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3DS

One Year Later: Professor Layton Vs Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney

by Donald Theriault - August 28, 2015, 4:09 am EDT
Total comments: 2

Presenting a new feature we hope you don't have any objections to.

They said it would never happen, and then they said it would never release outside of Japan. When Level 5 and Capcom announced they were teaming up for Professor Layton x Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney, the immediate speculation was it wasn’t going to come west following the disappointing sales of Ace Attorney Investigations and its sequel not even being localized. Also, there is the complication of having Nintendo as the publisher of the western Professor Layton games. Thankfully, the deals were signed and the game released in North America on August 29, 2014.

A year later, with all of its content unlocked and players just now recovering from the screaming of that one witness in particular, the game doesn’t get a lot of attention from 3DS owners, which is a shame as they’re missing an experience that has to be seen to be believed.

The Critical Reaction

Nintendo World Report has two reviews for the game: Daan Koopman’s review, based on the European version, and Clay Johnson’s review of the North American release. As it turned out, both agreed that the game was an 8.5, and for similar reasons. Both reviewers felt the game represented the featured series well, and the story and settings worked well. The chief concern for both reviewers was the game’s difficulty, as Clay felt the puzzles hit their difficulty plateau too early and Daan felt the game overall was a tad easy.

Overall, Nintendo World Report was on the positive end of critical reviews. Layton vs. Wright has a 79 average on Metacritic (based on 69 reviews), with scores ranging from a top score (GamingAge) to 4/10 (gameblog.fr). Generally, North American outlets were more favorable to the title, as three of the lower scores came from European outlets. A couple of outlets, notably Joystiq and the aforementioned gameblog.fr cited concerns about padding to make the game longer.

Preview coverage of the game was generally upbeat for the game at NWR – Daan was enjoying the game in his previews, while Josh Max took great joy in tangling with an incompetent security guard. Famicast hosts James Charlton and Ty Shughart played the game at the 2012 Tokyo Game Show and were intrigued by the game, even with the choice of vertical slices they were presented with. However, the most memorable pre-release coverage for western eyes was Chris Kohler’s column about the Japanese release, in which he was quite nervous about the game’s quality: “Quite frankly I was kind of hoping that the Great Fire they were all predicting was going to destroy their town would just get it over with.” This checkered a lot of the pre-release discussion of the game, and certainly gave me pause before I pulled the trigger on buying it thanks to a discounted preorder from a local retailer.

Good News and Bad News

My experience with the game’s two series were heavily biased toward the Professor Layton side – I marathoned the original DS trilogy of games in a week once, and had beaten all but the sixth Layton game to this point. My Phoenix Wright experience before Layton vs. Wright was limited to the first case of Ace Attorney and the first two cases of Dual Destinies before I tried its DLC chapter and couldn’t handle a whale as a murderer. Even if it was a killer whale.

The biggest improvement for me as a Layton fan were the breaks the Wright sections provided and the small quality of life improvements. Recent Professor Layton games have felt like a grind through a series of puzzles, and this game had fewer puzzles that were regularly broken up by fun courtroom sequences. The ability to use hint coins during the trial sections – as Kohler cited – was greatly appreciated as I still wasn’t fully getting the hang of the courtroom sequences. As well, Layton vs. Wright is the only game so far that explicitly signals where the hint coins are by way of a small sparkle when passed over on the touch screen, which soothes my normal obsession with finding the hint coins and made it so I had plenty of ammo for the last case.

The downloadable content for the game deserves a mention as well – it provides a nice extra boost to the game’s content at no cost now that it’s all out. More importantly, it takes the fourth wall, beats it to death with a fish, and lights the corpse on fire. Free from the confines of the story, the characters are free to riff on their existence as video game characters and have cats and prosecutors doing the “tick tick tick YES!” puzzle solved motion. In the end, these moments serve as a cherry on top of a game that’s already had plenty of great fan-service moments, like Phoenix and the Professor simultaneously pointing in summation (even if Luke and the game’s original character Espella had to move Layton into place because he got turned into gold).

The game added a new element to the trial sequences in the form of group trials – because really, in an ancient world, anything can happen in the criminal justice system – and they worked well most of the time. However, there were a couple of cases where I got stuck in them when I shouldn’t have been, so I’m hoping The Great Ace Attorney fixes them up since they return there. Or maybe I mark them down because of needing to take headache medication after hearing “SIIIIIIIIIIIIR!” one too many times in Chapter 4. The other complaint I have is one that was common to the reviewers – even a year later, I still find it absurd that the game took nearly a half hour to go from the last move of the last case to the credit roll. It even managed to reveal “I have an incurable disease” and “We’ve found a cure for the incurable disease” within three minutes of each other. It wasn’t quite Return of the King bad, but it was close.

Ending length quibbles aside, the finale did promise that the Professor and Phoenix would meet again someday, and I’d be more than willing to jump into it if it happens. A new game would likely take the lessons from further Phoenix Wright game development to heart, and would give Layton something to do besides mobile games.

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Talkback

TOPHATANT123August 28, 2015

I really enjoyed Layton Vs Phoenix Wright, in terms of Layton hooks or beginnings to a Layton story I think this one is by far the best, but in terms of endings it's one of the worst perhaps tied with Miracle Mask.

ken.rosenbergSeptember 02, 2015

How does the game hold up from the perspective of a Phoenix Wright fan?

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