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Professor Layton and the Last Specter Game Review

Professor Layton and the Last Specter is a 2009 puzzle adventure video game developed by Nintendo for the Nintendo DS. It was a very strong beginning of a new trilogy.

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“Every puzzle has an answer“

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Coming after ‘Unwound Future’ that completed the original trilogy, The Last Specter began a new trilogy, which is a prequel story that takes us all the way to the beginning when the main duo met. It’s an excellent story and it was a strong way to start this new trilogy that might eventually rival the original.

In an English village called Misthallery, a specter appears accompanied by the sound of a flute singing as it terrorizes the town. When Layton arrives, he teams up with Luke and a girl named Emmy to find out the identity of this specter and stop it from destroying the town. While nowhere near as strong as the story in the original game, it is actually an improvement upon the previous two installments as it is very moving and actually very well crafted throughout.

There were one too many twists in the final stretch of the storyline, but most worked and the villains were actually great with the chief character being particularly menacing. The incorporation of mecha elements and a legendary creature into the proceedings were somewhat clunky, but they both worked, especially the Loosha storyline. Her death was emotionally felt and that sequence was heartbreaking.

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The environmental elements were on strong display here and the mystery with the specter was excellent. This series had become by now overly reliant on the regular explanations being behind seemingly strange phenomena twist, but when they carefully execute the twists and turns as they did here, I cannot possibly complain too much.

But my favorite part of the story is actually the whole prequel angle. It was both intriguing and instantly emotionally rewarding seeing Layton and Luke meet for the first time. The writers put a lot of effort to actually change their dynamic for this game to the one where they are at first uneasy to work together and Luke is struggling psychologically speaking, and that was both clever and grounded in reality. The eventual opening up of Luke and the budding friendship was so beautiful. Luke’s father is also a solid character and Emmy is a fine additional sidekick. She’s not too memorable, but she is serviceable.

Unfortunately, The Last Specter continued the overly harsh difficulty level on the gameplay side of things. Once again, many of the puzzles were way too hard to solve for me personally. Too many featured an annoying “trick” that never appealed to me in the first place in these games. The emphasis on so many math problems also did not help.

They are so varied in their difficulty that the first twenty or so puzzles are way too easy, but once you get to the number sixty and above, you get to most of the puzzles being either immensely difficult or downright unsolvable without some help using hint coins. Thankfully, the hint coins are abundant in this world, which was very helpful. The sliding puzzles were once again my favorites and I also really liked the peg solitaire ones. Fitting the blocks into a correct shape was also fun and those puzzles were quite abundant thankfully. There are 170 puzzles to be found altogether, which makes this entry the longest by this point.

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As usually happens with this franchise, the mini-games are the highlights. These are always more enjoyable to me personally than the puzzles, though these ones were a bit too hard as well, but very entertaining to play nonetheless. The Puppet Theater mini-game is the easy one. This is the game that basically teaches children and non-natives of the English language the countless words for cooking through dialogue boxes. It was very well executed.

But the other two games are way too difficult, though they are fun in the easier levels. The Fish one is all about using physics to lead the fish to collect each and every coin in the tank. It requires a lot of trying and failing to conquer each level. The Toy Train is just as tough, though wildly entertaining. You guide the train from the start to the end point by making a railroad track for it, but evading other wagons and cars and making sure that you do not run of fuel makes this game quite demanding.

There is also a lot of stuff to collect here with the fossils being particularly interesting. The mouse badges also made for a solid collecting feature with the Mouse Alley mini-game being a fine tapping game, perfect to play on a phone via an emulator as I did.

The Last Specter pretty much takes the same gameplay elements from its predecessors. It lacks originality, but when the gameplay is this good, you cannot really blame it too much for repeating it. The pacing is all over the place with some sections getting too much story and not enough puzzles, but the dialogue is once again outstanding and so is the perfect voice acting with great voices all-around. The score itself is repetitive.

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The best part of the game is the world building. This is where the series shines the most. Misthallery is beautifully imagined. You get to really explore the village in all the streets and natural landscapes while meeting countless memorable NPC characters. The humorous dialogue can be quite endearing. The animation is reliably amazing and very pleasing for the eye.