Miracle Mask kicks off with a strong premise - a magician who is able to turn people into stone and horses threatens to take down this game's version of Las Vegas with the power of an ancient mask, causing an old childhood friend from Layton to request his help in this dire situation.

The change to 3D wasn't as rough as I've heard people make it out to be and it doesn't take long to get used to. Maybe it's because I've played Layton vs Wright first? Either way, the art direction isn't the only big change in Miracle Mask. Puzzles have also undergone a major overhaul, they're less logic-based now and many play like little minigames instead, but there's also a fair share of some usual puzzle formats (sliding puzzles, geometry puzzles). The puzzles in this entry are alright, nothing really stands out here in an especially good or bad light. Side activities were meh, I didn't really warm up to the robot minigame or the rabbit theater, but the shop sidegame was a fun pastime.

Most of my issues in Miracle Mask stem from the narrative. While I don't think it's a bad storyline per se, I found the twists (especially the villain's identity) to be really predictable. Emmy as a character is rather sidelined here, which is a shame, since I liked her role a lot in Last Specter. Also the game also has a lot of reveals that go... absolutely nowhere? There's an entire exposition segment fairly early into the game, where Layton whimsically deduces three of the villains' magic acts in their entirety. Not soon after, the magician performs another magic trick and Layton is able to come up with the solution to what just happened about 5 minutes after the events. I don't know, but to me it felt like the game was cheapening those moments by nearly immediately resolving them on a whim later. Why even bother listing them in the "Mysteries" section of the game if you're not even given time to think about these mysteries yourself?

What really dragged down this game for me however, was the entirety of Chapter 6. Minor gameplay spoilers ahead I guess? So, you've been solving puzzles and collecting hint coins for the past five chapters now. Great, right? How about the game turns into a mystery dungeon game?! Not going into the plot specifics here, but for a specific cause, Layton needs to navigate a cave with multiple floors. You would think it would be a short segment, since this sort of gameplay is experimental and has never been in any of the previous games before. NO! Enjoy your nine floors of rolling rocks and avoiding mummies. And just so you know, every floor consists of a handful of these rooms and an occasional puzzle - featuring a mandatory puzzle with forced gyro controls. I really hope Azran Legacy doesn't try this approach of gameplay again and just sticks to point-and-click navigation with a puzzle here and there throughout the entire game.

Now onto Azran Legacy to get to know all these characters Miracle Mask throws at you at the last possible moment (to get you hyped? I don't even know anymore). Thanks for reading and forgive me the ranting review for once.

It's a Layton game. The first one to be on 3DS, and the transition to 3D models is really well done, kinda love it. It gives it a bit more of a dynamic feel to them, especially Emmy who they put extra care into (I love her quick photograph snaps, even though she does it like 2 or 3 times in the whole game)
Speaking of Emmy they really didn't know what to do with her character huh? I don't think she did a single thing that mattered, she was kinda just there.

Anyway, the game itself is fine. The puzzles are once again also...fine...but truly feel like they've been re-hashed every time and most of them feel more like a chore to me.

The story is possibly the worst one yet with one of the most predictable twists I've ever seen. But at the same time, I like everything surrounding the twist, and how it was resolved. Wholesome stuff. It sort of felt like a kids movie or something, but that's okay. We also get a real look at Layton's past for once, and I liked that a lot.
But god, what a shitty antagonist these prequels have.

definitivamente foi o meu Professor Layton menos favorito até agora, isso siginifica que ele é ruim? de forma nenhuma!
no início eu estranhei bastante a mudança pros gráficos 3D mas com o tempo dá de se acostumar e eles são muito mais expressivos já que se movimantam e gesticulam durante todas os diágolos.

a OST é incrível e maravilhosa como já é de prache da série, mas a história parece deixar um pouco a desejar com a revelação final sendo muito previsível (mas mesmo assim sendo emocionante e perfeitamente construída).

além dos gráficos, a mudança de gameplay também é de se estranhar bastante no começo mas com o tempo é bastante fácil de acostumar e esse novo estilo até tem algumas vantagens em relação aos títulos de DS.

Another great entry in the series, now with charming 3D models. The jump on the 3DS brought some new positives, such as the new level of exploration in the areas and the new types of puzzles, but also some negatives such as some below average minigames and a chapter taking place in a dungeon which is a total shift in gameplay. This last negative is not as bad as some people say it is, though. All in all the positives balance out these negatives, creating an entry in the series that's neither the best nor the weakest. The same could be said about the story.

I was a bit worried about the jump to 3DS and the changes that came with it, but I think after a small adjustment period it hits the mark. Actually using both screens instead of just using one for puzzle info is a great change, and while I still prefer the 2D sprites of characters, the 3D models aren't too bad when you get used to them.

The navigation system is also way better than the previous games, though I'm not sure why it doesn't let you just click on a destination more than 1 screen away and navigate there immediately.

The story was nothing special, the twist was incredibly obvious, Descole still feels like nothing of importance, and the connections to Spectre's Call were very loose making this feel like more of a duology than a trilogy.

The past / present idea is a fun one for storytelling, and I enjoyed it, but the ruins of akbadain took far, far too long. It just kept going on and on everytime I thought it would end.

It is Layton, so it's nothing spectacularly different from what you may have already experienced in the series. That indeed is true, but this game even flaws at following the same formula from older games, some puzzles feel tired in their concept, because many of them try to present a solution that is "outside of the box" in that the statement from the puzzle is nothing but a trick that you must not fall into. This really gets tiresome sometimes and does feel overused. The story fleshes out Layton's past, which was unexpected, but the finale falls short from being a truly memorable plot because the pacing was nothing like well-distributed.

Definitely my least favorite ‘Layton’, maybe, though by only a smidge, but not for the reasons I expected. This game actually does a really great job on the transition from 2D to 3D, considering this is a series that, before this game, basically leaned mostly on the charm of their cartoony art style and animations that were made for 2D art and animation. The models in this game were not only very well done, but are well utilized to make some scenes a little more lively, with some non-2D-animated cutscenes using the models for some action scenes so that it’s not all the standard visual novel diorama. It gives the game a really great overall look that doesn’t veer far away from the established and well known style of the Professor Layton series.

Unfortunately, this game’s scenario and plot is just not even meeting its visual success in the middle. It is very interesting to dive into more of Layton’s past, after getting some insight into his love life in ‘Unwound Future’ and then seeing his early days at his current professor job in ‘Last Specter’. The scenario goes back and forth between past and present, as the professor recounts more of a story that’s directly intwined with the strange events that the gang is investigating. The thing is, the events of the present are not interesting after the very beginning and until the very end! It is a bit of a drag, pacing-wise, and the mystery just did not entice me. The chapters that make up the past are leagues more interesting, as we learn more about the stoic Hershel Layton’s closest friends of his teenhood. It made me wonder, constantly, of how this plot might’ve been better broken up or arranged in order to make for a better overall scenario.

Now, in these games, I don’t exactly hold a high standard for them to be extremely mind-boggling and surprising in terms of plot twists. Professor Layton games are very wacky and mystical and earnest, aiming for a wide audience of all ages. These games all revolve around Layton and his entourage unraveling a seemingly supernatural event, and not only explaining the phenomenon as a farce, but also uncovering the motives behind it. A problem in this installment is the game doesn’t really seem to be having any fun with the “explaining the phenom” part of the story. Professor Layton just seems to figure a lot of it out by talking about the events with others, and not a lot of investigating into each event happens, or puzzle solving, for that matter. There are less “a-ha!” moments and more “oh, okay,” ones, instead, I guess you could say. This is the fifth installment, and at this point, the audience knows that people magically disappearing or turning to stone might have some logic behind it, and the fun should be figuring out just how it was done, instead of figuring out that it was a trick in the first place.

Then, when it comes to motive, it is not exactly hard to connect the dots on what’s going on even as soon as all of the main players are introduced. The story, then, does not unfold with this in mind, and thus plays out as if we couldn’t possibly have a clue up until the last couple of chapters, when the professor himself begins hinting that he knows. Though, once you see even the first chapter that takes place in Layton’s past, I imagine any player could narrow it down a lot, and it becomes less about unmasking the masked villain of this story, and more about uncovering the motive. The game’s present story drags, mostly, because it takes a while to get to investigating a motive that might tie into events of the past that we still are dying to see.

The game’s finale also kind of falls flat. In my review of Professor Layton and the Last Specter, I fawned very hard over the climax of that game. The finale incorporates a lot of fun elements, and a lot of puzzles, and thus feels like a great finale, story- and game-wise. There’s only about a handful of puzzles even involved in this game’s final hour, and while they are fun I just couldn’t help but feel as if this game’s entire scenario was just really stringy, and wobbly, and not at all the kind of charming, woven quilt that most of the other installments share. For instance, part of the last chapter has you reading storybooks left as hints within a giant hotel so that Layton and co. know where to go to confront the antagonist. This amounts to you going to a room, finding the book after clicking around, then going to the next room. I feel like, in a puzzle/mystery game, it might be better to have the player be familiar with all of the rooms already, maybe by having already visited the area (it actually would’ve really served the story to have Layton be staying in this hotel during his entire visit), and then the player can figure out which room to go to themselves based on the hints instead of just, unlocking the room once you find the book, lol.

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask transitions a landmark DS series to 3DS very, very well when it comes to UI and basic gameplay structure, and the visuals do not suffer from letting go of the classic 2D portraits and also switching things to the top screen to accomodate the 3DS’ hardware design. One of the most fun little reveals was actually that a chapter in the story is told entirely through a dungeon crawling segment, utilizing the game’s newfound 3D style to switch things up, gameplay-wise, and keep the series fresh and still inventive, and, thus, keeping the audience engaged. This game is definitely continuing from its predecessor and throwing in more ingredients into the pot than just a bunch more puzzles. However, the story’s execution just did not come together on this one, for me, and although I would still recommend this to any fan of the professor’s, as it still give some wonderful insight into the character, it definitely is the weakest installment, in my mind.

This was the only Layton I had left to play, I didnt like the 3ds models at the time it released and totally forgot about it until a few days, it was really nice going back into the series after so long, so I may be a little bias.

I really liked the story, the tension and mistrust between some of the characters is really well written and the puzzles were great. The OST is amazing and I really love the city of Montedore.

The game has its flaws; chapter 6 is a 2-hour loop of the same puzzles over and over again, and you must go through it with the most annoying, nerd emoji, unbearable character i've ever seen in this series. Some of the mysteries are also quite obvious.

Great game overall tho

It almost feels inevitable that the Professor Layton series would reach this point. Unfortunately, there's a pretty finite number of ways you can spin logic to create inventive puzzles. Miracle Mask runs thin on creative puzzles and feels like it's mostly recycling old formats. However, I can't really blame the game too much for that. For the most part, I still enjoyed solving the puzzles the game offers. The solutions are different even if the format is familiar. I also think that I enjoyed Miracle Mask's cast of characters more than The Last Specter. The game gets more personal with Layton's friendships and the sequences that take place in Layton's past lead to some pretty good character building moments. New characters like Dalston, Randall, Angela and Henry were pretty good additions. However, whilst the puzzle side remains intact I think the mystery element of Miracle Mask is particularly weak. I'll keep this spoiler free but the eventual big reveal is very predictable. The most climactic moment of the narrative has very little impact as a result. My final note is that the performance is very choppy. The transition to 3D models instead of sprites is definitely a rocky one. There were several moments where I experienced slowdown, which I feel took away from the gameplay experience. Overall, Professor Layton & The Miracle Mask does function as a puzzle game, but is far from the best the series has to offer.

The fifth installment takes Layton in the series' most memorable setting yet brought to life by a (as per usual) stellar soundtrack and vibrant environments, even when the transition from hand-drawn 2D to a rudimentary 3D results in a noticeably rougher visual style, but the narrative within struggles to be interesting. New characters are shallow and the plot's mysteries are mostly either underwhelmingly predictable or have resolutions so ridiculously preposterous I'm inclined to call offensive. Puzzles too, while displaying the same charming creativity and variety they always have, too rarely offer a real challenge, at some points resembling minigames more than genuine brainteasers, making for the least entertaining and rewarding Layton game yet.