, in it's original language). dragon quest viii is another masterpiece from the company, yes, and i'd imagine way less people would be taken aback by THAT statement than if i were to call curious village a 'masterpiece'. And yet what makes both games great at their core is precisely the same thing: m o o o o o o d. or, more precisely, maybe tone. or presentation, or whichever, but all these words are in use to describe the slick levels of polish applied to nearly EVERY facet of these two games, which YES, /is/ a valid trait a studio can have (i'd argue such a mantle is best upheld by somewhere like kojipro, nowadays).
in dragon quest viii, the entire game structures itself as far more of a traditional 'fable' than the others in the series; while dragon quests i-vii feel very much like d&d campaigns, there is a 'dreaminess' to the whole of viii (ironic given VI's scenario) that makes the whole thing feel far more personal, almost fairy tale like. maybe it's due to the very fully realized and personable party, compared to the somewhat wooden presentation and writing of vii, maybe it's the fact that both dhoulmagus and rhapthorne seem straight out of a harlequin puppet show, while making you feel you're not just watching but openly taking part in such a performance. or hell it's most likely the fact that it still looks gorgeous, closing in on 2 decades later. the fact is, the amount of care and dedication went into the worldbuilding of this game is something to behold, and i'm not trying to dump on any of the other DQ's (except II) believe me; level-5 prez and the game's director, akihiro hino, even elaborated in a 2018 interview that he only got the job to develop the next entry after giving the producer of VII an itemized list of why it sucked. this stamp Level-5 branded onto dragon quest to make it their own was VERY much it's own personal chef's kiss, returning the series to it's myth-feeling roots that hino remembered from playing dq III for the first time. and that's why dragon quest VIII rocks but what's this got to do with the good professor.
well hino, who is also layton's beautifully shaggy-haired creator and main series producer, after finishing VIII and during the protracted development hell that was IX's production (where squeenix basically acquiesced to fan death threats that yeah, removing the turn based combat WOULD be a dumb idea hahaha) , had the brilliant idea to try something they had never done before: develop their first fully self-funded, self-released game. at a time when the company was under extreme pressure from IX's development, this is
a respectfully MANLY move from a beautifully MANLY man, and i give him my belated commendation, however despite only limited documentation of this period of the company (suffice to say everything seems to point towards 'a tad under duress'), it would not be a big stretch to call it a precarious time to work on it's own home-grown franchise, especially when (while they couldn't have known it at the time) the development of layton's 1 thru 4 would all end up overlapping heavily with their work on the IXth dragon quest, something squeenix couldn't have been overjoyed about. yet the company persisted on, finding beautiful source material in the many untranslated pages of real-life professor (actually doctor) Akira Tago's homemade puzzle books. already having been in publication for decades, you might be surprised to find a copy of some of the early books and note 'hey these are all exactly like the puzzles in professor layton and the curious village on nintendo ds !', and you'd be correct ! all but 30 of the game's 130+ puzzles, or damn near close to 80% of them, come from the pages of the pre-existing books, the one's made exclusively for the game being designed specifically with the touch screen in mind (later entries would feature far more of these kinds of puzzles as the amount of untapped material from Dr. Tago's books ran dry, imo to mixed results). the actual puzzles within layton are very cut and dry: if you don't like brainteasers, even if you dig layton's aesthetic, there's definitely a good chance you are not gonna have anywhere close to a fun time with this series; as obvious as it sounds, i'm mentioning this to partially explain why i've really ignored the whole 'puzzle' aspect of this PUZZLE adventure game. because, as noted earlier, these puzzles are almost separate from the game itself; they are great, definitely, but they come from not a game at all, but a big ol book designed to simply house a smorgasbord of them. these puzzles, ironically enough, are NOT what makes layton layton. rather, it is layton, that makes the puzzles come alive.
i brought up dq VIII because, while level-5 handled it's direction and overall development, the scenario was still all yuji Horii, like every game, and the art was still Toriyama, just like every game and the music was all still The Homophobic Guy, also like every game. Level-5 was given a dragon quest game essentially on paper, and was tasked with re-inventing the very framework that surrounded dragon quest; how it felt, played, and overall presented itself. if heartbeat was brought back to make viii, it would be 180 hours long, span 3 discs, look just like VII/the ds remakes, and probably feel like the equivalent of eating two massive steak dinners for your appetizer before the feast(i truly don't mean to bash heartbeat so much, I really love VI and think they got basically abused and sucked dry by Enix Co., but these are mostly addressed to VII). what makes professor layton such a perfect adventure game is that, level-5 did the exact same thing as w viii, except instead of contriving a reason to make a dude save his horse princess gf and her toad dad, they are contriving a reason for you to solve 130 brain puzzles and NOT feel like you're in school. and this is level-5's specialty.
the village is so curious because it wants YOU to be as well, and the devs make sure to make nearly every corner of this town and it's citizens 'curious'. the game, like most point and clickers on the nintendo dual screen, uses the dual screen to point and click. this means every corner of the village has some kind of clickable object, trinket, or hidden away feature or puzzle. in typical adventure game fashion, tapping on background elements can elicit a moving response, and while it's not as expansive as some of it's pc cousins, there's enough here to really entice you to poke around everywhere you can. it helps that said little details are expressed and sprinkled about so lovingly in the world, every character design itself a personality description, every building seeming both disjointed next to it's neighbors while simultaneously in it's perfect spot to give the village it's own signature warped skyline-and yes I do mean SKYline, as despite being a noticeably 20th-century France inspired village, it contains it's own massive Bastille-esque skyscraper at the center of town that only prods your curiosity more and more until the thrilling conclusion. Each facet of the town defies explanation ("so why does it need a drawbridge exactly") while still somehow seeming warm and welcoming, helped perhaps by the bumbling and toothlessness of the game's antagonists; while the main one has some pretty malevolent desires, even the somewhat more 'threatening' townsfolk can't seem threatening enough to erase their charm. The entire project just OOOOOOZES the level-5 wonder and polish from every orifice, perhaps motivated by it's status as their first and potentially last self-made project, but it shows. oh it so, so, shows.
and i didn't even talk about the actual plot yet, perhaps because i'd really like it to be best experienced blind, like any good mystery (or Mystere, eh??????), but for the sake of the eager reader who is interested enough to finish this piece but not the game, i'll bite. london archeological professor Hershel Layton, and his trusty boy sidekick Luke Triton, venture forth to the French village of St. Mystere to investigate not so much the death of the illustriously wealthy Baron Augustus Reinhold, but rather his last will and testament, which promises his fortune to whoever can figure out his final riddle, the Golden Apple, with clues left scattered throughout the village and its residents. after arriving, the drawbridge in and out of town is even more mysteriously pulled up, and whoever was behind that absconded with the lever to bring it back down, so it looks like the prof and Luke are stuck in this mess
till the bitter end. The game tells it's story using GORGEOUS animated cutscenes by P.A. Works (the studio behind Shirobako) that are truly inspired enough to leap far off the DS's 240p screen, with a whimsical enough soundtrack to match. and i know i used an indiana jones comparison up above but this really is much closer in tone and spirit to the Tintin series of books by Herge, as both this and that excel at not being afraid to get a little /silly/. now i already said I would avoid spoilers, but to simply mention, the layton series has received it's fair share of criticism over late-in-the-game asspulls, which while fair, is also a point strongly in it's favor with me at least. it avoids anything too dumb in this entry (at least not COMPLETELY unbelievable), with suspension of disbelieve firmly being yanked out by the third game's jaw droppingly loud and incredibly silly final act (to say nothing of game 2's bizarre climax), yet honestly by the end of it all I'd be very surprised if you're not at the very least along for the ride. and while this game also avoids some of the more emotional moments the later ones get to (anyone not brought to tears by Unwound Future's ending frightens me deeply), that's not to say you won't end up developing strong feelings for even the slightest of side characters (which does pay off to longtime fans; subsequent entries bring back certain characters for quick but enjoyable fanservice) and locations.
"Attachment" is a great word to truly describe curious village's, layton's, and indeed level-5's own ethos as a developer. what akihiro hino picked up on as a kid, grinding through the tough as nails famicom DQ's, was that to truly entice and hook a player into your world, no matter how ramshackle or filled with holes, you need only be welcoming, and happy for their arrival, even if they never do arrive. and a lot of people really did not, as despite the high sales for each game (high enough for each one to be localized by Nintendo themselves, at least), it has more or less remained dormant sans a couple phone remakes since the release of it's final entry, & the Azran Legacy, in 2013 in Japan, closing in on nearly a whole decade without the good professor. There was a single spinoff game featuring his adopted daughter, who despite her colorful personality and design, really did not end up setting the franchise, or anything for that matter on fire, as well as a few other mobile spinoffs, but no true follow up. This doesn't mean they did not try, though-2015 brought the reveal of the absolutely bizarre, and still un-resurfaced Layton 7, a confusing looking project that only seemed to serve to plaster the Layton franchise onto some type of gatcha-text chat-card game abomination. not the best direction, and having lain dormant for the past 7 years i think level-5 thought similarly.
or rather maybe Layton doesn't necessarily need to return (outside of perhaps an HD collection for switch ??), like everything must nowadays. layton's story is fully told, fully finished, and despite the degrees of quality varying for each title, every single one maintains a level of dedication towards depicting the good professor and his chums as a friendly bunch of travelers, removed from the real-world horrors of 19th/20th century euro archeology and it's never ending colonist hunger, through it's dedication towards building a charming, friendly world that exists only to serve you neat lil brainteasers. such a framework isn't really necessary anymore; while Dr. Tago's puzzles were quite good (and his unfortunate passing in 2016 means we have indeed solved the last of his works), modern adventure games find newer ways to shove in their brainteasers a bit more organically into the world (hell they were doing it already when this came out), and hence something like Layton comes off a bit more blunt. the best evidence of it's sticking-outedness in it's smartphone port, where, sandwiched on the app store between puzzle games that organize themselves as an even less subtle list of challenges, numbered 1 to 1000, comes a series that tries to tell the player that these puzzles are found all around you, in every day life, from people you know and love, or have never met before. And so professor layton and the curious village for nintendo ds doesn't just get an A for effort, it gets the whole freakin gradebook (that's how grades work right). it finally figured out the answer to get kids interested in working with numbers, crafting a gorgeous and truly Ghibli-esque world to explore, and it figured it out without a single hint coin. well done, hino-san. please come back soon <3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNarlVNOn0s