Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

It’s kind of nice Professor Layton and the Diabolical box took so long to reach North American shores. A series that revolves around solving all sorts of brain teasers and puzzles can get exhausting and if Diabolical Box arrived just a few months after the original’s release, I probably wouldn’t have been looking forward to it. So, after 1.5 years of mental refreshing, it’s just about time to dive into another Professor Layton game and Diabolical Box is more than just par the course. It sticks with what worked and tweaks and polishes a few key elements that didn’t, while still carrying over a few minor problems its predecessor had. Once you weigh everything into consideration, though, Diabolical Box truly is the better game and if Curious Village kept you entertained, Diabolical Box will too, only moreso.

Diabolical Box kicks off after an unspecified amount of time after Curious Village. Layton receives a letter from Dr. Schrader, Layton’s mentor and close friend, which has a dire tone ringing throughout the entire message, revealing scant details on the enigmatic Elysian Box. This propels Layton and Luke to go to Schrader’s home, where he’s seen lying on the floor, presumably dead. With a few clues and a train ticket, they’re off, in search of who did such a thing to Schrader and to solve the mystery of the box itself.

It’s good. Diabolical Box has a solid narrative, with enough mystery to keep things interesting and the localization is so good that it seriously doesn’t feel like this game originated from Japan. Coupled with a healthy dose of fantastic animated sequences, more than competent voice-acting and a heartwarming, poignant ending, Diabolical Box’s narrative is simple but light-hearted and endearing. Diabolical Box really wouldn’t be the success it is without this polished element of the game.
  
On the flipside, Diabolical Box also wouldn’t be the success it is without the puzzles. The puzzles, this time around, have a lot more variety to them. There’s less in the way of ones that require math, which kind of makes the memo function something that could’ve served much greater use in the original, but it’s still helpful in jotting down some key points. The puzzles rarely ever repeat; there are some alterations and more challenging versions of some puzzles, but the majority of Diabolical Box’s head scratchers have enough variety and uniqueness to each one that it did a lot to keep me going. If I tired of a long, unfortunate chain of math puzzles, which only happened once, there were a bunch of others that focused more of deciphering words and riddles to reach that ever satisfying “AHA!”

Another welcome change is how the puzzles are much more contextual this time around. You’ll still be given an arbitrary challenge from a lot of the puzzle-obsessed people of Layton’s world, but when the situation calls for it, the puzzles tie really well to any given situation at hand. It adds much more of a connective tissue between the gameplay and what’s going on in the story, binding them together into a much more cohesive product. The way puzzle solving  and St. Mystere from Curious Village were so divorced from one another was a real sticking point I had with that game, so this improvement alone really puts Diabolical Box above its predecessor quite handily.

Outside of the core, 150 puzzles, there are a few little fun diversions. You’ll get camera pieces over the course of the game to put one together, which is a puzzle of its own, and put it to use to solve a few puzzles, which unlocks another puzzle after that. The tea set is the one I had the most fun with, though, because tossing the right ingredients to unlock a new recipe is pretty rewarding, even though more than half of them resulted in dismal failures. This too will grant you the ability to unlock more puzzles as various characters will ask for specific teas. Hey, this game has puzzles.

And hey, this game looks and sounds great. There’s a really great art style the Professor Layton games have with its really subdued color palettes and simple, memorable character designs. There’s a lot of polish to the visuals and all the backgrounds are so painterly and great to look at that I’m really curious to see how a console Professor Layton would look on a TV screen. It’s not the platform I’d like to play a game like this on, but still, curious.     
 

The audio suffers from the inevitable amount of compression it goes through due to the DS’s limitations, but all the voice-acting and accordion-centric pieces sound good and the ominous tune that plays while solving puzzles has gone through some alterations, but it’s still weirdly haunting. There is a lot more variety to the music, too, which if you’re like me and got sick of Curious Village’s soundtrack after the first few hours, will appreciate.

Diabolical Box is a pretty long game, but considering I hunted down and solved most of the puzzles I could find, you should probably shave 2 or 3 hours off my 17-hour playtime if you’re just trying to blast through the game. Finishing the game unlocks a few things, like way harder puzzles.

Puzzles, yes, this game is full of them. As much it just could’ve been a cartridge stuffed with an assortment of things to solve, the fun story and top-notch production values gives it an extra layer of polish that really makes this game more than the sum of its parts. Some problems still persist, like the occasional frustration of getting lost if you just happen to forget to tap on a guy you needed to talk to, even though you talked to that guy before already, and the hints you can purchase with coins aren’t always helpful. But, they’re relatively minor problems and with an ending that blatantly tells you that the next game is totally coming soon (even has a code that you will use to unlock something in the next game), there’s a lot to look forward to if the quality of Diabolical Box is any indication.