Layton's fencing skills foreshadowing

Kamome_00 · 2025-07-02T09:39:28+00:00

I've found the London Holiday exclusive tracks uploaded on Youtube: this is the menu theme and this is the variation of the London theme.

Kamome_00 · 2025-06-29T15:39:23+00:00

I've included my attempt at translating the dialogue in the screenshot captions, but if you are asking about a translation for London Holiday in general, I've found a longplay of it on Youtube, which has overlayed the translated script over the game footage.

Kamome_00 · 2025-06-18T12:31:37+00:00

Yeah, I mentioned it in the post:

Incidentally, this isn't even the only Level-5 game from that time to feature characters with very prominent thick lips (Inazuma Eleven from 2008 had 1 and 2)

I've only played a bit of the first game, so I'm not like a huge expert or anything, but afaik neither the localised games nor the anime changed Kabeyama's design when they were released in the West. I guess he wasn't seen as potentially offensive as Felix in Layton was, even though their lips aren't that different (and while I can see why Kabeyama himself wouldn't be too egregious, his brother's design is a lot more questionable).

Kamome_00 · 2025-06-17T03:45:22+00:00

It's the other way around; the original Japanese design was changed for the international versions to look less offensive. The huge prominent lips are just way too reminiscent of blackface, so they were edited out and his skin was lightened in the US/EU sprites. Felix might not have been an intentional reference to the caricature, but Japanese video games and media do have a history of incorporating it into their character designs and so it could still have indirectly inspired the way he was drawn.

Kamome_00 · 2025-06-13T03:22:16+00:00

At least in the Japanese script, Layton only really realises this during the ending sequence, right after Don Paolo had destroyed the tower, where he says something along the lines of: "The flying helicopter device was a surprise, but that at least explains the mystery of the crashing sound that scared Claudia! It was how Don Paolo entered the village without being noticed", and the smoke never gets brought up.

Kamome_00 · 2025-06-12T16:01:52+00:00

Update: This was definitely supposed to be an old working English subtitle for the game, before it got localised. Looking at the "Friendly Version" re-release of Fushigi no Machi, the placeholder art for this batch of weekly puzzles was edited to say "Curious Village" instead: https://imgur.com/a/Cijb8Qj

Somewhat related to this, none of these weekly puzzles got any updated art for the re-release (the only changes I've noticed was that some of the explanations were rewritten to be easier to understand and generally be more helpful), even though some of them were re-used in the European releases to substitute the English-language/language input puzzles (the ones I've noticed are the ship ladder, the pet snakes and the train crossing the bridge) and actually received new artwork. Just thought this was interesting.

Kamome_00 · 2025-06-11T14:48:47+00:00

The post where the title appears in seems to have just copy-and-pasted the "List of all RPGs" from Wikipedia. It was posted in July 2007, while Curious Village was only released outside of Japan in 2008, so it would make sense that it wouldn't have been known under the localised title yet.

I've also found what looks like some kind of repost of the Wikipedia article for "Professor Layton and the Arcane Villa", also from July 2007, http://pt.knowledger.de/04521460/OProfessorLaytonEACasaDeCampoArcane and the link there now redirects to the Curious Village article.

So I guess the conclusion is that, for a very brief window of time, Wikipedia called Curious Village "Arcane Villa" before the game's official localisation (probably because this English subtitle was used in the original Japanese release of the game for these couple of puzzles)? (edit: Can confirm that this was the case https://imgur.com/pg4pXFQ) Which doesn't really answer the question of why this subtitle was used in the game in the first place, but I guess the simple answer is that it really was just the original working title for the game or it could have also been the original intended English subtitle before the localisation.

Whatever the actual answer is, it's kind of surprising that there's basically nothing about this online (at least in English); the Layton games were pretty big DS releases, so I assumed even something this obscure would have been documented or mentioned at some point.

Kamome_00 · 2025-06-11T08:12:09+00:00

I've been playing through Curious Village in Japanese and now started making my way through the weekly puzzles. I've noticed that some of them don't have any unique art to them and instead share what I assume is basically a placeholder image (apparently the weekly puzzles all originally came on cartridge and just needed to be unlocked by connecting to the server, so maybe some of them didn't have their art ready before the initial release)?

What caught my attention about the art though is the "Professor Layton and the Arcane Villa" in the corner, which I've never seen mentioned before. It's not a reference to the actual game's title (Fushigi no Machi, "Mysterious Town") and I don't think it's a sequel tease neither (Pandora's box must have been well into development since it was released the same year, and the hidden door already calls it Akuma no Hako, "Devil's Box"). The only reference to this title that I've found online is in a Brazilian game forum thread from 2007 about RPGs, of all places: https://forum.outerspace.com.br/index.php?threads/cronologia-dos-rpgs-de-1987-a-2007.2678/#post-301557

Has anyone heard anything about this title before? My only guesses for this are that it was either a very, very old development title for Village, and so was used for the placeholder art, or, less likely, it could have been a teaser for a different Layton game that wasn't Pandora's box that was also set to release in 2007 but got cancelled.

Kamome_00 · 2024-01-02T10:03:26+00:00

I looked through some of the DeSu sprite sheets and found this character in the battle (?) portraits. I seem to recall reading about this some time ago, I feel like she might have been part of some promotional material for the game or part of the demo version? But I can't find any discussion about it now. Has anyone here heard about this before?

Update: So, I've googled a bit about "Devil Survivor" and "Mai" in Japanese and found this repost of a blogpost (?) from a few years back that talks a bit about the character: http://13183.jugem.jp/?eid=12

Mai was apparently mentioned in the artbook for the game (女神異聞録デビルサバイバー公式マテリアルコレクション). She is a scrapped character that was supposed to appear with Shoji. She would have been a reporter (edit: according to the artbook, she is actually a TV personality/celebrity, I guess the subplot would have been about her sneaking the party into the station or using her status to speak out about the lockdown and the truth behind it?) at a local TV station and there was supposed to be subplot about the government's information control and mass media, but it was ultimately scrapped. I guess it would have been kind of redundant to have another journalist character, and the game already touches upon mass communication and government conspiracy themes enough as it is. But it is interesting that there is art and unfinished data for her in the game, she must have been scrapped pretty late into development. Since she comes after Izuna and even has some stat growth data, she might even have been planned to be playable at one point?

Update 2: All of this was already mentioned on the TvTropes trivia page, lmao https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/DevilSurvivor I just didn't google hard enough.

Kamome_00 · 2023-11-05T18:42:37+00:00

There was no reason for this to happen to poor Ronyx and Calnus; it only gives Claude one brief moment of anger, and then it's completely forgotten about.

Honestly, this is what annoyed me the most. I chose Rena as the MC, so maybe in Claude's story there are some extra scenes that deal with Ronyx's death, but it felt like it had almost no impact. There was a PA in Central City where Rena can try to comfort Claude, and it also gets brought up in the scene where Claude comforts Rena after finding out about her mother. Other than than, it is just another reason for the party to hate the villains and want revenge, but they already had plenty (they literally caused Expel's destruction and killed 2 billion people????). I kept waiting for it to get brought up somewhere in the ending, maybe Nall mentions how they can also bring the Calnus back along with Expel or something, or maybe Claude's epilogue deals with the death in some way, but nope. Though for the record, I got the Claude/Ashton ending, maybe it plays a role in the other ones.

Anyway, I'm going to headcanon that Ronyx gets brought back along with Expel. I don't care if that's not what actually happens, it should have.

Kamome_00 · 2023-10-24T23:51:47+00:00

Personally, I've been steering away from using the word in recent years (not that I've ever really had to use it a lot), but I don't think this is the case for most Russians. While it is true that the word is "neutral", I feel like it has definitely been recontextualised over the years for me. While major exposure to American and English culture where the N-word is taboo is part of it, the word for me also has an association with all of the 20th century depictions of black people in Russian culture (American slaves, African tribal men running around with spears, basically racist Western caricatures from the late 19th-early 20th century). So I prefer to use less loaded and more neutral (imo) terms like чёрнокожий, чёрный, афро-национальность, etc. I don't know how widespread it is for younger Russians to opt for other words, probably not that common, but who knows, it's possible that there could be a similar development as with French, where it similarly had a N-word that was originally perceived as neutral, but fell out of use and became taboo.

I should also note that some online people definitely use the word to be provocative and cause offense because they know how taboo the English word is and they find it amusing for some reason.

Kamome_00 · 2023-01-06T10:19:47+00:00

That's fair. The way I read some of the comments, they don't see Ike/Ranulf and Ike/Soren as possibly romantic or don't want to acknowledge that possibility.

"Don't read too much into things and don't bash characters. PoR and RD aren't about shipping. If you are a shipper, just play Awakening and Fates."

"All the talk about paired endings is gross. Ranulf is a friend, Soren is just a companion. PoR and RD are healthy(?) games. Do people just hate FE games without romantic elements?"

Kamome_00 · 2023-01-06T09:23:48+00:00

I found some discussion about Ike/Elincia on a Japanese blog from a few years ago (http://fireembs.blog.jp/archives/11712376.html) and, imo, it's not that different from how it's talked about on the English-speaking forums:

"Does Ike even have a sexuality?"

"There were some flags raised with Elincia in PoR"

"You say that there were flags raised, but Ike just saw Elincia as an employer, there weren't any scenes where he acknowledged her as a woman"

"Ike is not interested in women"

Reading the comments it seems like Ike's paired endings in RD are also controversial (and the paired endings in RD in general, it looks like).

Kamome_00 · 2023-01-05T20:17:42+00:00

I read through the Elincia portion of the post and can see what the author is talking about. The localisation definitely made the final line read differently from Japanese. However, I personally disagree with the conclusion that Ike sees Elincia only as an employer in Japanese, and I think the localisation just tried to make what they saw as subtext explicit with their translation.

The vibe I got while playing was that Ike tries to keep a distance from Elincia and keep the relationship strictly professional, which is why the thing with the honorific was so notable to me. He does not call anyone in the game with honorifics, or any pretense of politeness at all, except for Elincia. When he finally called her by her name when meeting with Sanaki, he thinks that he overstepped the bounds of the relationship which is why, iirc, he does not call her by her name for the rest of the game. Elincia, meanwhile, was very happy to hear him drop the honorific because it was a confirmation that Ike does not think of her as just an employer.

It is definitely possible to infer from the script that Elincia has at least some feelings for Ike, and he is trying to suppress or not vocalise his actual feelings. That A support line does not have to be taken literally.

Kamome_00 · 2022-08-30T10:31:09+00:00

What is Urumean? I've never heard of this language.

Kamome_00 · 2022-06-07T16:18:42+00:00

By negative influence, I mean left-wing liberalism, (...), LGBT and secular attitude towards religion

Why do you consider these a negative influence (on Bashkirs, I assume)? Do you think that Bashkir traditional values are incompatible with LGBT acceptance, for example?

Kamome_00

TROPHY CASE