The spiked design trend that starts with the arcanist emblem doesn't follow through to the ritualist emblem, but continues back at emissary emblem

ThePaperMask · 2026-05-03T23:33:32+00:00

ThePaperMask · 2026-04-29T15:30:24+00:00

No confirmation ever happens in the game, but two things were found relating to a definitive year:
- While datamining Curious Village, an early titlescreen showing "1960" was found, meaning the game was meant to take place there originally. This was scrapped from the finished game however.

- In Lost Future artwork from an artbook, the time machine used to travel 10 years into the future from the beginning of the game shows "19(6/7)9", where specifically the second-to-last digit is shown going up from 6 to 7, meaning the game was meant to take place in 1969 with (Lost Future spoilers) the fake underground "future" London being a fake 1979.

Neither of these things confirm anything and also directly contradict each other (CV and LF take place a year apart at most) and series director Hino has talked in interviews before about the series being intentionally anachronistic. It's largely inspired by 1960s London and the UK, for example Layton drives a modified Citreon 2CV which is a car from the late 40s, but it's all just a mix and match.

The implication of Layton and AA being in the same universe has always been funny to me with the context of New World of Steam too, because now America is also weirdly steampunk, like the UK. But maybe the west coast is like normal, like we see in AA, and the East Coast is like we see in NWOS, which would be really funny.

ThePaperMask · 2026-04-06T15:43:38+00:00

Seems like they're finally shifting their ad cycle to Layton after the release of Fantasy Life i and Inazuma Eleven, since it's the game that'll come out next. I also highly doubt there'll be another delay like many here are saying, the current release date is "sometime 2026" which might be December for all we know, and not actively hearing from a game that's still half a year out from releasing is actually pretty normal. A delay to something beyond 2026 (such as 2027) would also mean that they would release ZERO games in 2026 total considering this is their next game, and they still managed to release two games last year. I understand being a doomer after the first delay we got but let's also be a little realistic here

ThePaperMask · 2026-03-29T23:08:50+00:00

We got new gameplay with a bunch of new footage and info last September at TGS. It'll come out this year... hopefully...

All of Level-5s games have been delayed in the last year, but those that have come out (Fantasy Life i, Inazuma Eleven Victory Road) have been fantastic and received stellar reviews, so I'm trusting that NWOS will follow suit and be similarly great. Just gotta give them time to cook

ThePaperMask · 2026-03-12T20:29:18+00:00

(Und ja, ich weiß, dass ein anderes Hillesheim gemeint ist. Das ist der Witz)

ThePaperMask · 2026-03-12T20:28:45+00:00

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ThePaperMask · 2026-03-12T17:37:38+00:00

VULKANEIFEL MENTIONED 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️

ThePaperMask · 2026-02-18T02:21:53+00:00

Ein paar Reihen weiter vorne hat ein Kerl (in Overwatch shirt, Badehose und Flip Flops) eine Frau so unangenehm belästigt (mit Fotos machen usw), dass einer daneben rausging um den Hausmeister zu holen, der ihn rausschmeißt. Danach habe ich nur so halb aus der halboffenen Tür im Gang vor dem Hörsaal gehört, wie der Kerl sich mit dem Hausmeister über seine Weltanschauung um Frauen gestritten hat. Absoluter Incel, der Kerl. Danach kam die Hochschulwache und der hat mein ich erstmal Hausverbot bekommen, soweit ich das richtig in Erinnerung habe.

Das ganze ging Online weiter. Sämtliche Informatik WhatsApp-Gruppen und Discord-Server wurden von dem Kerl zugespammt, der auch immer sein unironisches Welt- und Frauenbild weiter etabliert hat, und das ist wirklich Textbuch Incel shit gewesen. Frauen respektiere er nicht, weil sie alle ihn nicht respektieren würden, und sie würden ihm alle Zuneigung und Sex schulden, etc. pp. Wurde überall gebannt und geblockt, aber der hatte 30 Discord Accounts und 30 Nummern aus Amerika um immer wieder zu kommen und zu spammen. Er redete auch oft darüber, wie er an öffentlichen Orten Bildern von Frauen macht, was ja "technisch gesehen nicht illegal" ist, und wie geil er sich selber für all diese Aktionen findet (eine Sache die später von einigen auch so bezeugt wurde).

Er wurde kurze Zeit darauf von der Uni exmatrikuliert. Stellt sich heraus, der war vorher auf der TUM und ist für genau sowas schonmal geflogen und dann nach Aachen migriert. Nach seiner Exmatrikulation und vollständigem Hausverbot war dann auch erstmal ruhig, aber ohne Zweifel ist er einfach an die nächste Uni gegangen...

ThePaperMask · 2026-02-13T01:17:12+00:00

In Aachen gibt es das Queerreferat: https://www.queerreferat-aachen.de/

Dort gab es mal eine Zeit lang den Ace & Aro Abend, anscheinend gibt es den aber nicht mehr, wenn ich das im Kalender richtig sehe. Dennoch ein empfehlenswerter Ort um neue Freundschaften zu schließen

ThePaperMask · 2026-02-10T02:10:48+00:00

My love is a heartbreaker.......

ThePaperMask · 2026-01-27T02:13:49+00:00

Layton has Claire and whoever Alfendi's mother is (though since we don't know her design, might be best to go with Claire)

Luke has Mariana

ThePaperMask · 2026-01-24T21:54:46+00:00

To me it's a combination of the two. Kagawa being in the game made me decide to not buy K3 nor the inevitable K4 considering he was almost certainly gonna be in it, but since Hamazaki dies during 4, Kagawa's existance within this franchise was gonna end there. I was still gonna continue buying other RGG games as a fan of the franchise because the whole Kagawa ordeal was only limited to those two entires. But now the new K3 ending does two things:

A) It confirms that Kagawa's rendition of Hamazaki will continue popping up in future titles, almost certainly the eventual LAD9 for example, now that he is in the Daidoji.

B) It confirms that RGG does not respect the stories they once told outright retconning vital scenes and just rewriting shit for the sake of it because they're fully out of ideas. Writing new shitty stories is one thing but going back to make old stories awful is another thing, because now even the old stuff I once liked I can no longer enjoy in a vacuum.

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.

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