A puzzle game that will win your heart... and your brain.

User Rating: 9.5 | Layton Kyouju to Saigo no Jikan Ryokou DS
By noah364 | Review Date:
If I were to review this game quickly, I would say that it is just plain incredible. Even if you're not the type of person who likes to solve puzzles, this game is for you. It mixes fantastic, yet simple game play and animated cut scenes that are movie quality. Even better, the 18-20 hour story is incredible and at one point almost left me crying all over my DS. Every puzzle requires brainpower, even if some are much harder than others. Of course, the object of the game is to solve as many puzzles as you can in the least amount of tries possible, to get the most picarats, the Layton equivalent of points. The more picarats you have at the end of the story mode, the more extras you unlock. The harder a puzzle is, the more picarats it's worth, and if you solve it incorrectly, that number goes down. Also, if you get stuck, you can buy a hint with one of your hint coins, which you can find by tapping with your stylus around the expansive world of the future London. All of the controls are done with the stylus and you move around by simply tapping the shoe icon in the bottom corner and tapping which direction that you want to go in. The system works surprisingly well and gives a great deal of freedom of being able to move around quickly. You talk to people by tapping them, and everyone has at least one puzzle. The puzzles progressively get more difficult as the game goes on. Luckily, though, the hints are always helpful and never obscure.
If for any reason you are in a rush or just don't have the patience to finish a puzzle, you can always come back to it later. If so, there are two ways to solve puzzles that have been quit. One, go back to the person who gave it to you, or two, go to the "puzzle keeper" so to speak. There is always a character that you can go to solve all of your unfinished puzzles at once. This comes in handy when you don't have the patience to track down all of your puzzles that you've quit at their original locations.
There are also a variety of bonus activities that you can access by tapping the icon of Professor Layton's trunk in the top corner. This trunk can let you save, check up on the details of the story, or access the puzzle index, which is an archive for all of the puzzle that you have already solved. This is good for reviewing puzzles or stumping your friends. The three actual activities, though, are the parrot, the toy car, and the storybooks. Many of the people you help along your journey will give you stickers for the storybook or delivery requests for the toy car or parrot. If your parrot has solved enough requests, which are kind of like miniature, harder puzzles, he can help you find hint coins. The toy car and storybooks unlock bonus, super hard puzzles after being solved. These puzzles are worth a lot of picarats and can help you boost your score.
The cut scenes in Unwound Future will blow your mind. Superb voice acting blends with exquisite music and animation to make a cinematic experience. The beautiful art style resembles those subtle French films with the colors dulled to a slight degree and the picture itself being flawless.
I found very little problems with Professor Layton and the Unwound Future while playing it, but there are a few. First of all, the voice acting is sporadic and only appears in about a quarter of the dialogue, but this can be blamed on the limited memory space of the DS cartridge. Second of all, some characters don't serve any purpose. They'll give you one puzzle, and poof, that's their whole point for existing, even though every one of the characters has great charm and is beautifully designed. Third of all, this story is a very sad and emotional one, but Layton's eyes are only little dots. You can tell that the animators had a hard time showing emotion in them. This may sound minor, and it is, but it does detract from the Emotional qualities of the professor, and makes him seem a little less human. This, of course, makes it harder to empathize for him.
All in all, Professor Layton and the Unwound Future is a well rounded, exciting, and puzzling experience that is by far worth your thirty bucks.

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