For the past few months, I’ve been working on a walkthrough for Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy. That’s the final game of the prequel trilogy, and overall, I’d say it’s a good game with a slightly disappointing story. Not that the story itself is bad, but it’s disappointing because it ends with every single character disappearing forever.
That’s a heavy-handed way to avoid continuity errors. Personally, I expected Luke and Layton to have a lightsaber battle on the lava planet. Luke falls into the lava and is reborn as the main villain of the next series. That would have been so cool!
Wait, that was Star Wars. Wrong prequel trilogy.
Doing a walkthrough for Azran Legacy is more or less the same as doing a walkthrough for the other Layton games, with one big difference. I’m talking about Chapter 4, the six-hour monster chapter that takes hold of the game like a killer octopus and doesn’t let go until it has sucked all the ink out of your pens.
For reference, every other chapter in the game is an hour long. Chapter 4 is as long as all the other chapters put together! I tried to split it up into reasonable parts, which gave my walkthrough an awkward-looking Table of Contents.
001. Prologue
002. Chapter 1
003. Chapter 2
004. Chapter 3
005. Chapter 4
005a. Chapter 4, Section 1
005b. Chapter 4, Section 2
005c. Chapter 4, Section 3
005d. Chapter 4, Section 4
005e. Chapter 4, Section 5
005f. Chapter 4, Section 6
005g. Chapter 4, Section 7
006. Chapter 5
007. Chapter 6
008. Finale
I feel your pain, Luke.
Naturally, Chapter 4 contains the majority of the game’s puzzles. The end of the chapter is the worst, because it throws 26 puzzles at you. After a two-minute scene, it throws 18 more puzzles at you. That makes over 45 puzzles in a row, with practically nothing in between them.
It took me over a week to get through that section, and by the end, I was ready to set the cartridge on fire. I know GameFAQs has a “complete walkthrough” category and an “incomplete walkthrough” category, but why doesn’t have a category for “mostly complete, except for the optional 45-puzzle block that everyone decides to skip”?
My walkthrough is still unfinished, because I need to muster up the courage to tackle the fifteen puzzles that get unlocked when you beat the game. And lest you think I’m being lazy, let me point out that these final fifteen puzzles are not in the other GameFAQs guide for this game. So if/when I finish the guide, I get bragging rights.
Man, it’d be so sweet if I met the other author in real life, and we got into an argument over politics. I’d be able to pull out “My Professor Layton walkthrough is slightly more comprehensive than yours!” as the ultimate trump card. That’s a good enough reason to put myself through another huge puzzle block, right?
