Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright

This review contains spoilers — a lot of spoilers, all of them. Think of a spoiler: it’s in here.

Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright is a crossover as ambitious as it is unexpected, with a complex story that ably mixes the disparate elements of its source materials while crafting its own tale about grief, faith, and collective hatred.

Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright seem an odd mix at first. Excluding their protagonists’ peculiar penchant for pointing forward during climatic moments, there’s little alike between these two series: they each have their own distinct art style and gameplay mechanics, with one focusing on exploration and puzzles, while the other, on verbal confrontations and courtroom drama. The approach here, then, is to make one structure complement the other, with the puzzle-solving aspect of Professor Layton serving as an engaging interlude between each case fought by Phoenix Wright in court.

One night, Professor Layton is visited by a strange girl in need of help. Her name is Espella Cantabella and she claims to be from the town of Labyrinthia, which Layton never heard of. She’s on the run with Layton’s old student, Carmine Accidenti, who lived up to his name and got himself injured in a car accident. Espella claims they are being pursued by witches, which also puzzle Layton: he has spent his whole career finding logical explanations for the supernatural – even though they’re usually so preposterous that the difference hardly matters –, so when he is himself spirited away to Labyrinthia, after peeking at Espella’s mysterious grimoire, he’s beyond intrigued.

This opening functions as an introduction to Professor Layton, presenting the character as the prototypical English gentleman – he’s the gaming version of Sherlock Holmes, after all –, who loves a nice cup of tea before solving a difficult case. When his apprentice, the little boy Luke, asks him what they’re going to do about Espella, Layton’s answer embodies the spirit of the character: “It is the duty of every gentleman to help a lady in trouble.”

They move to the scene of Accidenti’s accident, which has been isolated by the police, and are surprised to find his car destroyed at the top of a tree, with a huge hand mark on the hood – a stone statue nearby seems to be the culprit, but Layton is not ready to accept this conclusion yet. The game’s narrative handles magic like this at first: presenting preposterous problems, puzzles whose solution seem to require Layton to accept the supernatural.

Speaking of puzzles, they make the bedrock of Layton games, with the characters always asking the professor to solve one, be it a mathematical question, a logical riddle, a geometric problem, or one with a more inventive design. The game acknowledges this early on, when a police officer asks the professor to confirm his identity… by solving a puzzle. There’s often a quirky justification for every puzzle Layton must solve in his games, with the characters always giving an outlandish excuse for the one they’re about to hand the professor. The fact that no one questions this widespread behavior is part of the series’ charm – and maybe the world would be a better place if everyone really resolved their issues with puzzles.

After Layton and Luke are spirited away to Labyrinthia – after pushing Espella onto a small freighter to save her from a witch –, we move on to Phoenix Wright, a lawyer who’s visiting London in an exchange program, accompanied by the young and spirited Maya Fey. His case is supposed to be a simple one, as his client’s agent, a woman called Darklaw (if you’re wondering if she’s an antagonist, wonder no more), claims that the accused, Espella Cantabella, will confess to everything, having indeed tried to steal an item from a freighter and assaulted a person. Espella, appearing strangely lethargic, indeed confesses to all charges, seeming too eager to accept blame and punishment. Therefore, he’s just supposed to present the case and let the prosecution take care of the rest. But Phoenix Wright, of course, will have none of that.

His games are all about courtroom drama, which can be a bit freestyle in its proceedings: in a Phoenix Wright court anything can happen, the defense can hide evidence and present it at the last minute as a surprise to prove that the real culprit is none other than the prosecutor himself, a conclusion supported by a long and thorough cross-examination of the witness, who is a dolphin.

This is how the first witness in Espella’s case introduces himself: “The name’s Smiles. Johnny Smiles… Security guard supreme,” Smiles says, right after throwing his cap toward the camera and lifting his sunglasses for extra effect. “Whatever I do, I do in style. Is a bit of vanity a crime,” he answers, when Wright asks him why he was patrolling the freighter with those same sunglasses… at night – thus making it difficult for him to see what was happening in detail. Here’s the secret of the series’ success: there’s a method to the madness, with the insanity of the proceedings and the bizarre quirks of the characters often playing an important part in the story.

The main mechanic during these sections is the ability to cross-examine the witness: we go through each line of their testimony as many times as we want, pressing for more information until we find something in our court record (the case files, such as the autopsy report, crime weapon, so forth) that points at a contradiction or flaw in their logic. If they claim that they saw Espella in front of the victim, but we have a medical report detailing that the victim received a blow from the back, we present the report, making Phoenix Wright point forward and triumphantly yell, “OBJECTION!” while a soaring track – which has no right to being this good – plays in the background.

Both series’ soundtracks perfectly complement each other. While Phoenix Wright’s tracks bring this triumphant energy to the scenes, pumping us up for the next twist and revelation, Professor Layton’s music, with its violins and trumpets, possesses this more melodic quality that adds to the sense of mystery and pathos, reinforcing the tragedy of the main characters.

It’s with Layton that we are first introduced to the town of Labyrinthia, whose musical theme embodies the tone of his series. Both the professor and Luke don’t know how to react to it at first, suddenly seeing themselves in this walled-off town displaying medieval architecture, patrolled by knights, with minstrels performing in the square.

Their own Victorian garments immediately stand out, with Labyrinthia’s inhabitants finding Layton’s top hat particularly striking. It seems they either traveled in time to the past or are stuck in the middle of a fantasy story. Labyrinthia’s ruler is called the Storyteller, after all, and they soon come across a parade to celebrate the unveiling of His next story.

The Storyteller is more than a king in Labyrinthia, with the townsfolk treating him like a living deity with the power to change the very fabric of reality with his words. During the parade, a woman thanks him for having gotten pregnant, and another, for a family member’s sudden recovery from a terrible illness. It all happened because the Storyteller wrote so in his story. His words are treated as gospel: when Layton and Luke ask the people why they believe that what is written in the story will come to pass, the townsfolk are shocked to hear such a heretic question, with a man even pulling his own beard in distress, before threatening to call the guards – in usual Layton fashion, NPCs’ reactions are hyperbolical for comical effect.

The Storyteller’s story is a sacred text. This means that his words are not fiction – as his brilliant name suggests – but a window to the truth; they are prophetic. The people of Labyrinthia are people of faith, the parade is a religious ritual, and the Storyteller is a God. To avoid Luke getting them arrested with his questions, Layton explains to him the tricky thing about faith: it can disguise itself as reality, supplanting it. Believing in the story is not a matter of faith for those who believe in it precisely because they believe in it. As Layton say, “to the people of Labyrinthia it appears to be a matter of common sense.”

An old white man, with his face half-covered by an owl mask, wearing a brooch displaying both the sun and the moon, the Storyteller is a character built around wisdom and duality: men and God, reality and faith, blessing and deception. They’re all in his design. His next story, however, worries everyone, as it foretells that two people will meet an unfavorable end at the hands of a terrible witch.

As he explores Labyrinthia and meets its peculiar inhabitants – who may later play a crucial role in the Witch Trials, serving as witnesses – Layton, of course, has to solve many puzzles. When a minstrel (a Bard named Bardly) hands Layton the map of the town, it’s a puzzle: the map is in pieces that must be arranged correctly. There’s a great puzzle where we must discover who’s murdered a king by analyzing testimonies knowing only the killer will lie, which has a twist playing with our misconception about gender roles. Sometimes, the stakes are amusingly higher, such as when a knight doubts if Layton is an upstanding member of their community or a suspicious fellow that needs to be arrested, and hands him a puzzle to solve the matter.

As Layton and Luke explore Labyrinthia, they come across Phoenix and Maya, who are apprentice bakers, having no recollection of their past lives. They work for Patty Eclaire, a sweet baker who turns incredibly violent near everyone who doesn’t pay the proper respects to the majesty of bread. Espella Cantabella lives in the same house and, to the surprise of absolutely no one, she gets in trouble once again: when two thugs, named Robbs and Muggs, try to rob and mug her at night, they are suddenly engulfed in flames and the people at the scene accuse Espella of witchcraft (you can’t spell Espella without spell, after all). The girl, however, has an ace (attorney) up her sleeve and asks two apprentice bakers to assist in her defense: Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey.

The bulk of the game is the Witch Trials, which take place next to a pit of fire, where the accused stands inside an iron maiden, ready to be cast in the flames when the inevitable guilty verdict is pronounced by the judge. Phoenix Wright immediately feels something is not right: the people of Labyrinthia consider the prosecutor – an Inquisitor, as this is a religious trial – a celebrity, chanting his name when he enters the courtroom. The Inquisitor is Zacharias Barnham, a dashing red-haired man clad in armor who constantly points his big sword at Phoenix Wright as a display of strength.

Wright knows too well that if the people favor the prosecutor in a trial – or the judge, for that matter –, they are not after truth and justice, but after the cathartic release of a guilty verdict. This allows the prosecution a lot of crucial leeway. When the witnesses change their testimony to better suit a new piece of evidence, for example, saying that Estella was holding a bucket of milk one time and a magical scepter the other – just to get her convicted – no one bats an eye. Barnham sees nothing wrong with that and much less the judge, covered in his sinister purple robe. It’s not what about what the witnesses actually saw but what they should have seen if the accused is guilty. Most of the witnesses lie not because they’re guilty or have a hidden agenda, such as in normal Phoenix Wright stories; they lie here because they’re part of a spectacle and the guilty verdict is what is expected of them.

The game cranks this up to eleven when it presents testimonies as “group affairs,” with all witnesses standing behind the bench at the same time to offer their recounting of the events, which means that one witness often reacts to the story of the other. There’s this hilarious moment when Wright points a contradiction in their testimony and the witnesses start to quarrel among themselves, complaining about the flaws in each other’s story. So, the witnesses have a brilliant idea: they call for a “meeting” and form a circle – in front of everyone – where they start to discuss a strategy to “defeat” the defendant and match their stories. At the same time, the people are chanting Barham’s name and calling “logic” a form of witchcraft. Phoenix Wright realizes he’s in big trouble.

He also struggles a lot at the beginning of the trial because he can’t just point out that magic doesn’t exist and expect the court to operate in a rational way. If he says that Espella isn’t a witch because witches are not real, the judge will react as if Wright had said that big corporations have our best interest at heart: he’ll laugh at such a ridiculous notion and simply end the trial right then and there. Espella is about to be thrown into the flames, then, when Layton comes to save the day. The professor explains to Phoenix Wright that the people of Labyrinthia and the attorney are operating in two very distinct wavelengths. Wright can’t convince them of Espella’s innocence because he’s speaking in a different language altogether, one of empathy and logic, while they speak with one of hatred and faith. In other words, they are not communicating with each other.

So, Layton urges Wright to play within their rules, to act as if their paranoid delusions were real and still prove that, according to them, Espella is still innocent. To that end, Layton hands him a grimoire that explains the rules of magic in Labyrinthia, making the dynamic of the cross-examination change. Now Phoenix Wright is pointing out contradictions within their own belief system: if an incantation needs a scepter, how Espella can be a witch if she was holding just a bucket of milk? Oh, she made the scepter invisible? But if the incantation to make something disappear is instantaneous, how come the witnesses only heard it after Robbs and Mugs were incinerated?

When the witnesses are finally pushed to a corner, it’s not only cathartic to… witness them breaking down and losing their composure, but also highly amusing, due to their over-the-top animations and desperate outbursts: “I must have said it… how many times now? I lost my glasses days ago… Were you even listening? I’ll say it again. Over a MILLION times! ‘I lost my glasses! I lost my glasses!’ Do you LIKE evidence, Sir Defender? Do you LOVE proof, Sir Top Hat?! Then, PROVE I dropped my glasses at the crime scene! Ha! You CAN’T prove it! In. Other. Words. You lose,” the young flower seller named Kira says, after Wright turns the trial over its head and points out that she’s the more likely culprit.

When the trial ends with Kira being cast into the pit of fire – to her dismay, her glasses were inside the bucket of milk –, Phoenix and Maya realize too late their mistake: the problem of speaking like a lunatic with lunatics is that even if we convince them of our point, lunacy still prevails in the end. Witches supposedly don’t exist, but a girl has just been horribly executed for being one. And before she’s killed, Kira brings all attention back to Espella, accusing her of being the leader of all witches, the great Bezella. Espella, fearing for the safety of her friends, accepts the charges and turns herself in.

Layton and Luke go immediately to speak with the Storyteller himself in his secluded tower, trying to get a glimpse of his true plans, while solving many puzzles on the way. Phoenix and Maya, meanwhile, discover that the High Inquisitor in Labyrinthia is no other than Darklaw herself, who acts as if she never met them. The duo, then, visits the sight of an unsolved murder, that of the local alchemist, a case which they believe may be related to Espella’s – who they find out is the Storyteller’s own daughter. While investigating the Alchemist, they discover that magic in Labyrinthia is, of course, gender-exclusive. If a woman cures someone inexplicably, she’s a witch using forbidden magic who must be burned down. If a man does the same, he’s an alchemist using secret techniques who must be valued as the good local doctor.

The people believe the Alchemist’s murder was the witches’ doing, in part because he was found dead in a locked room, but also because they’re usually to blame for everything. The hatred the people of Labyrinthia feel toward witches is fascinating and a crucial part of the game’s main theme. Witches may harm people in Labyrinthia, but so do normal people. There’s the legend of a great fire created by the Great Witch Bezella that destroyed the town, but there’s no one alive who remembers the moment. It’s just a story. There’s nothing particularly harmful about them that warrants such particular hate. But in the Storyteller’s story, witches are the number one enemy, they are the culprit behind every misdeed and misfortune. They are a collective scapegoat, the political bogeyman, the construct that helps to direct the hate of the people to an imaginary enemy. It’s no wonder that the Storyteller is unhappy with Layton’s presence in his town, sensing that the professor’s logical approach will endanger whatever is really happening in Labyrinthia. A new story is so written, stating that a newcomer in the town will meet a terrible fate: fearing it’s about Phoenix Wright, Layton hushes to the Alchemist’s house, only to be himself turned to gold. The only other person present in the room is Maya Fey, who is now the one accused of being a witch.

The proceeding trial starts with a tragic turn: Luke is now one of the witnesses, demanding justice for the killing of his beloved mentor and not believing in Maya’s innocence. Luke is young, hurt, and feels betrayed. Layton – on account of being dead – is not there to assist Phoenix Wright anymore. And Maya – on account of being in a cage on top of a pit of fire – can’t help him either. It’s Espella, then, who offers to assist the lawyer and stand by his side, trying to prove Maya’s innocence – which shows her gentle heart, as Espella has no idea what she’s doing, but she’s doing it nonetheless because it’s the right thing to do.

When Barnham accepts Espella’s request and allows her to stand beside Wright in court, we start to see another side of the Inquisitor, which we only got a glimpse of during the final moments of the previous trial: when Kira’s guilt becomes clear, Barnham lets Wright loose, just demanding enough evidence to leave no doubt that the flower seller really is a witch. Here, he feels for the loss of Sir Top Hat, and thinks there’s no harm in letting Espella help: he enjoyed the verbal altercations with Phoenix and Layton and appreciates that, in the end, they led everyone to the truth. Barnham’s dog, Constantine, is a cute poodle wearing a helmet who’s very keen to bite Wright. Constantine functions as a window to the Inquisitor’s character: behind the aggressive façade, he’s a good person whose sense of duty can sometimes keep him from doing the right thing. Constantine is in love with Espella’s cat Eve, for example, but refuses to admit it because his knightly pride doesn’t allow him space for sentimental nonsense – but he brings her sweets, from time to time, nonetheless. Inquisitor Barnham, in turn, will have a similar relationship with Darklaw.

During the trial, he also loses his patience with one of the witnesses, an old drunkard named Emeer Punchenbaug, who keeps messing things up. The town’s punchbag, he’s always giving reason to everyone that chastises him: he’s basically a kleptomaniac, stealing everything that is lying unguarded in front of him. In the first trial, he was a surprise witness, yelling from the audience that he too saw what transpired. However, he soon proved to be the most unreliable witness of all, constantly changing his story to better match whatever suited the moment. Here, there’s a moment when Wright asks Emeer if he knows about a missing item at the crime scene and the man tries to dodge the question. Barnham, then, promptly yells at him, “Witness! Just what have you done this time? You look like a dog caught making a mess on the carpet!” The Inquisitor pushes Emeer to reveal that he stole nothing less than Layton’s golden arm from the crime scene and sold it in the market, pretending it was a piece of art. In the first trial, he was dressed in common rags, but now he appeared covered in jewels and drinking from a golden cup, so we were given kind of a good hint that something was… off.

The witnesses in the game are always a delight in their bizarre eccentricities, making each trial feel unique. This one also has Birdley, a bard with a bird, who always testifies singing: “Victim of magic, sparkly and done for, I heard the staff fall on the floor.” And later on, even his parrot Mister Cracker becomes a key witness, very eloquently repeating each sound it heard when the crime took place: “Aaaaah! Slam! Dearie, dearie me! Clang! Godoor!”

The last one is a magical incantation that allows a witch to open portals on green walls and, as it happens, the Alchemist’s wall just happened to have a suspicious green patch badly concealed by a portrait. It’s interesting to notice how at this point Phoenix Wright is already so immersed in Labyrinthia’s way of thinking that he’s acting as if magic were indeed real. When he hears about Godoor, his conclusion is genuine: Maya is innocent because a witch used the spell to open a portal to the Alchemist’s chamber. The fact that everyone around him believes in magic is too powerful a social force for him to resist. If he starts the first Witch Trial as an odd baker who had no reason to be in a court of law, now his rival, Inquisitor Barnham, refers to him as Sir Blue Knight as a sign of respect. And it all changed when Wright accepted their crazy ideas and acted in the same way: he started to belong.

And it just so happens that the Alchemist’s butler, the young Greyerl, used to wear a green gem as a brooch, the same gem that is needed for a witch to cast Godoor. To the surprise of no one but all Labyrinthians, Phoenix Wright discovers that the one behind the murder is the butler. Greyerl is a witch. The Alchemist already knew about that, but had decided to take her under his wing nonetheless – she’s just a girl, after all – and asked her to disguise herself as a boy, so that no one would ever suspect anything: as a man, Greyerl could pursue in the art of alchemy without being persecuted. However, after the sudden appearance of a bell tower in the middle a stormy night in Labyrinthia, the Alchemist’s demeanor changed completely and became somber. Greyerl feared her master was going to change his mind about her and give her to the Inquisition. She became paranoid. And when she got a glimpse of the letter the Alchemist was writing the Storyteller, talking about exposing the truth about a witch, she decided to act. She only failed because the Alchemist, after writing that letter, had taken his own life, drinking poison – whose bottle Punchenbaug also stole from the crime scene. In other words, Greyerl ended up strangling an already dead body. Maya is set free, but when they put the butler in the iron maiden, she tries to be a hero and save the girl. However, she ends up herself inside the cage, which drops into the fire pit.

Barnham is horrified to have let an innocent die on his watch and so helps a distraught Wright to escape with Luke and Espella, even though she’s accused of being the great witch Bezella. The Inquisitor began the game taking guilt for granted but now he is already understanding a fundamental principle in criminal law, the presumption of innocence: “I know very well what she is accused of… But for the time being, that is precisely what she is: accused. Not guilty,” he says. He points them to the direction of a shady tavern, where they will be safe from the Inquisition – and just the fact that he knows about that tavern and is friends with the owner already says much about how Barnham’s knightly façade is just that: a façade.

They have some time to grieve and we learn that in Labyrinthia puzzle-solving can even be a bonding experience. Wright has a spirited talk about grief and responsibility – about the need to accept the pain over a loss and the powerlessness behind that need – with a complete stranger after solving a puzzle. At the end of the conversation, Wright thanks the woman for her time, who in turn replies, “Pfft, no need for formalities. We just did share a puzzle, after all.”

The characters in the game never fail to impress with their creative designs. Near the tavern, for example, we also find Cooper, a lonely boy with shaggy hair who lives inside a barrel and understandably hates everyone who tries to roll it, lean on it, or touch it. “Never forgive when throw rubbish at Cooper barrell! Fling Cooper apple at head. SPLAT!” he says after revealing there are many things in his barrel and inviting Luke inside. Luckily, Luke declines and Cooper offers a particularly nasty puzzle about boxes. It’s all too random to not be funny.

Few people would really buy that the main characters of the original games would die in a crossover, so Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright gets it right to not stretch the suspense more than it needs to show the impact on the characters. So, we soon see Maya running away from cloaked figures in a dense forest and being saved by none other than Professor Layton himself, who uses his great swordsmanship to dispatch the fiends with a wooden stick. As they explore the woods – Layton is amused to hear he was turned into a gold statue –, they come across a community of the same cloaked figures that were pursuing Maya. They call themselves Shades and answer to a great witch, who appears before them and – to Maya’s surprise – lets them wander free in the forest, teasing Layton about solving its puzzle. In a nice touch, the font of the witch’s text is purple, which gives her lines a bit of dramatic flair.

Meanwhile, Phoenix Wright and Luke bump into Kira in the market, the flower seller who was executed as a witch in the first trial. She promptly disappears from sight, but this leads Wright to investigate the pit of fire in the courtroom and discover that, at the very bottom, there’s a wagon that takes the person out of the city and into the nearby forest.  The game, then, is pairing the main character of a series with the sidekick of the other, Layton with Maya, and Phoenix with Luke. And while Wright tries to harden himself to better protect a troubled Luke, giving him hope that maybe both Layton and Maya are still alive, Maya tests Layton’s gentlemanly demeanor with her always outlandish suggestions and comments. When she starts to fuel a Shade’s paranoia just for fun, for example, Layton has to intervene, “Miss Fey, please refrain from putting any terrible scenarios into his head.”

They both come across Inquisitor Barnham, who arrived in the forest after following Darklaw – he’s beginning to question his superiors and get that there’s something strange going on. The game never tries to hide that Darklaw is a witch, not only with her – let’s say “not subtle” – name but also with the golden gauntlet she wears, which is the same one the witch who pursued Espella at the beginning used. Barnham returns to Labyrinthia, disturbed by the implications of what he just saw, and both groups finally meet with each other in the nearby ruins. It’s a touching reunion that becomes amusing when we see the contrast between Luke and Maya’s reaction: while the boy sobs and barely finds words to express his relief, Maya goes, “YOOOOOOOOO, NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK! Hey, Nick! Niiiiiiick!”

When they investigate the ruins, Layton discovers it used to guard something called “The Bell of Ruin,” which may now be standing at the top of the mysterious bell tower that so upset the Alchemist when it suddenly appeared one night in Labyrinthia. However, as they speak of the bell, Espella changes her demeanor too, and just like the Alchemist, she gets horribly distraught: she’s suddenly taken by flashbacks of her as a kid watching a great fire wrecking the town. She gets pale, as if confronting a terrible truth, and says, “I am Bezella… The Great Witch Bezella.” Espella runs away and, as they follow her back into Labyrinthia, they find out that the Storyteller wrote a “final story” that prophesizes his death at the hands of Bezella. The religious motif is back in full force as the “final story” is revealed to be one about martyrdom: his death is supposed to free the people of Labyrinthia after the final Witch Trial. They all run to the bell tower just in time to witness Espella conjuring an enormous fire dragon and launching it directly at her father, who is engulfed in the flames.

In the chaos that follows, Barnham tries to confront Darklaw, having finally stopped seeing his role as a persecutor as a quest for the guilty verdict, now understanding that his duty is to search for the truth. But his growth as a character is tragically cut short, since Darklaw, as expected, immediately arrests the Inquisitor, locking him away in the town’s dungeon. The reason she gives him, however, surprises Barnham: she criticizes the knight not for his disobedience but for only going halfway – and being too late at that. Darklaw lauds him for having followed her into the forest but chastises the Inquisitor for not having had the courage to confront her right then and there and remove her mask: even when Barnham starts to finally search for the truth, he’s so wary of what he’ll find that he doesn’t dare to follow it through to the end. Darklaw takes Barnham out of the picture not because he became unruly and started digging things up, but because he took too long to do so. She’s not covering her tracks; she’s punishing him for not having dared sooner. Barnham was always with Phoenix Wright at the end of the trials, but only at the end, when it mattered little: he’s always too late at doing the right thing. His arc of redemption, then, cannot be completed. Tragic characters are the ones whose terrible downfall is inevitable due to their fatal flaw: because they are like that, they could not have met any other end. When Darklaw asks Barnham why he never dared to question the Storyteller, the Inquisitor answers that duty and honor forbade it. And so Darklaw’s reply seals the tragedy: “And so you failed. Your knightly pride was your critical flaw.”

But what does this scene say about Darklaw herself? If what she wanted was to have Barnham rebelling sooner, it means that she needs people to question things. She’s not hiding the truth about Labyrinthia, but trying to expose it. It’s why she allowed Layton and Maya to wander freely in the forest and meet her Shades. In the Final Witch Trial, when she appears as Phoenix Wright’s rival, standing behind the bench that Barnham used to occupy, Darklaw is revealed to be an unusual and intriguing antagonist. Because, unlike Barnham, who opposed Wright with his questions, Darklaw seems to be subtly guiding the lawyer: when she tries to block a line of argument or dismiss a piece of evidence is to signal to him that they are important, that he’s finally on the right track. She wants Wright to push harder at these moments to find the truth, especially because she knows the gullible judge will always side with her. There’s this great moment when the judge asks a crucial question to Espella – who’s almost in a catatonic state, hellbent on admitting her guilt and nothing else – and Darklaw cuts him off, saying that his query, although fascinating, doesn’t actually matter. The judge, then, comically replies: “The inquisition has ingeniously solved the query by disregarding it.” We just wish we could solve our problems the same way.

The trial itself is appropriately chaotic. There are nothing less than ten witnesses at the same time: an eccentric group of guards called Vigilantes, who were guarding the bell tower and apprehended Espella after the Storyteller’s murder. Their leader is a bullish fellow who hates Wright and only cares about his reputation. “We have been guarding the bell tower ever since it appeared! No one’s ever said a bad word about us,” he says, as if the Vigilantes were on trial instead of Espella. Another guard, Shakey, is in a comically bad state, covered in bandages and barely supporting himself with a feeble crutch: “M…m…my eyes…went h-hazy… It…it… made me sh-shake and I… got d-dizzy,” he testifies before falling over. Maya pities the poor guy and, honestly, we all should too. Servius and Trodden, meanwhile, are in love with Foxy, a dominant female guard. Servius and Trodden are into BDSM and – to Wright’s consternation – are very forward about that (“You have no idea how delightful it is when Foxy steps on us in her dirty stilettos, imprinting the mud on our backs,” one of them says, before presenting the mark of Foxy’s heel on his back. Maya seems to get the appeal of women stepping on men and, honestly, we all should too. Then, there’s Mr. Wordsmith, who crafts his very crucial testimony very eloquently: “I have been mulling over this incident… and just now, the realisation dawned on me. I… remember nothing.” And we couldn’t forget Dzibilchaltunchunchucmil, who speaks in a heavy Scottish accent. “Ah didne rin awa’! Ah did mah duty when Ah doscovered th’ intruder, Ah teel ye!” Dzibilchaltunchunchucmil says. Maya seems to understand Dzibilchaltunchunchucmil perfectly and, honestly, she kind of lost me with this one.

Shuffling through ten bonkers testimonies makes pressing them for more information laborious and presenting the correct evidence at the right moment harder: since there are too many options, we must really think about what we are doing or the sequence will drag on for a while. In classic Phoenix Wright fashion, however, the quirks of some of the witnesses are not there just for show, but end up really influencing the trial. Here, for example, BDSM is crucial to prove Espella’s innocence. The mud prints of Foxy’s heel suddenly become relevant when Wright realizes we can compare them with the ones found at the crime scene and discover there were more people up in the bell tower.

At this point, the game’s structure is shaken up, as it alternates the trial with Layton’s search of the Storyteller’s tower and eventually even offers a puzzle during the trial itself: Phoenix Wright must crack the concealed mechanism that opens the path to the top of the bell tower, where none other than Kira, the flower seller, is hidden. The plot suddenly thickens, since to operate the mechanism Wright needed two pendants, Espella’s, and the pendant of the person who assaulted Kira in the tower and locked her up there: High Inquisitor Darklaw. Phoenix Wright demands that she testify but Darklaw argues that she can’t be a witness since there would be no one left to serve as a prosecutor (Barnham being imprisoned for treason). This is when the title Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright becomes justified, as Layton – back from the Storyteller’s tower – makes a great entrance. “I can prove conclusively… that Espella Cantabella is in fact the Great Witch Bezella,” he says, before taking Darklaw’s place as an Inquisitor.

Layton as a prosecutor is Darklaw on steroids. He’s also guiding Phoenix Wright to find the truth, but much more forcefully, completely shutting down the lawyer when he’s treading the wrong line of reasoning. And, unlike Barnham and Darklaw, Layton is equally harsh with the witnesses, never letting anything slide. When Kira accuses Darklaw of having carried Espella to the bell tower and being the leader of the Shades, Darklaw addresses the judge, “Milord, there is nothing left for me to say. ‘Tis the word of the High Inquisitor versus that of a witch. Tell me, who would you sooner believe?” She knows that he will promptly disregard the accusation, but Layton quickly steps in: “This isn’t a matter of believing or not believing. I’m afraid those are words that carry no meaning here. The only thing that carries any meaning here within the courtroom is evidence. Don’t you agree, Mr Wright?” Phoenix Wright realizes it’s his cue and presents proof that eventually makes Darklaw confess to everything. Exposing the truth, after all, was her plan all along, but she needed solid evidence and the proper context for the judge – and the people of Labyrinthia, who are all in the audience – to believe the earth-shattering news she was about to give: magic is not real.

If you could point at one problem of Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright it would be that the explanation behind Labyrinthia is too farfetched to be believable. The logistics don’t make sense, they’re too grandiose to be possible, and filled with holes when we look at the details. Layton’s stories, with their many artificial cities, have always been accused of that, that there’s no verisimilitude in the inner workings of their plot twists. However, Layton’s world is one where people solve their issues with puzzles and talking to animals is possible: over-analyzing the realism of the worldbuilding is missing the point. The focus of their stories, then, has always been on the dramatic impact the twist has on its many characters. And here this approach certainly succeeds.

Darklaw explains that the purpose of the Shades is to make people believe in magic. They follow Labyrinthia’s so-called “witches” all day long, concealed by a cloak whose color – pure black – the townsfolk were conditioned to not see and avoid. When the witches say an incantation, the Shades use mechanical contraptions to create the illusion of magic. This is only possible because the water of Labyrinthia has a special substance that makes people vulnerable to suggestion and the sound of silver: the Shades, then, carry tiny silver bells that they ring to make everyone pass out. They tell them what they are supposed to see, and use the mechanical contraptions to sell the lie. One of the final shots of the game shows the true Labyrinthia, when everyone is free of the substance’s effect and we see many cranes and structures all over the town to help the Shades create their magic (and, as we’ve established, a true gentleman should never ask questions such as “what about the shadows those things cast on the ground and the noise they made?”)

The judge is understandably shocked. He has been killing women for being witches for years, the prospect of it being all a lie is too terrible to accept. Darklaw assures him no one was killed, for the fire pit is a fake, and the victims are all brought to the woods to become Shades. Just like the judge, the people of Labyrinthia are also confused, skeptical, and angry. They are not buying it. Hell, even Phoenix Wright is surprised and can’t bring himself to believe magic is not real – and he knows magic is not real. But belief can supplant reality and Wright’s own world is now one of fire dragons and witches. This is the beauty of the twist: thematically, it seals the deal. The Storyteller’s story and the witches being all a lie is crucial to reveal the manipulation behind their design. If they were true, not only the people would be right to believe in them, but it couldn’t even be called belief in the first place, as it would be about something factual. But now that the lie is exposed, the rhetorical lure of the Story and the seductive nature of a collective enemy are all laid bare for us to see.

The people of Labyrinthia are having a hard time believing all that – it’s easier to double down on the mistake than to admit you’ve been wrong your whole life – and the judge is perplexed, too. This is when, once again, Professor Layton comes to the rescue and brings forth the final witness. The only one that can prove that their sacred text is a lie, that God is not real, and that He is not even dead: the Storyteller, God himself.

Phoenix Wright has spent the last week dabbling in magic, arguing about spells and incantations, cross-examining testimonies about portals on green paint. So, the first sentence in the Storyteller’s testimony shocks him to the core: “I am the president of Labrelum Inc.,” the Storyteller says, bringing Wright right back to reality. He’s Arthur Cantabella, the president of a global pharmaceutical company that is researching a way to better control people. With the “special substance” in the region’s water that makes people malleable to suggestion and pass out when hearing silver bells, they have encountered the perfect site to build a research facility and, adding religion to the mix, create a unique social experiment – funded by the U.K. government no less. They found desperate people who were glad to sign a contract and forget all about their previous lives and the real world – who wouldn’t, really – and put the project in motion.

But Professor Layton is not satisfied. After all, this doesn’t explain why Espella – Arthur’s own daughter – was on trial and why she was even inside Labyrinthia in the first place. To make matters worse, Espella is still claiming she’s the Great Witch Bezella, to the Storyteller’s dismay. He doesn’t know what to do, he keeps saying to Espella that she is talking nonsense, that witches are not real, that magic is not real, that not even the judge is a real judge. He pleads to his daughter to see sense. Espella, however, is certain of her guilt: she was there during the legendary fire caused by Bezella. “I remember what I saw! And how it felt – the heat, the smoke!” she says. Layton, then, pushes her to the breaking point to get the truth out in the open.

Many years ago, when Espella was a kid, Arthur Cantabella found out about the special properties of the region’s water in the worst possible way. He had just dug out the Bell of Ruin – not knowing about its title – from the nearby ruins and his closest friend, who would later become Labyrinthia’s Alchemist, built a tower to display the object. Espella wanted to ring it right then and there, it was a beautiful bell, but her father told her a story to discourage her: those who strike the bell are possessed by the fearsome witch Bezella and made to do terrible things. During the town’s annual Festival, however, Espella climbed the tower with her friend Eve anyway and they rang the bell: everyone in the town passed out and a fire broke loose. Arthur and his friend were back inside the ruins that night and, when they got out, they were met with a ghastly sight: the town burned to the ground, the kids in the bell tower in a state of shock.

Espella is consumed by guilt. How come she’s not Bezella if she struck the Bell of Ruin and killed everyone in town, including her own mother? She caused a massacre. She’s guilty of everything. Watching his daughter enter a catatonic state because of a fairy tale he told, Arthur decides to double down on the idea: he tells more stories about witches, acting like Phoenix Wright in the first trial, pretending they’re real so he can get to his daughter, speaking like a lunatic to a lunatic so he can communicate with her. But, as Wright found out when Kira was cast into the flames, lunacy always wins when we get down to its level: to get his daughter back, Arthur realized that witches should always be real. His stories had to grow in complexity and scale, hiring actors and building props. And, to his credit, it worked: Espella started to be her old self again, but only in this made-believe world. Arthur, then, hoped that the complex fantasy of Labyrinthia would exorcise the guilt out of Espella. If he could make her believe Bezella was another person altogether and watch the great witch being trialed and burned, Espella would be finally free of the fantasy. If the witches functioned so well as a collective scapegoat, they should serve just as well as a personal one. So, the Storyteller wrote that the young flower seller, Kira, would be trialed as a witch and then return in the grand finale as Bezella herself. But Darklaw altered the story and put the blame on Espella on both occasions.

Because Darklaw knows that Espella really is Bezella, that is, that Espella was the one who rang the bell and caused the legendary fire that killed everyone in town many years ago. She knows this because she was there with Espella in the tower. She was her childhood friend Eve, whose name Espella later gave to her cat, having blocked all memories related to the incident. Eve is the daughter of the Alchemist, whose suicide was driven by guilt, after sighting the accursed bell tower he designed – the tower was covered in a veil of the color they are conditioned not to see, but a lightning strike set the veil alight, making the tower aptly appear inside a burst of flames in the night. His letter to the Storyteller was not to confess about Greyerl being a witch – he knew they didn’t exist, after all – it was about wanting to expose the whole truth about Labyrinthia. Eve, also tired of the charade, and wanting revenge for her father’s death, tried to corrupt Arthur’s plan and put Espella herself on trial for being Bezella.

As Eve gives her final testimony, Layton’s musical theme plays in the background, a brilliant touch that not only imbues her confession with pathos, but also shows how the professor is in control of the situation – it’s all unfolding according to his plan. His only mistake is to underestimate Espella’s guilt, for after hearing everything, the girl doesn’t get better. On the contrary, Espella runs away from the court and gets on top of the bell tower. She wants to jump and free the world of all her misdeeds. Guilt is almost like faith in the sense that it can supplant reality: blame doesn’t need reason to be attached to someone, it requires only belief.

Phoenix Wright and Layton, then, must work together to solve the last piece of the puzzle. Eve, after all, still has to live up to her name. Going over the events of that fateful night, they discover that she was the one who committed the original sin, she was the one who rang the bell and not Espella, who chickened out at the last moment, thinking of Bezella. Darklaw is shaken to the core, she had also blocked the memory of the event, but since Espella was too quick to accept the blame, she was happy to oblige. She runs to the top of the tower, seeing that Espella is going to jump anyway – if blame doesn’t care about reality, it doesn’t matter that she didn’t ring the bell – and is able to catch Espella at the last moment, with the help of Luke, who was maneuvering a nearby crane.

With Espella safe, Arthur Cantabella decides to put a stop to Labyrinthia, but its people disagree: most of them enjoy their new lives and want to continue to live there, but with the truth now in the open. Labyrinthia, then, begins the process of becoming a real town, and, as Phoenix Wright, Maya, Layton, and Luke leave, we all just hope both Espella and Eve get a good therapist.

If the game’s narrative has two real flaws is that the tone of the ending is happier than it should have been, and that its last moments are unnecessarily convoluted. First, there’s the fact that Espella is still a very troubled young girl, her father should probably be in jail, and most people in Labyrinthia discovered their reality was a lie. So, seeing them all smile as they wave Wright and Layton away rings false: although the truth has been revealed, the tragedy has not really been overcome. Bittersweetness would have been a more fitting tone to the ending. Then, there’s the matter of some elements that get thrown in during the last cutscenes and lead nowhere, such as Arthur’s terminal illness, which is cured just a few lines of dialogue after being first brought up. It’s there to justify his “last story” – if he was dying in real life, he would have to die in Labyrinthia – but the event was already justified, both thematically and plot-wise, as he needed to be a martyr and Bezella to stand trial. The illness is unnecessary and makes the story stumble a little near the finish line.

However, Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright’s narrative is complex and fascinating enough to make up for these small shortcomings. It’s one of the most ambitious crossovers in gaming, going much beyond just the exciting prospect of uniting these two great universes and crafting its own unique story.

October 31, 2024.