Everything about Arzen Legacy is built on a solid foundation, the animation is great, the puzzles are great, and the formula of the series has been pretty much perfect'd at this point. Arzen Legacy by all means uses all the resources that previous Layton games had and makes use of them for it's own benefit and in a lot of ways is the logical conclusion of 6 games into one. That's the thing though, you can have everything work in favor for you and still lose it if you don't focus on a good story. Arzen Legacy felt like it was being built up throughout this whole prequel series and while there are some nice building blocks to the mystery, it ultimately fails to achieve this. The game feels far too bloated and misses a lot of beats to have all the twists and turns it has fall flat. It's a real shame too because the game really just needed to be longer or fix it's pacing in order to have all these mysteries feel satisfying. Still this doesn't ruin the game from being good on it's own, but it does notably suffer from it. Arzen Legacy is a decent last outing for Layton, but Unwonded Future still feels like the better end to the series, and I suppose I'm fine with that.

While the first two acts of the story have some minor pacing issues (which, this game has made me realize, a lot of the Layton games seem to have) it's made up for by the really stellar finale; the game pulls out a handful of big twists in quick succession and somehow they all feel handled really well. It even does a good job on the emotional beats, which I really wasn't expecting since this was a replay (granted, the first one in a while, but still).

Also I really liked that one trick question puzzle at the beginning of the game.

Azran Legacy is the worst Professor Layton game there is. Its still good, but compared to other Layton games? it falls short. Its such a shame too. the first half of the game was fantastic and i had high hopes. then the latter half comes in, what a mess it was. they literally crammed like 500 plot twists in the last hour of the game and i just couldnt keep up. not only that but they literally focus on solving questions we didnt even ask for rather than solving the main fucking mytsery which is crammed in the final chapter. Honestly, i wish the prequel trilogy didnt exist. AL is a good ending for layton , but UW / LF is way better at giving an proper ending for him.

Overall, its a good game. By far the worst Layton game starring layton himself though.

Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy is the final game in the main Layton series, and it takes the story to heights the likes of which we haven’t seen before in these games. Being a prequel game to the series it feels a bit odd as the stakes laid out over the course of this games story are so grandiose in comparison to the original trilogy that the stories told in that game dwarf in comparison. But that said, that isn’t necessarily a great thing, I feel that the huge leap in what’s at stake can almost feel like a jump the shark type scenario for the series despite being built up from through Last Specter and Miracle Mask. Despite my shaky feeling about the larger than life narrative what makes me really appreciate the game once again is it’s characters. The new cast of characters introduced for the prequel trilogy seemed a bit shoe horned in at first, but as the trilogy told its story I became more invested in the microcosm that they inhabited watching all the characters relationships unfold into an ultimate climax in this entry was very satisfying. As for the gameplay, it takes the 3D Layton formula set up in Miracle Mask and improves on it just slightly to make the whole experience more enjoyable. Navigating the map and looking around an area remain largely the same but have been refined ever so slightly that it feels more enjoyable to control and explore, which was my biggest gripe with Miracle Mask. The game’s puzzles seemed to ease up on the math puzzles which I greatly appreciated but one thread that has continued throughout the prequel series the almost lack of any real creativity with the puzzles that we saw in the original trilogy. This does not mean the new puzzles are bad, far from it, but looking back at puzzles from Curious Village you can tell they were starting to run out of steam here. As for the environments you explore this game perhaps may be the largest in the series yet, as Layton and Co go on a globe trotting adventure exploring places like the Wild West, a tropical island, a Romani Village, amongst many others which are all displayed in high detail and brought to life with lovable NPCs and wonderful music. Overall I had a great time with Azran Legacy, and it is a great send off to the mainline series of games even if it bites off more than it can realistically chew. Any Layton fans should leave this game feeling satisfied at the very least.

Weak puzzles make it hard to recommend this game for any reason other than rounding out Layton's plot. Unfortunately, I don't think it's a very satisfying conclusion. Still, Sycamore and Aurora are good traveling companions. I just wish they'd focused their attention more on a smaller environment. Trying to go nationhopping over many months feels like it's out of anything but Layton, whose greatest strength to me always seemed to be focusing on smaller stories and more limited environments so that they could be explored in great detail.

As the last installment of Professors Layton's tale, Azran Legacy clearly learns from the past making it's gameplay the best of the series, the puzzles, the solutions, the way you progress and even the mini games all come to their best here, the azran puzzles are the best in the series, letting the puzzelocks as the only bad part.

In it's character it also delivers in greatness, all of them are well designed and find their place into the narrative. The narrative itself is well done, however a little too megalomaniac for my own taste, but still maintains the series constant quality.

In general Professor layton has been a delightful series to have played throughout it's entire duration in the last year, it sure was made with a lot of care and dedication put into it, it deserved more attention and future, but it was nice to see that their legacy will always be there in the form of a great serie of games.

The last of the mainline Professor Layton games wraps up the prequel trilogy in a fashion with a globe-trotting adventure with a lot of locations and major plot revelations. Even in the sometimes ludicrous world of Layton, I definitely didn’t buy into all the plot twists and character turns that happen here, some of which felt forced to get us on track to Curious Village and so forth. But it’s still an engaging story and I was curious to see it through.

Credit always has to go to puzzle master Akira Tago, who died in 2016. A legend and the backbone of what made these games so great along the way. Professor Layton is a really fun series to get into and I’d definitely suggest starting at the beginning. Azran Legacy isn’t a bad final chapter to the gentleman’s adventures.