I like emmy but christ dude we really have the opposite of the what happened with flora in the original trilogy already unfolding here. flora had an entire first game dedicted to telling her backstory and then she got shafted for the rest of the series. emmy has got like, a single episode that is optional to watch and she's already the most present female character this series ever had.

misthallery is a lovely place and the story this time around is...okay. I know we're long past the point of questioning or getting mad at the twists in these games but this one feels like a compromise of the tone the game was building up. I don't know. the puzzles kinda suck more than they used to also. all of the trunk minigames are direct downgrades of unwound future's that are similar in concept but are somehow infinitely more tedious. I felt a much greater satisfaction of satisfaction with the toy car than I did the train and the stage play is a fucking joke.

this game also has a bunch of extra stuff that I can tell was put in to meet a new standard of substance that this new trilogy of layton games seems to be working towards. the bad news is it kinda all sucks. having a collection of random items seems pointless when you already did this in curious village and then put them into your hotel room in a cute little minigame where you had to figure out whether each item was more to layton or luke's prefences. the trash you collect isn't even related to archaelogy or anything so... what's the point? also there's extra episodes now that only exist to show skits of the characters in the world, which unfortunately would only work if those characters were as charming as the ones in previous games, which they aren't.

the game provided some good puzzles, and that's all well, but I gotta say, this is definitely the weakest title in the series thus far (<-- has not played azran legacy) and it doesn't bode well for whatever I'm about to experience next.