The Good: Likeable characters, creative story with shocking plot twist, creative wide range of challenging puzzles, beautiful ending, impressive 2D graphics and atmosphere.
The Bad: Dialouge is extremely cheesy at times, the game as a whole is too easy, painful music, gameplay gets repetitive.
You know, even though violence in video games is awesome, sometimes you got to play a game with no violence. Not a game where you kill enemies, no! Sometimes, you need a game that stimulates your mind and gives you brainteasers. An example of that is Professor Layton and the Curious Village.
In this game, you play as Professor Layton, the famous puzzle solving professor. Solving puzzles shouldn't really give you the title of professor, but whatever. So, Professor Layton and his really, really annoying sidekick, Luke, must go to this town called St. Mysterre to discover the Golden Apple. While there, a lot of weird things happen, which gets Professor Layton curious. He must solve the mysteries to find the secret behind St. Mysterre. Now onto the review.
This game is really, really, really cliché. It has a whole bunch of British stereotypes in it. That being said, that's what makes the game enjoyable. It is its own strength and weakness. We'll get to the strength in a minute. The weakness is that the dialogue is really lame. Sometimes, when you read the dialogue boxes, you can't help but rolling your eyes or groaning. With that in mind, the way you find some of your puzzles is completely ridiculous. "Wow, that cat is so cute! Here kitty, kitty!" "You certainly have a way with animals, Luke. Speaking of which, have you heard of this one?" The puzzle had nothing to do with cats.
Its strength is that it makes the characters interesting and likeable and the story really good. The story is creative and sometimes even funny. It actually had a pretty good plot twist that I was completely not expecting. The characters are entertaining with all of them having unique personalities. They range from funny to strange to likeable. Its things like those that can't keep you from smiling time to time.
The puzzles are great. They really test your mind and challenge your thought process without being overly difficult. They range from multiple choice to math to drawing to puzzle solving. The wide variety of puzzles are creative and thought provoking.
The puzzles themselves are challenging, but the game itself is pretty easy. There is hardly any penalty when you fail to solve a puzzle. When you get it wrong, you lose a few picarats (those are basically a score system). After you lose a couple times, it doesn't reduce anymore. There is no way to lose the game from failing a puzzle, which is a little disappointing. You can quit the puzzle, but you can always do it again from finding the same person or thing you got the puzzle from or going to the place where all the puzzles go when they're unsolved.
The biggest downside to the game is by far, by FAR, the music. It's practically torture to your ears. It is literally a mix of a xylophone (or something of the sort) and an accordion. Does that sound like good music to you? No. It probably doesn't.
The biggest upside to the game, though, is the ending. The ending is freaking amazing. It's beautiful, touching, and wrapped up very nicely. The ending literally contains 6 different cutscenes and not one of them is boring. The ending to Professor Layton and the Curious Village is almost as good as Bioshock. Yeah. It's that impressive.
Another big upside is the graphics and the art. The graphics are extremely impressive, especially for the DS. No, it's not 3D graphics. It's a 2D cartoon like game. Everything looks great from the towns to the characters to the puzzles. The cut scenes are most impressive, containing fully animated, fully voiced, fully textured videos, which are actually pretty funny, most of the time.
While the gameplay and art is great, the game is kind of repetitive. Especially when you think you've solved a puzzle. It's the same thing. You see a montage of either Professor Layton or Luke pondering a question and seeing if they got it right or not. If not, you have to wait a good while to start the puzzle again. Not to mention the same music plays during every puzzle. Literally, the same track plays every puzzle in the game. And there are over 130 of them! And going through the town is also repetitive. You're basically tapping arrows and going back and forth through a really small town. It gets kind of annoying. But it isn't that bad going through town once you're really progressing through the story.
Overall, the game is fun. It definitely has flaws, like the music, the repetitive gameplay, and the cheesy lines, but it is enjoyable to progress through the story, meet the characters, solve the puzzles, and look at the great graphics. I suggest you give it a try. You will enjoy yourself.