Review: Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Grade: B-
Time Spent Playing: 13 hours


An hour or so into Layton I was prepared to write it off as a 5 dollar grocery store puzzle book, gussied up by a charming cast of characters and gorgeous aesthetic. Having now finished it, that's pretty much exactly what Professor Layton is.

That doesn't make it not fun, I just find the disconnect between the world your exploring and the puzzles you're solving in it to be unappetizing. While I should have been more interested in the carefree goings on of Layton and Luke, I was more focused on finding and solving the inventive and involving puzzles, often to the detriment of my investment in the story and characters. I find that to be a shame because within five minutes of turning the game on I was in love with the whole concept; as if Layton were some cherished cartoon from my childhood given new life on my DS. This is probably why I'm more interested in seeing the upcoming movie than I am playing the sequels.

Thinking about it now, it seems ridiculous that I'm finding such fault with marrying the two aspects of the game that I enjoy so much independently of each other, but I really do think the two don't compliment each other. I will probably give a sequel a try, but I really hope that they make the puzzles more context sensitive to what is actually going on in the story.

Review: Final Fantasy III

Grade: B+
Time Spent Playing: 25 hours


Like most people who aren't Japanese or bored psychopaths, I never played the original Final Fantasy III. If my time spent with FF5 is any indication; I probably would have hated it. To be frank, I didn't expect to enjoy this game as much as I did. I thought I was getting into a grinding, dungeon crawl with free form gameplay that will leave you naked, bruised, bloodied, and dying of pneumonia if you didn't choose your characters' vocations wisely. I was right.

But somehow, I liked what this game was serving up. From the no-fluff opening on, I had a ball piloting my mostly personality vacant warriors toward their collective destiny. After some splendid revolutions in RPG combat over the last few years, going back to basic turn taking should have been a chore. It wasn't. Maybe it's the handheld format or the simple fact that genre staples become staples because they work so well. Though, around hour twenty I started to feel some fatigue with the game, so basic turn based fighting does have its limits.

The story that's here is impressive. The events your party is swept up into hits on some interesting concepts and the characters that befriend you often meet sad and tragic ends. In contrast, your party of characters are pretty dull unless, like me, you groundlessly attribute personality to them and decide your party of savvy transvestites are out to stop Xande because he wears pleated khakis. Fashion faux pas!

I suppose the graphics are nice, but when all the art from Amano showcases an imagination many times greater than the game artists', you can't help but wonder what splendor a fully realized adaptation of his vision would amount to. I never understood why Square employed him only to water down his creations into standard manga fare.