Been playing this Level 5 developed (Dark Cloud, Dragon Quest, Rogue Galaxy) puzzler/mystery when I've had the opportunity and it's one of those games that refuses to leave the ol' grey matter alone.
Fundamentally, it's a Sherlock Holmes-type game where you have to solve various mysteries in a village called St. Mystere. This is done via meeting various residents of the village, much like an extremely RPG-lite village exploration, who in-turn request you to solve puzzles before revealing information pertaining to a particular mystery. On the surface, it's one of those games that doesn't look like it's been developed by a Japanese developer, it's got a very quaint British-ness to it all.
The puzzles have been fiendishly quirky so far, a couple of them in the early going were fairly simple, obviously easing the player into the game and into the whole puzzle-solving mechanic. One thing I have noticed however, for a few of the puzzles, the answers are never the same twice.
I'm a good way through this game at the moment. Using it to relax after an intense Bayonetta sesh. It's absolutely lovely in the presentation department, with a strong sense of style. The best part is the animation preceeding a 'correct' or 'incorrect' announcement by the game. It's a four frame animation with each frame displaying for about 0.5 seconds. The first 2 frames are the same irrespective of whether you've got the right or the wrong answer, which puckers up the ol' pooh hole every time
Puzzle wise the first 60 or so puzzles are relatively straight forward, however I'm in a zone now where I'm stuck on a couple of the more difficult puzzles. There's a hint system available, but I'm not going to use that unless I absolutely have to.
In short this is a really charming game that's been well thought out and executed with high production values. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes the odd brain teaser.
There has been a few of these right? I've lost track. It was one of the series I was going to revisit come the XL!!!!!
I've not touched the DS in years, only for Wii demo testing mucking about, actually playing a game is weird.
Yes it's a big series in Japan, which is taking a while to drip feed over here. I guess there's a fair amount of localisation work to be done. Whoever did the localisation did a bang up job as it's extremely well done. The little cutscenes are quite surprisingly good on the DS. Very nice video and decent voice acting. Using the MoviClip codec it seems. Not heard of that one before now.
That is used on a few, struggling to remember - March of the Minis maybe? and PS0 I think.
I have Curious Village on the pile, was going to get started on that or Spirit Tracks. I'm put off Layton somehow as it seems a bit too gentle, and I'm not keen on the character designs, but I'll give it a go.
We have two Layton's now in the West, Curious Village and Pandora's Box (Diabolical Box in the States). Japan has three titles released so far, and a fourth soon, which starts a new trilogy, set as a prequel also explaining how Layton met the boy.
I quite like the character design. The NPC characters are very strange looking and have a sort of European look to them in a charicature sort of way. Luke - Layton's apprentice is pure Manga style and Layton himself has a very clean design, which is in keeping with his Dandy Gentleman persona.
I'm about 100 puzzles (11 hours) in (out of 120 or more) and I have a few puzzles that are causing me real problems. One appears to be critical to progression too, so I have to solve that one. the good news is that in the main there aren't too many pinch points, so you can leave puzzles unsolved and still progress the narrative.