I think over the course of my life I've played this game front to back like 4 times. And it's really unfortunate that, like, the more you replay a game, the more the game's world loses its believability and luster.
This isn't really a review of the game. The game's good, I think. It's hard to know with how many playthroughs I've done so I kind of just have to take my past self's word on this one.
The first time I went through this game I was definitely when I was still early on in elementary school, probably 8 or 9 years old or so, probably relatively close to when the game first released. I remembered a big twist or two but not much else, definitely not the puzzles.
The second time was probably around 5 or 6 years later, in the summer after freshman year of high school. My high school had a P.E. credit requirement, and, like the nerd I am, I took it over the summer so I could cram more honors classes in during the year to boost my class rank. Pretty pathetic in retrospect, but anyways I was probably around 14 or 15 years old at this point. I know for a fact I played through pretty much the entire thing on some volatile phone emulator, but I don't know that I actually finished the last hour or so. Maybe I did, but like, in a crowded gymnasium or something. Or I could have just lost my save right near the end. Again, I didn't really remember every plot beat, but I definitely started to memorize the tricks to some of the more challenging puzzles, which of course takes a bit of the fun out of future playthroughs.
The third time was right at the start of the summer of 2020. We were still only a couple months into quarantine, and I had just graduated my last semester of high school on a YouTube live stream. By this point, I did have an account on this site, and I was already pretty used to viewing stuff from a more critical lens than I had before. Honestly, I came back to play it just to make sure it was still good so I could put it on my top 5, and was it? Hell yeah!! There was an entire plot thread I hadn't really paid attention to on my previous playthroughs, one because I was like, 9 years old and too stupid to understand most of the story at all (lmao), and the other because I probably didn't even get to see the conclusion of said plot thread. And this plot thread is fucking amazing!!! Instantly drafted to my "games that have made me cry" list.
But this came at a cost, of course. When the story is more memorable to you, you're not going to forget it as easy. In addition, a pretty decent amount of the difficult puzzles I knew the gist of what I had to do but maybe not the exact solution, but there were still enough for that playthrough. Not so much for the next one.
The fourth (and probably final? definitely waiting a very long time for the next playthrough if it ever happens) time, just happened! As of writing in February of 2022, a year and a half into University, played in basically one session a couple nights before an exam I've been procrastinating studying for. The main reason I even wanted to play this again, is that between the last playthrough and now, I'd played pretty much every other layton game, and thought that as they went on, they got pretty weak. Anyone who's played Azran Legacy could probably tell you that. And after all of that I was like, "was this series ever even that good in the first place? or was it just nostalgia that made me like it?"
The main downside to playing all the Layton games is that you learn their tricks. You figure out how to, very easily, solve the most common puzzles they throw at you. Oh, here's one where you flip numbers/letters around. Here's one where 4 people all have some stipulation and you have to give them the right hat or put them in the right seat or something. Here's a slide puzzle. Here's one where you rearrange tiles. And so pretty much all of the puzzles I hadn't memorized verbatim by this point (which honestly was a lot) could be solved very, very trivially because I knew all of the game's tricks.
I finished this playthrough in like 6 and 1/2 hours. This is not a game that should be finished that quickly. The pacing is really, really off if you just speed through all of the puzzles like I did, and if you know basically all of the story beats, what reason is there to even play? I mean in the end, it was worth it, but I do kind of ask myself, couldn't I have just watched the last 30 minutes on youtube and gotten the same effect? Possibly even a better effect since I wouldn't have sunk a whole night into playing a game that I've already internalized so thoroughly that nothing about it is novel anymore?
I don't really know. It's like 7am here and I haven't slept yet and I'm really tired so this is probably just incoherent rambling, but honestly this playthrough was just a really sobering reminder that, like, your first experience with some piece of media you love is ephemeral and very much going to elude you as time goes on. And trying to relive that by playing the game again is almost definitely not going to give you the same feeling, a thousandfold for puzzle games with easily memoizable solutions and a thousandfold for story heavy stuff, and this game is definitely both.
Despite all this the I still think the last couple chapters of this game is such a good sequence I kind of have to at least keep it at an 8. For now
This isn't really a review of the game. The game's good, I think. It's hard to know with how many playthroughs I've done so I kind of just have to take my past self's word on this one.
The first time I went through this game I was definitely when I was still early on in elementary school, probably 8 or 9 years old or so, probably relatively close to when the game first released. I remembered a big twist or two but not much else, definitely not the puzzles.
The second time was probably around 5 or 6 years later, in the summer after freshman year of high school. My high school had a P.E. credit requirement, and, like the nerd I am, I took it over the summer so I could cram more honors classes in during the year to boost my class rank. Pretty pathetic in retrospect, but anyways I was probably around 14 or 15 years old at this point. I know for a fact I played through pretty much the entire thing on some volatile phone emulator, but I don't know that I actually finished the last hour or so. Maybe I did, but like, in a crowded gymnasium or something. Or I could have just lost my save right near the end. Again, I didn't really remember every plot beat, but I definitely started to memorize the tricks to some of the more challenging puzzles, which of course takes a bit of the fun out of future playthroughs.
The third time was right at the start of the summer of 2020. We were still only a couple months into quarantine, and I had just graduated my last semester of high school on a YouTube live stream. By this point, I did have an account on this site, and I was already pretty used to viewing stuff from a more critical lens than I had before. Honestly, I came back to play it just to make sure it was still good so I could put it on my top 5, and was it? Hell yeah!! There was an entire plot thread I hadn't really paid attention to on my previous playthroughs, one because I was like, 9 years old and too stupid to understand most of the story at all (lmao), and the other because I probably didn't even get to see the conclusion of said plot thread. And this plot thread is fucking amazing!!! Instantly drafted to my "games that have made me cry" list.
But this came at a cost, of course. When the story is more memorable to you, you're not going to forget it as easy. In addition, a pretty decent amount of the difficult puzzles I knew the gist of what I had to do but maybe not the exact solution, but there were still enough for that playthrough. Not so much for the next one.
The fourth (and probably final? definitely waiting a very long time for the next playthrough if it ever happens) time, just happened! As of writing in February of 2022, a year and a half into University, played in basically one session a couple nights before an exam I've been procrastinating studying for. The main reason I even wanted to play this again, is that between the last playthrough and now, I'd played pretty much every other layton game, and thought that as they went on, they got pretty weak. Anyone who's played Azran Legacy could probably tell you that. And after all of that I was like, "was this series ever even that good in the first place? or was it just nostalgia that made me like it?"
The main downside to playing all the Layton games is that you learn their tricks. You figure out how to, very easily, solve the most common puzzles they throw at you. Oh, here's one where you flip numbers/letters around. Here's one where 4 people all have some stipulation and you have to give them the right hat or put them in the right seat or something. Here's a slide puzzle. Here's one where you rearrange tiles. And so pretty much all of the puzzles I hadn't memorized verbatim by this point (which honestly was a lot) could be solved very, very trivially because I knew all of the game's tricks.
I finished this playthrough in like 6 and 1/2 hours. This is not a game that should be finished that quickly. The pacing is really, really off if you just speed through all of the puzzles like I did, and if you know basically all of the story beats, what reason is there to even play? I mean in the end, it was worth it, but I do kind of ask myself, couldn't I have just watched the last 30 minutes on youtube and gotten the same effect? Possibly even a better effect since I wouldn't have sunk a whole night into playing a game that I've already internalized so thoroughly that nothing about it is novel anymore?
I don't really know. It's like 7am here and I haven't slept yet and I'm really tired so this is probably just incoherent rambling, but honestly this playthrough was just a really sobering reminder that, like, your first experience with some piece of media you love is ephemeral and very much going to elude you as time goes on. And trying to relive that by playing the game again is almost definitely not going to give you the same feeling, a thousandfold for puzzle games with easily memoizable solutions and a thousandfold for story heavy stuff, and this game is definitely both.
Despite all this the I still think the last couple chapters of this game is such a good sequence I kind of have to at least keep it at an 8. For now