Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires' Conspiracy - Deluxe Edition (NSW) Review

We arrive at the final review of the month here at SuperPhillip Central. It's Level 5's familiar Professor Layton series with a not-so-familiar new starring lead. It's Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires' Conspiracy - Deluxe Edition for the Nintendo Switch. Here's the SPC review.

This mystery is history!

The Professor Layton series is known for having charming, zany, and kooky characters, mysteries that feature equally zany and kooky solutions, and a whole healthy heaping of brain teasers in the form of puzzles for players to solve. Every game in the Professor Layton series has featured Hershel Layton as the main star, but can the series stand on its own two feet with a brand-new protagonist? That's what Layton's daughter Katrielle hopes, and that's on top of the hope of her newly opened detective agency getting off the ground. Fortunately, Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaries' Conspiracy - Deluxe Edition shows that, like her father, no puzzle is a match for a Layton, and while the game doesn't hit the same highs as the majority of games featuring her father, Kat is no slouch when it comes to starring in a series of mysteries that are engaging to play and to mull over their sophisticated and fun puzzles.

With Professor Layton missing and mysteriously out of the picture, there are few people in London to turn to in order to solve their mysteries, so Katrielle Layton decides to open her own detective agency. Joined by a nervy assistant with an unrequited crush on Katrielle and a talking hound dog with a bout of amnesia, the Layton Detective Agency begins seeing clients to solve their various cases. 

You're in good hands with Katrielle! Wait. That's part of another company's slogan!

Cases in Layton's Mystery Journey share overarching characters in the form of a familiar batch of London citizens in addition to the Seven Dragons, self-made millionaires in their individual trades, but for the most part, the cases themselves are isolated from one another rather than being part of some grander, greater mystery like in previous Professor Layton games. This has its pros and cons, with this format being good for bite sized sessions, as most cases can be completed within an hour or two, but if you're wanting an engrossing mystery that keeps you guessing until the very end, you won't receive the fantastic payoffs found in past Professor Layton games.

Exploring London and her various sights is made as easy as ever in Layton's Mystery Journey, having players move from screen to screen via map, and move around a magnifying glass with either the JoyCon analog stick or the touch screen to investigate and examine areas of interest on screens. Specific locations on screens house anything from people to talk to for clues, hint coins, collectibles in the form of treasures from past Layton games, and the most important gameplay piece for the Layton series, puzzles. 

Get around and gad about London easily with maps such as these.

Yes, puzzles are everywhere in the world of Layton's Mystery Journey and the Professor Layton series proper. They're used to gain information from the game's charming characters, hidden in odd locations around London, and pretty much a peculiar fascination with most of the city's residents. When a puzzle is stumbled upon, the player enters an entirely separate screen where the puzzle name, number, and the amount of picarats it's worth are revealed. Then, said puzzle and description reveal themselves. For the most part, the majority of puzzles remain unchanged from Layton's Mystery Journey's arrival from the Nintendo 3DS to the Switch. However, some puzzles--about a dozen or so--have been swapped out for Switch-exclusive ones.

Aw, man... I was never good at math...

The puzzles in Layton's Mystery Journey run the gamut to test and tease your brain, offering the odd trick question every now and then. Though in Layton's Mystery Journey these trick questions seem to pop up more often than in past games. Regardless, some puzzles require you to input a number for the answer, while others are multiple choice, or request that you interact with them in unique ways for trial and error-style puzzles. If any puzzle stumps you or you find yourself stumbling on your way to discover the solution, hint coins found in the scenery of screens around London help give up to four clues to help you arrive at the correct answer. The more hint coins you spend and clues you unlock, the more apparent the solution becomes, with the super hint (costing two hint coins) basically spilling the beans on the solution altogether.

...But English was always a better subject for me. Wink-wink!

So, while moving about London and solving puzzles remains the same with Layton's Mystery Journey, the case formula, as we've seen, offers a new structure to the game. As Kat speaks with various characters and comes up with her own deductions, one of six unmissable case clues reveals itself. Once all six clues are collected and assembled, the case becomes solvable, which Kat does automatically without assistance from the player. Thus, it's more about the journey rather than the destination, especially since many of the cases will have you solving them before even Kat does. At least that was my experience with some of the cases, and I'm as dumb as a box of rocks.

Put together pieces of information to solve each case's mystery.

Kat's adventure through the game's 12 cases lasted me around 21 hours. This included dabbling around with the bonus mini-games and their levels that unlock through completing cases, as well as the daily puzzles that unlock in a separate menu. If you picked up the game today and downloaded all of the puzzles currently, you'd have access to every daily puzzle since the game's launch back in November. New daily puzzles appear every day as well, one each day.

Layton's Mystery Journey sports a similar but consistently charming art style for its cast of characters when compared to past Layton games. The denizens of London are just as much characterized in their appearances as they are in their dialogue, which is written remarkably well--though you might hound Sherl the dog a bit for his numerous canine-based puns. Occasionally, fully animated cutscenes appear interspersed in the game's cases, though these aren't overly abundant in quantity. Yes, a case of quality over quantity indeed. Meanwhile, the voice acting leans heavily into making sure you're hit over the head (and the ears) that you're playing a game set in London with full fledged accents, some more hammy than others. At any rate, Layton's Mystery Journey happily continues the Layton series's penchant for possessing an excellent presentation.

Overall, if you've already experienced what Layton's Mystery Journey had to offer on a previous platform it released on, then there's no real reason to play through the game again on the Switch, despite the sharper visuals, slightly altered or completely different puzzles, and new additions. While Kat and her adventure may stay in the shadow of her father's trademark top hat due to its disjointed case structure and easier puzzles, Layton's Mystery Journey is still a top notch point-and-click puzzle game that fans of the Professor Layton series will feel right at home playing. It's also a fantastic starting point for new players to take their first leap into the Layton franchise. 

[SPC Says: B]

Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom (PS4) First Trailer

A big surprise RPG was revealed at the PlayStation Experience today. It's the sequel to the PS3 cult classic Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch! Check out the glorious anime-esque visuals with this HD trailer of this new sequel.

LBX: Little Battlers eXperience (3DS) Review

We have two reviews to end the month of September here at SuperPhillip Central. Both are Nintendo 3DS releases, so let's kick things off with the first. The game is in a series that has seen multiple games, but this one is the first to reach the West. It's LBX: Little Battlers eXperience.

Custom Robo

Based off the anime that currently airs on the Nicktoons channel here in the United States, LBX, standing for Little Battlers Experience, features small toy robots with huge power behind them. Battles take place in the safety of special fortified cardboard box arenas where up to six robotic battlers can combat one another either in teams or in a battle royale setting.

While Nintendo and Level-5 have come together to localize LBX: Little Battlers Experience for the Nintendo 3DS in the West, there have actually been a myriad of titles based off the property that first released on Sony’s PlayStation Portable before moving onto the Nintendo 3DS. Now, for the first time, us lucky Westerners get the opportunity to see what all the fuss behind this miniaturized mech combat series is all about. Does LBX: Little Battlers eXperience make for a good first impression to the series for the West?

LBX follows the story of Van Yamano, a middle school student who is unlucky in the way that all of his friends battle and enjoy LBX robots, miniature figures with awesome power, and his mother currently does not let him do the same. It seems this will continue to be the status quo for young Van until a mysterious woman gives him a special LBX model that she says could help save the world. Now, not only does Van have an LBX to call his own, but he has a shifty organization looking to retrieve his LBX through any means necessary.

The anime cutscenes look absolutely glorious.

The story of LBX features well-done dialogue that while sometimes rote anime stuff, does occasionally separate itself from clichés. Some of the dialogue is read aloud, while other times most of it is needed to be read. Special anime cutscenes play during more important scenes of the game. The story itself has plenty of twists to keep players engaged throughout its 10 or so episodes, loosely following the cartoon, so if you’ve watched the show, you will somewhat familiarity with what happens in the game.

Unfortunately, this leads to one of the first problems I need to address with LBX. On many occasions, you’ll find that you are unable to skip certain scenes of dialogue in the game. There was one point in a special tournament within the game that I kept failing. This meant I had to not only restart from an earlier point in the tournament, but to add insult to injury, I had to wait basically four minutes to get back to the point I was at, sitting through dialogue and flashy sequences with no guarantee that I would succeed my next “at-battle”. Nothing but anger and rage consumed my impatient soul as the game taunted me with no ability to skip a scene I must have watched at least five times after four separate failures at the tournament battle in question.

Furthermore, a lot of LBX’s play time will consist of you running from place to place in the real world, which can sometimes be very tedious, divided up between areas of the town, whether it be the residential district, commercial district, Tiny Orbit HQ, the riverfront, and so forth. This is particularly noticeable if you do the optional quests that can have you involved in mighty fetch quests with the bonus of having some nice rewards such as LBX parts, items, and money.

As stated in the introduction, battles in the world of LBX take place in arenas set inside fortified cardboard. The thought behind this is that before the invention of this special type of battlefield, LBX battles were much more dangerous, leading to a ban on the usage of them until fortified cardboard came along. This made it so battles have all the safety both LBX users and everyday citizens who might have been caught in the crossfire previously can appreciate.

Ready for battle? Then let's get it on!

Battles can have a wide set of rules. Some are one-on-one affairs while others are team battles with Van and his friend(s) taking on two or three rival opponents. Sometimes the goal is to simply eliminate the other LBX before they do the same to you, while other times you’ll have to knock them out three times.

The "D" in "Team D" stands for Destroyers!

With team battles, you basically have to micromanage, which if the partner AI were smarter, you wouldn’t have to do. This means healing your teammates with your own items, and hoping to the LBX gods that you aren’t once again put into a situation where it’s 1-on-3 because your worthless teammates’ LBX robots are already eliminated.

Typical battles give you various options to utilize: a simple attack button, a jump, a block, a dash, an item button, and a special attack button. Using these in conjunction in one another offers plenty of offensive and defensive possibilities in each LBX battle you participate in, whether as part of the story or through talking with an NPC in one of the game’s numerous hubs.

A wide selection of arenas is available in LBX,
from plains and forests to glaciers and ancient temples.

The life bar of each LBX is affected by what equipment (i.e. parts) is tied to it. In addition, there are other considerations to make note of in battle, such as the tension gauge. This gauge will quickly empty after successive attacks. Once it reaches zero, your attacks do little damage, so you have to back away and let it replenish itself which takes a few seconds. This is to make it so you can’t just mash your way through battles to win them. It takes some grace to win LBX battles! This goes into when an LBX falls on its back or front in battle. There is a nice invincibility period for LBX battlers that stand back up so they aren’t involved in an unfair and endless combo attack.

The customization options for LBX fighters are pretty much limitless. You can mix and match parts of models for the head, body, left arm, right arm, left leg, and right leg. Depending on the parts chosen, your robot will move faster if it has light parts or move more slowly if it has parts that weigh it down. It’s an important consideration to make outside of just designing an LBX that looks awesome. You can also opt to just use a basic model set if customization of LBX does not fully appeal to you. Any set of LBX that you come up with can be saved in one of 30 slots, so you always have a loadout perfect for the battle ahead.

There are a handful of weapon types that LBX can use. For instance, my favorite happens to be a lance or spear that has a good reach that can attack foes a little further away than those that use a sword. However, the latter is great because it can attack more quickly. You can even equip two swords at once for more attack opportunities, but the catch is that you can’t equip a shield to block enemy advances. In addition to close-range weapons, you have guns that can fire bursts at faraway foes, as well as sniper rifles that deal heavy damage from afar, but take precision aiming and some time to reload.

Grinding for levels is an optional and by no means mandatory task in LBX, which is great as it bucks the trend of typical RPGs. Just because you’re a lower level than your opponent, does not mean that you’re necessarily going to lose or be at a disadvantage. It more boils down to your tactical fortitude and how you operate your controlled LBX.

LBX offers multiplayer, but it sadly and confusingly only offers local play for up to six players. Finding six players with the game much less another person can be tough in this day and age, so the lack of online multiplayer is a severe oversight.

Online play is very ni-- wait. No, no, no.
It's totally missing! Not very nice at all!

For those who like the idea of battling heavily customizable robots with a large layer of depth in its combat mechanics are sure to love LBX. It does have its small issues that gradually build up to be big problems, such as being forced to relive certain scenes again and again if you continuously fail the battles after them. However, overall, LBX: Little Battlers eXperience is a game that both children and adults can enjoy. It’s great for children for the joy of battling toy robots, and it’s great for adults for all of the customization options available to them.

[SPC Says: B]

550th Review! Fantasy Life (3DS) Review

Here it is, ladies and gents, SuperPhillip Central's 550th review! I don't dare wish to know how many words from review #1 to #550 have been typed, as that would probably make me want to reassess my life. Speaking of lives and a perfect segue, Level 5's Fantasy Life appeared on my favorite games of 2014 list, and for good reason, too! See why with this, SPC's 550th review!

(If you want to see any of the reviews leading up to this one, check out my Review Archive!)

Get a Life! ...Or twelve!

Though the system's library at launch started out anemic and ridiculously slow, we've reached a point with the Nintendo 3DS that it seems every month the system is getting a must-play game. Developer Level 5 has been a big supporter of Nintendo handhelds since the original Nintendo DS. Now with the Nintendo 3DS, their support continues with a charmingly delightful action-RPG with a massive amount of content, Fantasy Life.

Fantasy Life puts you into the game, creating your own personal avatar from a wide range of customization options. After tinkering with your looks, you're thrust into the world, the capitol city of Castele, to be more specific, where you meet a strange and curious little butterfly which serves as the talkative part of your eventual partnership. After all, your avatar is like the heroes of RPGs of long ago, totally silent and mute.

The land of Reviera is dealing with falling meteors known as Doomstones that are plaguing the lands where they crash, causing creatures to become more feral and violent than normal. It's with the assistance of the king and numerous NPCs that the mystery behind these Doomstones is explained.

Even though there's a lot of it, thankfully the dialogue
 in Fantasy Life errs on the side of being funny.

Fantasy Life's main story mode takes around 10-15 hours to complete, and it's unfortunately mostly just dialogue and overly long chat sessions. Of course, there's moving to and fro from place to place, but most of the time you'll be mashing on the A button to advance the dialogue, albeit it's rather charming and humorous. There's just too much of it. If you decide to just plow through all seven chapters of Fantasy Life's story one after the other, you very much will get burnt out on the game halfway through, much more the actual end.

Thankfully, you can progress the story at your leisure, any time you want. Fantasy Life's abundance of content happens outside of the story anyway. It's through selecting one of twelve Lives (i.e. job types) and progressing from being low skilled to a complete master that the real fun of Fantasy Life happens.

Reviera is teeming with places to go,
people to meet, and monsters to slay!

Even though you can select a Life, you're not stuck with that Life for the entirety of the game. Much like advancing through the game's story, you can choose a different Life at your will. You just need to head to a Guild, located in every major town in Fantasy Life, to switch Lives. Skills learned from a previous Life can be used in a new Life.

As stated, there are twelve Lives to choose from in Fantasy Life. These range from the offensive juggernauts and short-range fighters of the Paladin and Mercenary Lives to Miners that mine ore to be used by the Blacksmith Life to create new weapons, armor, gear, and furniture. Then there are the long-range Hunter (bow-user) and Wizard Lives, Woodcutter, and more.

And I did it with my own two hands!

Also as stated, each beginning of a Life starts you with a limited skill set. To advance to the next skill level, you have to acquire stars from completing certain in-game tasks, as specified by your Life's Master, the person you train under. For instance, starting out, the Paladin Life needs to take out five common sheep enemies on the East Grassy Plains, while a task for a later level of Life mastery requires a Paladin to take out one of the game's much stronger and less common boss-like creatures, such as a formidable dragon. Another task could be defeating such a creature and taking the bounty, a cage imprisoning the defeated beast, to the local Bounty office for a cash reward.

Time to make this dinosaur extinct!
(Better yet, time to put this dino on ice!)

Outside of a number of objectives to complete at different skill levels of Lives, NPCs in Castele and the lands surrounding it sometimes offer a myriad of quests for players to complete. These don't award players with stars, but they do offer prizes like common as well as rare items, and cash rewards. These quests can range from defeating a certain number of a specific enemy to delivering a desired amount of items or materials to an NPC. These quests add even more replay value to the immense amount already available in Fantasy Life.

Quests like this build on Fantasy Life's
massive amount of replay value.

Combat in Fantasy Life plays out like in typical action-RPG fashion. Offensive-oriented Lives do great in battle, as expected, allowing the ability to unleash deadly combos that deal plenty of more damage than simply attacking with a weak strike over and over again. There's a degree of welcomed timing to have battles be about skill. Harder boss-like creatures encourage a hit-and-run type strategy, as well as a hurt-and-heal type strategy. The latter basically has your avatar attacking without regard for taking damage, only retreating to occasionally heal him or herself.

More difficult field monsters get a
special battle theme as you fight them.

Depending on the Life chosen, your plan for battle can change dramatically. While a Hunter can attack from far away, this Life's attack stat isn't the greatest. Meanwhile, a Paladin has the luxury of drawing out a shield to defend themselves while with a Mercenary has a stronger attack in exchange for no way to defend themselves.

Should my armor be melting right now?

Overall, combat is fun and doesn't feel overly passive. The ability to enlist a maximum of two NPCs makes it so you need not battle alone, or, better yet, as cruel as this sounds, you have two people to use as decoys, which is particularly great for stronger creature encounters.

The world of Fantasy Life is quite expansive, offering a wide amount of areas to explore. Many of these areas aren't even necessary to explore in the story mode, thus offering some of the game's hardest challenges. There are wide open plains, mysterious caverns, vast deserts, closed-in forests, archipelagos, sandy beaches, and isles in the sky to venture through and traverse.

Let's take this Big Pete wannabe out!

Customization is heavily supported in Fantasy Life, whether it's custom-fitting your character with different weapons and armor, each changing the on-screen look of your avatar, or buying or building furniture to put inside one of your homes in Animal Crossing-like fashion. It all adds up to a wealth of options to make your character and your home your way, allowing a great amount of creativity and personal style.

Fantasy Life supports a gorgeous cartoon-like art style with plenty of charm and character. Areas are bright and possess an admirable amount of detail to them, character and creature models are impressive to gaze upon, and the frame-rate usually behaves itself, outside of heavy traffic combat areas. The man best known for his work with the Final Fantasy series, Nobuo Uematsu, delivers a fresh soundtrack with plenty of cute melodies and themes that punctuate the gameplay of Fantasy Life splendidly. It all equals a presentation package that is utterly delightful, especially when looking at it with the 3D slider turned all the way up.

This isn't any ordinary day at the beach.

For those looking for an action-RPG with plenty of content to it, Fantasy Life is a great selection for a Nintendo 3DS owner. The story sequences do little to excite, but at least the dialogue is funny enough that it's not worth skipping completely. The real fun comes from expanding each of the game's twelve Lives, eventually becoming a master and beyond for each of them. If this challenge seems worthwhile enough (and I argue it very much is), then Fantasy Life is definitely a terrific game to let you live the double life you've always wanted to have.

[SPC Says: 9.25/10]

Fantasy Life (3DS) North American TV Commercial

Bayonetta 2 (posted yesterday) isn't the only game releasing on October 24 that is also getting publicity from Nintendo of America. No, Fantasy Life is also releasing that day and has a TV spot to call its own. This Level-5 made, Nintendo-published game with tons of customization, action, and charm has been out in Japan and Europe for a while now. Us small little North American 3DS owners will get to play it later this month. Ah, Bayonetta 2 and Fantasy Life... A month doesn't get any better!