Review #739: Professor Layton and the Last Specter

 Ain't no stopping the Layton steam train!

 I thought that Unwound Future couldn't be topped. I also expected that a prequel series would fail to match the previous games. Turns out I was wrong, Professor Layton and the Last Specter is a fantastic follow up to Unwound Future, and may very well be a contender for best Layton game.

 Set years before the original series, The Last Specter deals with Layton and Luke's first meeting. A giant specter is wrecking havoc in Luke's hometown, and his father Clark, a good friend of the professor, asks Layton for help. In what's a completely different set up from previous games, Luke is a precocious child that spends most of his time shut inside his own room and Layton has to slowly earn his trust. It's actually quite endearing. I always liked Flora, but Level 5 didn't know what to do with her, so now we've got Emmy, the professor's current assistant, and she's great. She's not as bright as Layton, and probably not as bright as Luke would eventually become, but she's the muscle of the group. The three of them make for a fantastic group of characters, and throughout the course of the game I grew quite fond of their dynamic. They also added more flavor text to items you can examine on the environments, always leading to all three characters interacting with each other. Charming! Overall, I think the story is not as interesting or as good as the one in the previous game, but they made up for that by giving us a more interesting cast.

 The game features the most amount of puzzles in a Layton game yet, at 170, two more than Unwound Future. Ironically, the storyline felt shorter than previous games, the previous game was at least an hour longer. The minigames felt a bit uninspired this time around. The train mini-game is an alternate take on the toy car from Unwound Future, the Fish Tank is very similar to the Parrot minigame and the new Puppet Theater works exactly like the previous game's sticker book but with verbs instead of stickers. It doesn't work as well either, since many verbs could work well enough with the context you're provided, such as 'moved' or 'placed', 'covered' and 'wrapped', etc.

 There is, however, one extra that makes up for that. An extra that was cut from the European version(Bastards!). Said extra is.... London Life! It's a 2-D slice-of-life game, not unlike Animal Crossing, in which you create a simple 2-D avatar and take on simple requests from civilians. Civilians being characters from every previous game in the series! Your objective is to amass Wealth and Happiness, the former being your means to buy objects to decorate your room with as well as clothes or what have you, the latter being a health-gauge of sorts, since scary stuff like touching bats or picking up a bug instead of a flower saps your happiness.

 Every time you go to sleep in your bed you advance time, and every in-game day you get new quests from civilians to fulfill. They start repeating eventually, but they are simple so as not to become too tedious. You can also do all sorts of jobs and activities to get money, like Taxi Driving, Bus Driving, getting luggage to the correct rooms in a hotel, juggling and a few others. It's not a '100 hour rpg' as they call it, but it's a surprisingly fun time waster. And it really adds up to the game, you could easily lose a few hours in this little "extra".

 Professor Layton and the Last Specter is a fantastic entry into the series, one of the best actually. Being the beginning of a prequel trilogy means that you don't need to have played any previous game in the series to get the most out of the story, it has the largest amount of puzzles in the series and it also has an extra that could pretty much be its own game, and it has nothing to do with puzzles or riddles, so it's pretty much like having two great games in a single cart. Know what? I'm no longer doubtful, this IS the best Layton game yet.
 8.0 out of 10