COMPLETE: Professor Layton and the Unwound Future

[kjorteo]

Several years ago, I was playing a game called Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, the third in the Professor Layton series. I'd known by this point to expect pain. The first two games had established a very clear pattern of being a stock brainteaser collection with a plot wrapped around it. ("We have to get into the criminals' hideout, but the guard won't let us through unless we can solve this block puzzle in under ten moves!") However, they had also established the pattern that said plot hits hard. Much like the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series, there are two types of people: Those who would not expect these games of all things to contain anything that would make you cry, and those who have ever actually played one.

While I was playing Unwound Future, my girlfriend at the time broke up with me. It blindsided me; she had hidden and lied to me about a lot of things and I'd been completely oblivious to them, until she dumped me just as I was contemplating proposing. Those who knew me at the time probably remember how long it took me to recover from that.

Meanwhile, I had gotten just far enough in Unwound Future to have a vague guess where this could be going: there were flashback scenes involving Professor Layton's long lost former love, who even looked and sounded like my now-former girlfriend. (They even had a similar-sounding accent!) It was enough that... well, my clanmates would call this "Too Real." I put the game on the shelf for years, because I knew this was going to hurt and I just couldn't handle it at the time.

I'm okay now. There was a long recovery, but I did it and I'm on the other side of it. At this point, that I decided it would be good to dust off and finally finish this. Once there was enough distance that I could handle it, doing so became a matter of closure.

Unfortunately, after all that intro there, I really don't have a whole lot to say about the game itself. I mean, it's a Professor Layton game. It's puzzles and crying. Anything I could say would pertain to the latter and be a massive spoiler. I will say that this game was excellent, though. I do love this series, and this may be... hmm. I want to say that this one might be my new favorite entry so far, but Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box is kind of hard to top. Let's just call it a tie for now, but it's hard to overstate what an accomplishment it is to be in that same tier.

Was I right in setting Unwound Future aside for this long? Ahahaha oh God yes are you kidding I would have died. But... I'm glad to be here now, after everything. I made it, it's over, and I can breathe a sigh of relief at that, while also basking in the accomplishment of having gotten here. Few things satisfy like a puzzle solved, after all.

(Footnote: I'm counting this one as 100% complete enough after doing all the story puzzles + all of Layton's Challenges + the Hidden Door. The Weekly Puzzles have gone the way of FF3DS Mognet and are no longer possible to do because, you know, Nintendo WFC.)

(Footnote 2: Unwound Future has a gruff anthro bunny in it for exactly one scene and I have no idea why, but I am absolutely not complaining. <3)

Comments

[jesterelijah]

*hugs you tight* It's good that you're a better self now and I'm still proud of you for that. Honestly? After all that, I'm glad you found the time to enjoy the game for what it is. It's my favorite out of the whole series because of how the plot and characters stuck with me (with Miracle Mask and Specter's Flute following). You can answer this as vaguely as you can or DM me if you want to expand on it, but how did you feel about Future!Luke and Layton and about how they were handled throughout the game?

[kjorteo]

I will hit you up on Telegram to answer this!

[xyzzysqrl]

Gruff Bunny looks kinda great and yeah eventually I will get to this. I think I only ever played Curious Village and the start of one of the others, and I don't remember which one.

[penguinmayhem]

The bunny is voiced by Kaius Ballad.

Does he have auto-life too?

[swordianmaster]

Uncertain, but he's just as much of a mopey edgelord.

[kjorteo]

Okay but he's hot though.

[swordianmaster]

It took me a good, long minute to realize you meant Subject 3 and not Caius.

I was very close to deeply questioning your taste in JRPG villains.

[kjorteo]

TO BE FAIR, Caius passes the "If you need at least three guesses to figure out the gender you are pretty enough that Celine is interested" test, and even comes in purple.

[swordianmaster]

On the flipside, he got exactly half of a haircut, wears enough frills to make David Bowie look straight, and very probably cut himself on all that edge.

[kjorteo]

I well admit he is slightly "ChocoboKick's Vincent phase" edgewise, but those first two are still points in his favor if anything.

[penguinmayhem]

He's also voiced by Liam O'Brien.

Oh and he's technically a dragon because he kinda sorta is Bahamut. Kind of. Possibly?

[davidn]

It's been a very long time since I played this game, enough that I can't remember a lot of the finer points of it and I'd completely forgotten that Subject 3 existed at all, but I'm glad that you eventually got to a place where you could enjoy it again. Looking back at my own thoughts, it seemed that I was a bit too distracted by how implausible the criminal scheme was this time, but even though nothing will ever beat the tea puzzle minigame, the casino gun and the travelling mini made up for it.

I'm still not quite over Beasley.

[kjorteo]

Implausible criminal schemes are just how the Layton series works! Seriously, even before I got far enough to see the reveal in this game, I knew the pattern clearly established by the other games in this series.

Every Layton game so far: Our heroes are presented with what appears at first glance to be a paranormal or otherwise mysterious phenomenon, and eventually they find a "rational" explanation that's honestly even worse.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village: Is the mysterious tower no one dares approach really a bad omen? No, but the everyone in the entire town is robots.

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box: Is there really a box that magically kills anyone who opens it? Furthermore, is Anton Herzen a vampire? No and no, but the entire town is a hallucination brought on by a gas leak from under Anton's castle that makes everyone see whatever they were expecting to see, and the box has traces of the gas so that people familiar with its reputation make it self-fulfilling.

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future: Have Luke and Layton really been transported via time travel to a version of London from ten years in the future? No, but someone used their inheritance money to recreate an entire fake "future London" set in an impossibly vast underground cavern space.

Unwound Future at least tried to zig-zag it by declaring "Future London Is Real" to be good enough for a SOLVED in the Mysteries section just to make you play along for half the game, only to introduce a previously-unseen DOUBLE SOLVED (well, "The Whole Story") when it's time for the reveal. That... didn't work in every case (I had my suspicions about Claire even after Celeste explained who she was) and it did feel a bit like cheating to me, but... okay.

Beasley D: That was not okay!

[kjorteo]

Also, I love how you went through the cast by the quality and believability of their fake accents :D (Obviously I have a tremendous amount of room to speak here.)

[davidn]

Hah, that is an outstanding summary of the games - I'd played them far apart enough that I didn't notice the pattern, but you're absolutely right.

[davidn]

Voicing French characters as aggressively English seems to be a widespread trope, but Professor Layton is the only instance I can recall of it being the other way around - the game wants you to believe it's set in London and it attempts to get the voices right but the whole aesthetic, the animation and the music and everything is so blatantly French, evoking things like the Triplets of Belleville.

[kjorteo]

Oh, wow. I think I need to see this, now.