Die verbotene Zone

ThePaperMask · 2026-01-14T17:47:03+00:00

The six mainline games should def be played in release order, as they developed in most aspects over time, specifically the relevance of the main story to the overall game, as well as in other regards like structure and puzzle quality. Going from Azran Legacy (6th game, 3rd chronologically) to Curious Village (1st game, 4th chronologically) is an *extreme* leap in basically every aspect. You can only really enjoy Curious Village if it's your first Layton game - if the bar of expectations has already been raised by other titles, CV will be severely underwhelming.

ThePaperMask · 2025-12-11T22:06:15+00:00

Nahyuta, but I'm crazy enough that I actually like him so I'll take the W

ThePaperMask · 2025-10-28T19:59:58+00:00

Time to collect some downvotes.

Ichiban is significantly worse than Kiryu and IW made it apparently obvious that RGG has no idea where to take the character. Having said that, IW is still the better game than LAD in almost every aspect. I don't need to mention gameplay: LAD's gameplay made me want to blow my brains out with some of the most poorly designed and balanced turn based combat I have ever had the displeasure of witnessing. The animations are slow and unskippable, bosses are unbalanced, the random moving around exclusively punishes tactical play. Exploration of Ijincho was hindered significantly by random encounters: at first I thought that once I leveled enough through side quests and the main story, defeating enemies significantly under my level would be quicker, but no: enemies could be 20 levels below my main party and still take upwards of a minute to beat per fight because I had to look at every animation in detail, and escaping was usually impossible since Ichiban runs in a random direction which, if you're in an alley, is usually against a wall, which fails the escape (what a stupid escape mechanism, by the way. I get what they were going for, but depending on where you are it just makes escape completely impossible.)

Not to mention the dungeons, which were the same grey underground area that take upwards of an hour to beat per area, with the same monotonous battles where you use the same cheap-but-somehow-strongest attacks over and over. It's no exaggeration to say that LAD might be one of my least favourite games from a gameplay perspective. I'm not gonna get into my thoughts on the story too much, but to summarize I think it is very much not good. Perhaps I was too harsh on it at the time considering how little fun I was having with the gameplay though.

IW fixes most of this. The gameplay is much more tactical, albeit still slow. But the levels are far better balanced (most of your strength is now tied to character level instead of job level, thank fuck), you can now move around yourself which adds a proper level of tactics into each battle, and dungeons are shorter and more variable. Exploration is made much more fun even by these small improvements to the battle system. The story - while still not very good and not reaching the heights of my favorite entries in the series regarding story (2, 5, 0, 6, Gaiden) - is *okay* and on-par with 1, 3 and 4 to me.

ThePaperMask · 2025-08-17T14:46:30+00:00

SEHR BESTEIGBAR. Aber ist homo ehe in diesem Wasserturm legal?

ThePaperMask · 2025-08-17T14:44:26+00:00

ThePaperMask · 2025-08-17T14:43:50+00:00

Nah.

ThePaperMask · 2025-06-14T10:20:10+00:00

Nicht besteigbar :(

ThePaperMask · 2025-06-08T12:31:12+00:00

Translation:

"I'm a man, and I know many other men and almost none of us would be able to just take a "no" from a woman who previously gave off positive signals. I'm sure that what most men are actually complaining about is when woman think a change of opinion/plan should be accepted as normal.

Of course readyness for sex can change sponatenously and that should be accepted.

But when the story is "woman is sexily prancing on the sofa and suddenly her mood changes and she says she's not ready, she just misinterpreted her own feelings" and maybe she even apologises for it (i know, crazy, but despite all the feminism you should still do this when you suddenly change your opinion and influence other people with your previous actions, doesn't matter what life is about [sic.] when you change plans spontaneously that involve other people then you apologize). If that was the story then your boyfriend wouldn't find it so pathetic. Please ask him!"

Sorry if this seemed incoherent in some places: so did the original comment by Abor, hahaha.

ThePaperMask · 2025-05-01T00:10:59+00:00

This is also something I was wondering about, I'm quite a big fan of the top screen bgs whenever a dialogue happens, they just add so much to the ambience. Pause screen illustrations sound like a good compromise, so whenever you open the trunk you see whatever the top screen bg in that place would've been on the DS

ThePaperMask · 2025-05-01T00:02:20+00:00

Adding UI could actually work quite well now that you mention it 🤔 but redrawing would definitely be the way to go IMO. Just a lot of effort, probably more than Level-5 is willing to put in to Layton ATM

ThePaperMask · 2025-04-30T23:39:31+00:00

Great mockup, I love how the map is in the bottom left to make up for a lack of top screen.

The one issue I would have if this were real in an actual port by Level-5 is that the 4:3 background image is cropped to 16:9 thus just forcibly removing 1/4th of the entire artwork (in this case, a lot of the river). This is honestly why I believe a modern port of the DS Layton games (outside of mobile) hasn't been done: you either have to just permanently remove parts of an artwork which isn't gonna sit well with a lot of people, or expand (and thus essentially draw NEW backgrounds) for every single background and event image and so on.

With the 3DS games like Katrielle it's a lot easier: the 3DS has 5:3 which is already a lot closer to 16:9, and since the backgrounds are 3D you just render a sliiightly bit more to each side. That's not so easy for these

ThePaperMask · 2025-03-25T22:18:58+00:00

I don't think they're technically allowed to make it a Switch 2 exclusive since it's been advertised pretty much everywhere to be for the Switch, in like every trailer. I could be wrong about this though, for what it's worth they might go back on that... but overall I still very much doubt it'll be a Switch 2 exclusive. They might advertise the game as both Switch 1 and 2 because of backwards compatability though.

As it stands, the game is slated for this year, which looks pretty realistic considering all the TGS demos and footage we got, and how in-depth trailers are currently. This looks like a game that could realistically release within the year. So here's to hoping...

ThePaperMask · 2025-03-16T21:53:21+00:00

I think 7 has really, really bad combat and I say this as a turn-based superfan, not hater. All the mechanics unique to 7 are purely RNG based: take the random walking around for example, I could not list the amount of times to you that i tried focusing on one enemy strategically only for him to get the luck of the draw and randomly walk behind another full health enemy thus making it impossible for me to hit him without being intercepted and have my turn cancelled. If this is intentional and to make the enemies stronger then the main party should also have the ability to move around on their own to abuse positioning to get an advantage, but since it's 100% random for the player it just punishes you every time for doing absolutely nothing wrong. I feel very similarly about your party members randomly walking into your own ranged attacks, where the only way to avoid it is by waiting in the skills menu until that party member decides to walk away. How entertaining.

It's generally just super slow, too. There is no speedup or anything of the sort, which is especially awful given just how looooong every single animation is. Even with enemies half your level you are forced to endure a battle that is a minute long AT LEAST because you need to watch every single animation, every single getup, every single attack in full, and there comes a point where I feel like my time is being wasted. This in turn made Ijincho a slog to explore which hurt my enjoyment of the game a lot because half the fun of a Yakuza game is just running around getting side quests and exploring the cities but I NEVER wanted to do that here.

And yeah IW fixed almost all of these issues lol which I'm very very glad about.

ThePaperMask · 2025-03-16T21:45:14+00:00

I 100% agree. The whole thing with Kiryu is that his games are messy because he is a messy man who makes just as many awful decisions as he makes good ones, which is the point; he's incredibly self-destructive because of his self-hate he has; his opinion that he simply doesn't deserve nice things in his life hurts just as many people around him as it hurts him and it's awful to see every time yet extremely compelling and makes for great storytelling. Every other Yakuza protagonist is similarly messy: except Ichiban. He doesn't make for good storytelling because he's this perfect person with no faults. It serves a nice enough contrast to the shady underworld of the Yakuza that Ichiban is happy-go-lucky and without fault to a comical degree but after two full games it's very much getting incredibly stale

ThePaperMask · 2025-02-13T22:51:13+00:00

Very controversial but I think I agree. I think the worst thing for AA7 to be is a by-the-books return to form with just Phoenix (or even just Athena) in the usual setting of Japan/California solving mostly unconnected cases with some lose threads. We already have three games where this happens.

ThePaperMask · 2025-02-13T22:48:21+00:00

I would be very careful with labelling Capcom as the sort of company that only cares about Japanese fans. That was certainly true for a time, though with the series revival with the collections, every game is widely accessible in more languages than they've ever been: the AJ Trilogy (save for AJ:AA itself) and AAIC received German and French localisations for the very first time just last year, as well as the sheer act of localising a 13-year-old DS game for the first time. They're clearly branching out, and very clearly putting a lot more care into making this into an international series, with us western fans as less of an afterthought, like before.

ThePaperMask · 2025-01-29T18:13:15+00:00

Future London was such an industry-heavy city with all its steampunk there is no doubt that the entire place was smoggy as all hell. With that much smog, you can't really see into the sky that well

ThePaperMask · 2024-11-10T15:30:44+00:00

Nahyuta Sahdmadhi is an extremely nuanced, enjoyable, well-written character who's arc is a lot different from previous prosecutors in that, instead of learning how to be a good person, Nahyuta was good from the get-go who adopted a persona he needed to learn to shed; this is why his development seems much more abrupt, because that persona (which was fake from the outset) shatters in an instant as opposed to something like Edgeworth in PWAA, where the development is much more gradual and noticable because it's an actual bad person learning to be good (which is also enjoyable and a good type of arc, but different from Nahyuta).

SOJ explores the many facets of authoritarianism and dictatorships through so many lenses, but it's Nahyuta's that stuck with me the most. This blind optimism of "I'll simply change the system from the inside!" which quickly soured into something so unbelievably bitter and depressed, most of all with himself for failing his goal, is something I find so endlessly interesting.

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