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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Why the ending to Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright is terrible (SPOILERS)

To be fair, before I kick this thread off, allow me to state that the majority of PLvPW is pretty good. Puzzles are well done and thoughtful for the most part (though the instructions could stand to be a bit clearer), the trial segements are generally well done too. Nothing that really stuck out as memorable in my opinion, nothing that was Turnabout Serenade levels of bad, but typical middle of the road AA quality, which is in and of itself good. Some well done twists and turns kept the plot moving forward, even if the characters were more than a little one dimensional (Maya in particular).

That said...that ending to this game is bad. Explosively bad. Horribly, awfully, possibly the worst segment in any Ace Attorney game ever levels of bad. There are so many plotholes, inconsistencies, and contradictions it comes close to upstaging Mass Effect 3, and that's not a statement I'm making lightly. The problem is that the ending tries to do away with all magic entirely, but fails to explan how many of the occurances in games work. To its credit, it does go over a lot of them, but there are still quite a few left hanging without any reasonable explanation at all.

In full disclosure, I have not played a Professor Layton game before this (while conversly playing every single Ace Attorney title released in the US so far), so I have no way to gauge how crazy this game's ending may be to other Layton titles. If other Layton titles are as ridiculous as this, and you enjoyed them, then this probably won't bug you. For me, it did, though, because I've felt that, with a few notable exceptions, the Ace Attorney games have done an excellent job of filling in all plot holes and explaining everything. Meanwhile, the ending to this game has an utterly insane number of plot holes. That's what I'm addressing here.

Ready? Cool

Problem #1: Cutscenes

This isn't so much a complaint leveled at the custscenes as it is what takes place within the cutscenes. If you've finished the game, you know that at the end, it turns out Labyrinthia was merely a research project and magic doesn't exist at all. With that said, there are several things that ocurred in the anime cutscenes that just flat out should not be able to.

Let's start with the earliest example: Layton, Luke, Phoenix, and Maya all getting sucked into Labyrinthia by means of book. I would assume the explanation here is "hypnosis," but even if that is the case, the anime cutscenes presented a drastically different picture of what happened. Both of them show, quite clearly, the book's pages glowing blue, and the characters getting sucked inside. Luke and Layton even discuss the glowing book letters at one point. So either the cutscenes are flat out lying to us at points, or...actually I don't know what else it could be.

That said, at least there is a possible explanation for that one. I guess I could possibly imagine that maybe the game's explanation for people falling unconscious (i.e. getting them to drink contaminated water and ringing silver bells) could possibly have happened here. Maybe Luke and Layton were slipped some of this water earlier, and Phoenix and Maya had the same thing happen to them. Then, when both characters were rendered unconscious, they were dragged away, and the cutscenes merely depicted...something else entirely to make us thing magic was involved. I really don't know. At least there's some sort of explanation for this, though.

What's completely unexplainable is how in the world the fire dragon directly before the final trial works. If magic does not exist, then there is no possible way to explain a giant fire breathing dragon suddenly appearing and murdering someone. And yet, a person is put on trial for it, clearly indicating that hundreds of people saw it. I realize that hypnosis employed by the Storyteller is at play here, but that has some limits on it as well, and while I can maybe buy that he just tricked everyone into thinking there was a dragon there, it shouldn't be possible to replicate the effects of a fire dragon's blast.

Last but not least is the chase sequence at the beginning of the game, where Espella and Chase (I believe was his name) are being chased (ha ha) through some English backgrounds. Eventually a witch flies through the air, commands a statue to attack the car, and it flips onto a tree. Now, again, the cutscene presents issues with witches clearly flying and shooting lasers of all things, but the bigger issues is how in the world they got statues to move. Did someone run ahead and replace the statues with giant knight robots just in case a car was chased nearby? How exactly are we accounting for this?

#2: How in the world did Phoenix and Maya get to Labyrinthia?

So my understanding of how the staff of Wright and Co. got into magic research world is that, after clearing Espella in the English court, they were rendered unconscious by Darklaw (presumably using the water/bell method), hypnotised into getting their memories changed, and then moved from the Defendant's Lobby to Labyrinthia. This last part I find especially difficult to believe, as it would involve dragging unconscious bodies through a courthouse full of people, outside, into a car, and away to Labyrinthia, something I imagine would turn more than a few heads.

Basically what I'm saying is that unless Labyrinthia has bribed the entire London police force I'm not seeing how they can swing all this.

#3: Invisible Things Everywhere

So I can suspend my belief enough to imagine that there's possibly some metal somewhere that is black enough it absorbs all light thus making it invisible. Actually, no, I can't, because that's the exact opposite of invisibility (which is letting all light through; i.e. why glass is the closest to an invisible object as is commonly found). But even if that WAS how light worked, I still have a major problem with all this considering that magic doesn't exist.

Most of it has to do with the spell Phoenix and Layton say after the final trial has concluded which turns all the machines visible again. There is no metal anywhere which changes color when you order it to. I believe that the idea is that the people were hypnotised into not being able to see certain shades of black...I think...(although if they could do that it begs the question why they wouldn't just go with another color entirely, one that's presumably much easier to obtain), but if that's the case, it opens up an entirely new problem: the invisible cloak. If the invisible cloak is invisible because people haven't been ordered to notice it, then why exactly does the entirety of the cloak become visible when baking powder is poured over part of it? That's beyond nonsensical.

#4: The Bell Tower of Doom

Another complaint leveled mostly at invisibility; but more of the properties of invisibility than anything.

The issue here is the bell tower, which was around for the entirety of Labyrinthia's existence. If you'll recall, it was hidden with an invisible cloak, and then ten years later, that cloak was burned down with a flash of lightning, giving it the appearance of actually materializing, when in fact it was there all along. While I'm willing to assume for the sake of argument that there is some magic material that can make things invisible or that you can hypnotise people into not seeing things (whatever it was), but unless you've somehow got the ability to hypnotize people into somehow being intangible, I'm not buying that no one ever walked into this tower over the course of ten years and noticed "huh, there's something invisible here." Especially considering it's located directly in the middle of a fairly crowded neighborhood (as evidenced in Case 2).

#5: The Gate

This one's leveled at something that ocurred much earlier in the game. When Layton in Luke arrive in Labyrinthia for the first time, they enter through a gate, only to notice after arriving that the gate has mystically disappeared and they are trapped inside, with everyone claiming that such a gate has never existed. The gate obviously wasn't just an invisible disguised section of the wall, as Layton and Luke obviously traveled through it. And we've ruled out magic as well. I suppose complex machinery is a possibility, but 1: that would make noise, so I can't imagine Luke and Layton would have missed it closing, and 2: it would be very noticeable, meaning that no one would possibly mistake it. So we need an explanation for how an opening in a wall silently disappears with no one noticing outside of magic...and I've got nothing.

#6: Espella's kidnapping

I could have included this one in the animated cutscenes bit, but I felt like it was worth getting a section entirely to itself because of how agregious it was. At the beginning, Espella is kidnapped from Layton's office when a bird flies near the window, Luke opens it, the bird transforms into a witch, grabs Espella, and flies out the window.

Now...since magic is ruled out of the picture, we need an explanation for somehow being able to transform from a bird to a person (or whatever), and then being able to fly while holding onto a teenage girl no less. Unless Cantabella's pharmaceutical company has somehow developed a drug for shapeshifting, I'm not quite sure how that possibly works.

#7: Magical knight things

Towards the end of the game, Layton and Luke invade (for lack of a better word) the storyteller's tower, whereupon he somehow orders several suits of empty knights to attack Layton. While I can possibly imagine that the knights are machines, what I'm less ok with is how exactly he ordered them to attack Layton. We have no magic, so simply writing it in his story has no effect. 

And while we're on the subject, when did Layton learn how to sword fight?

#8: Not really a plot hole, BUT...

"Hey look I have an incurable disease"

"Nvm it's cured"



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Turnabout Serenade wasn't that bad, though.



MTZehvor said:

In full disclosure, I have not played a Professor Layton game before this (while conversly playing every single Ace Attorney title released in the US so far), so I have no way to gauge how crazy this game's ending may be to other Layton titles.

Well, at the end of the first one you find out that all the villagers you've been speaking to in the rural village are actually robots built to entertain a little girl, while the third game reveals that the London you've been visiting isn't in the future, but rather an elaborate replica built underground. So yeah, this game fits in neatly.

Wright said:

Turnabout Serenade wasn't that bad, though.

Well, not relative to having a root canal without painkillers, no. I guess.