Anime Professor Layton series (& ripoffs)

[Maxie]

For a series so well-established, I found it a little irksome to have no thread devoted to it, so I'm setting one up, if only for recording my own good cheer with the series.
I've found out about its existence probably decades ago, but finally played a Layton game only last year, on the 3ds - I played Layton 6, the Azran Legacy, which I found rather quaint despite being just a tad too anime. Then I went back to play the Miracle Mask, or Layton 5, and didn't like it very much.
So I went back to the very beginning and currently I'm emulating Layton 1 - apart from no taking notes function, which annoys me sometimes, the game's so far almost as if not more fun than the Azran Legacy. I intend to play through all four NDS installments to be better versed in the franchise, also because these games happen to be super fun.
This thread serves as a go-to place for discussing Layton and Layton-lites, like Puzzle Agent, or Det. Grimoire.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

fuck off, Liberal, STOP imitating our precious Maxie...

 

[Maxie]

Beaten Layton 1. Its greatest strength - a very contricted locale, befitting a single investigation, is also its undoing towards the end of the game. As puzzles are tied to NPCs, rather than to locations (the latter few in number), you eventually run out of puzzles to beat, as each NPC may have three of them at most. Towards the end of the game it's not unusual to beat a puzzle or two per chapter, simply because you've beaten most during the first five hours of the game. Just as the puzzles are unevenly spread (and, I must say, the final puzzles are rather anticlimactic), so are the mysteries, casually resolved in a single comment by Layton during the final chapter. Plot-wise it's much neater than Layton 5 and 6, although Layton 6 is an entirely different game structure-wise, with thematic puzzles spread around diverse locales, if ineffectively.