I have come to the realization that, for me, the Professor Layton series is very similar to the John Madden Football games that you kids seem to enjoy so much: One comes out every fall, and it's the same as the last one, but I buy it anyway and love it.
Professor Layton and the Demon Flute was released last week in Japan, and thus begins my annual intense Japanese practice, picking through logic puzzles and a detective story. Demon Flute follows the usual formula: The silk top-hatted English professor and his sidekicks investigate a mysterious happening. In this case, it's a demon that comes to life and smashes up a town every time a certain flute is played.
Since this is the first game in the Layton prequel trilogy, and thus a bit of a jump start for the series, Level-5 has added a few features that will surprise longtime fans.
The most obvious is a new type of puzzle. The usual formula for a Layton game sees the professor and friends progressing through the story while solving a bunch of logic puzzles that are rarely connected to the narrative.
An example is at right. Here's the translation, if you're wondering:
(You can figure it out from that small screenshot, although it might be difficult because of the low resolution. Answer below!)
This is how the puzzles usually go -- you jump out of the story and into this separate mode. Demon Flute adds puzzles that are integrated into the story setting. So instead of jumping out of the town, a puzzle actually happens right there on the map. For example, when we reached a bridge that had ropes tied in front of it, I had to pick which rope to cut that would end up untying the entire knot.
These new puzzles, although rare, do a little bit to alleviate the disconnect between Layton's story and gameplay.
In previous games, you'd want to tap every bit of each area that you walked to, because hidden "hint coins" and puzzles are everywhere. Also, Layton and Luke often comment on certain things in the environments. In this game, multiple characters will comment on things if you click them multiple times, and coins or puzzles might be hidden under layers of dialogue. This seems like it could get annoying, but the dialogue disappears after you've been through it once, so it's actually a lot less annoying than the constant dialogue pop-ups of the first trilogy.
If you want to take a break from the main game, Layton games always offer some unique puzzles accessible from the main menu. *Demon Flute *has some of the best so far:
__Train* *__challenges you to plot a route for a toy train that passes by all of the stations on a map, but doesn't run out of fuel. This is really fun.
Fish is going to be a translator's nightmare. You have a two-letter Japanese word and a tank full of fish. If you feed the word to the fish, the letters change -- you can see how they change by looking at a grid of Japanese characters on the top screen. The object is to learn how each fish alters the letters (they generally shift a few places on the grid) and figure out how to transform the starting word into the goal word. It's fun, but completely untranslatable.
Finally, Puppet Theatre lets you choose from a variety of different words that you collect through your adventure in an attempt to finish the script for an amusing puppet show.
And that's not even mentioning Professor Layton's London Life, a bonus mode that opens up after you beat the game. Developed by Brownie Brown, it's a pixel-art RPG in which you go about Layton's workaday life as a London professor, doing errands for the people in town, keeping them happy and collecting rare items from them.
Apparently this mode involves trading items with other players viasure-chigai communication, so perhaps that's Level-5's aim here?
That's what's new about Professor Layton and the Demon Flute. Other than that, expect the same tough logic puzzles you know and love. And expect it to come out in America in a couple of years, since we all seem to be on a delayed schedule with regards to this series' localization.
(Answer: A, B, and D. C's shadow is different, meaning that he took the photo at a different time of day.)
Images: Level-5
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