I am quick to tell people all about my slightly unhealthy obsession with the Ace Attorney
franchise.
I have played every game in the series, watched the live action movie, collected a fair deal
of the manga; it’s safe to say that I am a huge fan.
My experiences with Professor Layton, however, are not quite as extensive.
I did play the first title, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, but at the time I
did not find myself enjoying it very much.
With that said, Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney has still been one of
my most highly anticipated 3DS titles in the history of the system.
Although it came out in Japan back in 2012, it didn’t reach the rest of the world until
this year, and even then there was a five-month gap between its release in Europe and Australia,
and its release in North America.
Now that the game is playable world-wide, however, is it worth the wait?
Well, a lot of that depends on your personal preferences.
In this case, you’d have to be okay with a game that has you reading text for about
eighty percent of its play-time.
Both the Ace Attorney series and the Professor Layton series are known for being very story-heavy,
text-filled games, involving a lot of reading, thinking, and not much else.
If you’re the type who doesn’t care for the story in video games, then this is a title
than you can skip without much thought.
So how exactly do the two meet?
It begins when a young woman named Espella meets with Professor Layton and his assistant,
Luke, at their London office.
Espella tells them of the troubles in her hometown of Labryinthia, piquing the professor’s
curiosity.
Meanwhile, Phoenix Wright and his assistant, Maya, are visiting London for work when the
two are pulled into the case after a series of circumstances.
Eventually both groups wind up in Labyrinthia where not only do they have to discover its
secrets but defend the wrongly accused of being witches in the aptly named Witch’s
Court.
As you would expect, the plot contains many twists and turns, but it always managed to
keep me interested and on my toes throughout the majority of my playthrough.
There were some places where the story became a little dull, almost to the point of feeling
a bit like filler, specifically during one section in the middle of the game.
Even then, however, it didn’t hamper my experience enough to ruin my enjoyment the
game’s story.
The writing manages to fit the story’s mood at various points rather well, knowing exactly
when to be serious, when to crack a joke, or even be a little sad.
I always love when a game can make me laugh, and Layton vs Ace Attorney actually had me
laughing out loud on a handful of occasions.
My only real gripe with the story-telling as a whole is that many of the original characters
just come across as a bit bland.
The main culprit of this is Espella, who I found to be dreadfully boring.
She wasn’t insufferable in any way, but it bothered me that such a plot-important
character seemed to have very little character traits other than “being nice.”
Many of the minor townspeople tend to be very one-dimensional as well, and there are a few
that tended to grate on my nerves after a while.
That’s not to say that every character is like this, since I enjoyed the game’s antagonist
quite a bit and Zarchias Barnham, the prosecutor in the Witch Trials, stuck in my mind as being
a very engaging and well-rounded member of the cast.
What will color your judgment (heh, see what I did there?) of this game more than anything
else is your experience with past titles in either franchise.
As I mentioned before, I’m a huge fan of the Ace Attorney series, but my experience
with Professor Layton titles is limited to the first game, which just didn’t impress
me.
In the case (heh) of this crossover, the time spent in each character’s gameplay style
pretty evenly.
For those like me who prefer one style to the other, that could feel a little disappointing.
But the Layton gameplay portions did win me over as I made my way through the story.
Exploring the world is done just like in the Layton series, talking to people, solving
puzzles, and finding hint coins to help you with said puzzles.
And it makes sense since puzzles are quite literally the most iconic things about a Professor
Layton game.
And this one’s no different as the title is chock full of them.
Quite a few need to be solved in order to progress with the game’s story, but there’s
a fair number that are found by poking around the game’s many areas.
To my surprise, most of the puzzles were rather fun to solve, mostly involving logical thinking.
There were a handful that could be solved either through random guessing or pure trial
and error, but more often than not I was able to think my way through a puzzle naturally.
I only had to resort to the old trick using all of the hint coins to find the solution
and then reset the game so I could get it on my first try a handful of times throughout
my playthrough of the game.
One complaint I do have, however, is that a lot of the puzzles tended to repeat the
same scenarios a handful of times, and even among the different types of puzzles, a lot
of them boil down to “get thing A from place B to place C.”
This isn’t a huge complaint, but it did make a handful of the puzzles feel a bit tedious.
The other half of the game is spent in the courtroom, where you cross-examine witnesses
and present evidence like in the Ace Attorney series.
The main twist put on this formula is that most of the time you will be cross-examining
multiple witnesses at once, and occasionally you’ll have to switch witnesses during the
middle of a specific question in order to find the right information to proceed.
This mechanic is interesting on paper, but in practice it mostly just adds another thing
to check in every single round of cross-examination.
A second, smaller element is that Layton’s hint coins can be used to point players in
the right direction during these sequences.
Everything else works just as well as it does in the better Ace Attorney games however,
and it’s interesting to have a trial where your “logic” is dictated by things like
witchcraft and magic instead of the normally scientific-minded approach present in the
main series.
Thankfully, both series’ mechanics manage to fit together remarkably well.
As an Ace Attorney fan, the Professor Layton segments did not feel out of place at all,
simply feeling like a more puzzle-heavy variation on the more mundane investigations of the
Ace Attorney universe.
Artistically, I love this game’s graphics.
Somehow, despite Professor Layton and Ace Attorney having drastically different art
styles, Capcom and Level-5 managed to create a world that fits both series like a glove.
The designs for the new characters are striking and memorable, and the background art in particular
is stunning at points.
It’s only when you look at the game from a technical standpoint that a few cracks begin
to show.
There’s some occasional minor clipping in the character models, and while the animation
is fluid there are points when the game’s framerate takes a pretty drastic hit.
Turning on the game’s 3D effect makes certain graphical oddities a bit more noticeable,
particularly the mix of 2D assets in a 3D space.
The game’s gorgeous animated cutscenes also look odd in 3D, since leaving the effect on
can result in things like houses floating above the dirt directly underneath them.
If you want the best visual experience you can with Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright,
you should probably turn the 3D off.
Musically, the game is adequate.
While the tracks manage to fit the mood, very few of them manage to be particularly memorable,
although the questioning theme for the Witch Trial is one that tends to stick in my head.
The voice acting fares much better than the music, since every actor goes all out and
delivers a performance that matches the character they are portraying.
The acting does get a bit hammy at points, but, for a game like this, it’s appropriate
for the most part.
I just wish that there was more of it, since the voice acting is only reserved for the
most important moments in the game.
Despite a few clunky bits here and there, Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
is a game that I enjoyed playing front to back.
I like the game quite a lot, and even though I’m far more of an Ace Attorney fan than
a Professor Layton fan, I found myself having just as much fun solving the puzzles on the
field as I did pointing out contradictions in the courtroom.
Although I wouldn’t suggest this game as an introduction to either series, if you’re
familiar with one or the other I highly recommend giving it a shot.
Hey, I’m Ted, or ExandShadow from BrainScratchComms, and I hope you enjoyed the review.
If you’d like to hear me talk a bit more about Ace Attorney, here’s a link you can
follow to the BrainScratchCommes retrospective on the Ace Attorney series.
Thanks for watching, and be sure to stay tuned to GameXplain for more on Professor Layton,
Ace Attorney, and other things gaming too.
Thanks guys.