Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy

Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy is the sixth and – hitherto – last game in the series to feature the archeologist Hershell Layton as the protagonist. It is, however, an uneven game that tries to offer more freedom to the player but at the expense of pacing and narrative focus. It still has its share of bizarre and tragic characters, but the narrative loses steam too soon to have the same impact of previous installments.

The story begins when Layton receives a letter from an esteemed professor that tells him of an archeological breakthrough: professor Sycamore claims that he’s found a “living mummy” in the isolated and snow-laden town of Fraenbourg. Hershell Layton, then, readily departs into another adventure with his loyal assistant Emmy, and curious his pupil Luke.

After arriving at Fraenbourg and finding a strange and mysterious girl trapped in ice – she’s called Aurora – the group discovers that they need to locate and acquire five special stones to unlock the secrets of the Azran civilization and discover what is their lasting legacy. Their main obstacle is Targent, a group of mercenaries that may be led by a menacing man named Bronev, but is actually full of silly thugs so inept that they would make Team Rocket look like overachievers in comparison.

To circumvent Targent and acquire the stones, Layton and his friends must solve the puzzles that haunt the minds of every eccentric figure they encounter in their journey. In Layton games, puzzle-solving is not just the main mechanic, but the raison d’etre of all the characters. To illustrate how powerful and advanced the Azran civilization once was, for example, Aurora claims that there wasn’t a single puzzle they couldn’t solve. In this series, every character has a puzzle to test the professor’s wit no matter the situation: here, there’s a moment in which Layton must solve a puzzle about matching shapes to form a gift box just to gain the trust of a sheep. It’s bizarre and silly, but also part of the game’s charm. In one of Azran Legacy‘s first scenes, a character even uses a puzzle to verify Layton’s identity: puzzles form this game’s soul. As a character points out: “Money may not grow on trees, but it appears that puzzles do.”

To further increase their charm, the puzzles usually begin with quirky descriptions (“This trio of criminal brothers have committed so many crimes together that even their breathing has become synchronized“) and go on to present an utterly bizarre context to their main gimmick. There are 150 puzzles of varying difficulty – and quality – scattered throughout the main story, and veteran players won’t be too surprised with their types, since most of them are built around the usual actions, like arranging blocks, doing simple math, or finding an answer to a very specific and arbitrary set of rules.

The point where Azran Legacy differs from previous entries is the fact that now Layton can travel to different lands to find the stones – whereas before he usually had to uncover the secrets of a single major city – and the player can visit them in any order. This freedom, however, proves to be more a curse than a blessing, since each new location has its own storyline, which means the main one is put on hold for the most part of the game.

The places Layton has to visit are certainly varied in theme and tone. There’s a walled city where all the grown-ups have been mysteriously put into a deep sleep, and a windy village up in the hills where they sacrifice young maidens to please their wind god; but also a tropical forest where Layton must simply discover a way to make the villager elder laugh, and a beach resort where people like to randomly trade stones just for fun. Overall, they’re a mixed bag: it’s difficult, for example, to care for the village elder and the people who live in his forest. It’s a simple storyline made even simpler by the fact that it has basically no interesting characters or surprises in store, which makes the whole affair feel like busywork to get one of the stones. On the other hand, the storyline involving human sacrifice deals with heavy themes, showing characters driven by fear and resentment, which thematically links the events to those of the main plot.

Azran Legacy’s main issue is precisely the fact that the main story is interrupted as soon as the game opens up to the player. After all, for us to be able to freely choose which destination to visit first and not get lost in the story in the process, the writers made each one irrelevant to the main events. Therefore, nothing meaningful happens as Layton is exploring not one, not two, but five different places. Sure, some of the characters are developed with their interactions with the many people they meet – especially Sycamore, who reveals his empathic and caring side – but that doesn’t change the fact that the stories and characters around them barely impact the game’s main events.

The game’s core theme revolves around the question of humanity’s worth: has is it learned from past mistakes or does it continue to be selfish and cruel? Traveling and meeting a lot of people, indeed, plays a role in shaping Aurora’s mind in the matter, but not all stories really contribute to that: take that of the walled city as an example. Its resolution is not about people being good or cruel to each other, but about an accident and its very unique repercussions.

Consequently, when all this traveling is done, and the game goes back to developing its villains and main themes directly, it’s already too late, because it has wasted most of its time with irrelevant storylines. In other words, Azran Legacy has an excellent introduction and an excellent climax, but nothing really interesting in the between. This leads to a lot of revelations, twists, and confrontations being crammed into the last hour of the game, without room to breathe.

And that’s a pity, because Azran Legacy, which had the task of concluding the overarching story of this trilogy – and the movie – about the Azran artifacts and Descole’s true intentions, has good ideas and some surprises up its sleeve. The antagonists, as it is usual with the franchise, start as villainous menacing figures but are eventually revealed to be tragic, broken people – sometimes in a very Layton kind of way: “I threw my whole life away to solve the greatest puzzle in modern history,” one of the antagonists laments. There’s also a great dialogue between Layton and Bronev, the leader of Targent, right at the end, that deals with identity, loss, and forgiveness, and reinforces the professor as a gentle, but resolute man.

The game continues to show a great use of color as well. Luke’s innocence is rightly represented by the soft blue of his clothes. Emmy’s energy and pro-activity are displayed by the bright yellow that defines her. Meanwhile, Layton’s personality – his intellect helps hide his gentle soul – is expressed by his brown coat covering the warm orange of his shirt. In contrast, professor Sycamore already shows signs of danger by wearing a red tie. If the color red only appears on Layton’s hat, showing that his mind is his weapon, Sycamore also wears a red glass, showing that it’s his perspective that is dangerous. To make matters even more intense, Sycamore’s ship is covered by the color purple – a color that is usually associated with death, villains, and the supernatural.

Presentation-wise, The Azran Legacy is breathtakingly gorgeous, especially in 3D, which makes the environments pop and come alive. The characters are all eccentric in their design: there’s a man shaped like a mushroom, and another one with two huge teeth that are bigger than his head. And the soundtrack, composed by series veteran Tomohito Nishiura, is still stellar with songs charged with melancholy and pathos.

Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy is an uneven, but competent ending for the Professor Layton series. With a great set of characters and stellar presentation, the game is only dragged down by its lack of narrative focus.

March 27, 2020.