Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy

Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy is the sixth and hitherto last game in the series to feature the archaeologist Hershel Layton as the protagonist. It is, however, an uneven game that tries to offer more freedom to the player at the expense of pacing and narrative focus.

The story begins when Layton receives a letter from an esteemed professor telling him of an archeological breakthrough: professor Sycamore claims to have found a “living mummy” in the isolated and snow-laden town of Fraenbourg. Hershell Layton, then, readily departs into another adventure with his loyal assistant Emmy and curious pupil Luke.

After arriving in Fraenbourg and encountering the mummy trapped in ice – she’s actually a nice girl called Aurora –, the group sets out to locate and acquire five special stones that unlock the secrets of the lost Azran civilization. Their main obstacle is Targent, a mercenary group that, despite being led by a menacing man named Bronev, is actually full of silly thugs so inept that they would make Team Rocket look like overachievers in comparison.

To circumvent Targent and acquire the stones, Layton and his friends must, of course, solve puzzles – and a lot of them, as basically every eccentric figure they come across is haunted by one in some way or another. In Layton games, after all, puzzle-solving is not just the main mechanic, but the entire raison d’être of the characters: you give good morning to a person and they give you a puzzle back. To illustrate how powerful and advanced the Azran civilization once was, for example, Aurora claims that there wasn’t a single puzzle they couldn’t solve. In this series, every character has a puzzle to test the professor’s wit, no matter the situation: here, there’s a moment in which Layton must solve a puzzle about matching shapes to form a gift box just to gain the trust of… a sheep. It’s bizarre and silly… and a great part of the game’s charm. In one of Azran Legacy‘s first scenes, a character even uses a puzzle to verify Layton’s identity: puzzles form this game’s soul, they’re what define the protagonist. As a character points out: “Money may not grow on trees, but it appears that puzzles do.”

To further increase their charm, puzzles usually begin with quirky descriptions (“This trio of criminal brothers have committed so many crimes together that even their breathing has become synchronized“) and go on to present an utterly bizarre context to their main gimmick. There are 150 puzzles of varying difficulty – and quality – scattered throughout the main story, and veteran players won’t be too surprised with their types, since most of them are built around the usual actions, such as arranging blocks, doing simple math, or finding an answer to a very specific and arbitrary set of rules.

The point where Azran Legacy differs from previous entries is the fact that now Layton can travel to different lands to find the magic stones – whereas before he usually had to uncover the secrets of a single major city – and we can visit these places in any order. This freedom, however, proves to be more of a curse than a blessing, since each new location has its own storyline that puts the main one on hold for a long while.

The places Layton visits here are certainly varied in theme and tone. There’s a walled city where all the grown-ups have been mysteriously put into a deep sleep, and a windy village up in the hills where they sacrifice young maidens to please their wind go, but also a tropical forest where Layton must simply discover a way to make the villager elder laugh, and a beach resort where people like to randomly trade stones just for fun. Narrative-wise, however, they’re a mixed bag: it’s difficult, for example, to care for the village elder and the people who live in his forest. It’s a simple storyline made even simpler by the fact that it has basically no interesting characters or surprises in store, which makes the whole affair feel like busywork to get to one of the stones. On the other hand, the storyline involving human sacrifice deals with heavy themes, showing characters driven by fear and resentment, which thematically links the events to those of the main plot.

Azran Legacy’s main issue is precisely the fact that the main story is interrupted as soon as the game opens up to the player. After all, for us to be able to freely choose which destination to visit first without getting lost in the story, their storylines must be self-contained. This means that nothing meaningful happens while Layton explores not one, not two, but five different places. Sure, some of the main characters are developed with their interactions with the people they meet – especially Sycamore, who has a chance to reveal his more empathic and caring side – but that doesn’t change the fact that the main plot is put on hold for far too long.

The game’s core theme revolves around the question of humanity’s worth: have we learned from our past mistakes, or do we continue to be selfish and cruel? Traveling and meeting a lot of people indeed play a role in shaping Aurora’s mind in the matter, but not all stories really contribute to that. Let’s take the walled city as an example: its resolution is not about people being good or cruel to each other, but about a specific accident and its very unique repercussions.

Therefore, when all this traveling is done, and the game goes back to developing its villains and main themes directly, it’s already too late, because it has wasted most of its runtime with irrelevant storylines. In other words, Azran Legacy has an excellent introduction and an excellent climax, but nothing really interesting in between. This leads to a lot of revelations, twists, and confrontations being crammed into the last hour of the game, with absolutely no room to breathe.

And that’s a pity, because Azran Legacy had the enormous task of concluding the overarching story of this trilogy – and movie – about the Azran artifacts and Descole’s true intentions. What’s here is still great, though: the antagonists, for example, start as villainous figures that are eventually revealed to be tragic, broken people – sometimes in a very Laytonesque kind of way: “I threw my whole life away to solve the greatest puzzle in modern history,” one of them laments. There’s also an excellent exchange right at the end between Layton and Bronev, the leader of Targent, that deals with identity, loss, and forgiveness, and reinforces the professor as a gentle but resolute man.

The series continues to make great use of color as well. Luke’s innocence is always rightly represented by the soft blue of his clothes. Emmy’s energy and pro-activity are displayed by the bright yellow that defines her. Meanwhile, Layton’s personality – his intellect helps hide his gentle soul – is expressed by his brown coat covering the warm orange of his shirt. In contrast, Professor Sycamore already shows signs of danger by wearing a red tie.  And if the color red only appears on Layton’s hat, indicating that his mind is his weapon, Sycamore also wears red glasses, suggesting that it’s his perspective on the world that’s dangerous. To make matters even more intense, Sycamore’s ship is covered by the color purple – a color that is usually associated with death, villains, and the supernatural.

Presentation-wise, The Azran Legacy is breathtakingly gorgeous, especially in 3D, which makes the beautiful environments pop and come alive. The characters are all eccentric in their design: there’s a man shaped like a mushroom, and another one with two huge teeth that are bigger than his head. And the soundtrack, composed by series veteran Tomohito Nishiura, remains stellar with lots of songs charged with melancholy and pathos.

Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy may be uneven narrative-wise, but it’s still a competent ending for the Layton series. With a great set of characters and stellar presentation, the game is only dragged down by its lack of narrative focus.

June 06, 2025.

Review originally published on March 27, 2020.