I loved the Professor Layton series and when I heard that they were planning a cross over game with the Phoenix Wright series I figured that I should check it out. I was interested to find out what kind of game they could cross with Layton so I borrowed the whole series from B-Town. After many months and a few setbacks, including a broken DS I had to send back to Nintendo for repairs and a lot of time spent training for a Marathon, I finally finished the first game in the series.
I both loved and hated this game. I enjoyed the game play thoroughly as it is quite unique. In the game you are a defense attorney and you have to solve the case and acquire a not guilty verdict for your client. The court has its own set of rules that you are restricted by. The case can not exceed three trial days, which are split up by spans of time in which you are required to investigate and discover the clues you need to use in your clients defense. In court you are required to break down the arguments of the witnesses and either discredit them or prove that they are outright lying. This gets a bit hectic because if you present the wrong piece of evidence, or at the wrong time, too many times the judge declares your client guilty and you are forced to restart the chapter from the beginning. This can be wearisome because that means you need to sit through all the same dialogue that took an eternity to go through the first time. The other thing that drove me crazy about this game is that you have to search a bunch of locations for clues or evidence and often times you have no idea what you are looking for or where to start. I spent hours clicking on random stuff hoping I would accidentally stumble upon something relevant. In one case I was forced to use a walk through only to discover that the item I was looking for was in a remote area in a safe in a corner that I could barely discern.
After skimming back over my post I feel that I have focused more on the things I hated about the game and glossed quickly over the things I truly enjoyed. Let me remedy that situation now. This game is as I said "truly unique." It's one of those games that somebody probably threw the idea out there in a brainstorming session and everyone sat back and said "that sounds amazing but how do we pull it off." The processes of questioning everything the witness says trying to find faults and using evidence to discredit them is actually quite fun when you aren't trying to present evidence at random and hoping to get lucky. When you know what the misstep is and how to prove it you just want to yell "objection," and because of the on board microphone and the awesomeness of the game you actually can and it works. Like wise when you want more information from a witness you can scream "hold it" at your DS and they will give you more information.
The best part of the game is the cases and the wacky characters that you encounter. The cases are well thought out and get longer and more thorough as the game progresses (five cases in total). The last case took me a long time to beat but in the end after all the plot twists and turns it was easily my favorite of the group. The characters are amazing because they are clearly a Japanese twist on Americans. Its like an odd version of Anime but dumbed down for an American audience.
After finishing the game I am still very curious to see how they go about mashing this game up with the Professor Layton style. Both are very unique and it will be fun to see how they shave the edges of each game to get them to work together. Having played at least one game from both series now I doubt there will be a cool balance of familiar with another truly unique game play experience.
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