What a dream combination this is. Two of the Nintendo 3DS’ most cerebral and characterful series, both notable for their gentle humour and entertaining writing, together in one adventure. Layton stands alongside Wright in the court defender’s stand, and Wright complements Layton’s gentlemanly musings with his enthusiastic finger-pointing pronouncements. This is a lovingly crafted tribute, with the Layton series’ quaint watercolour environments and the idiosyncratic characterisation and animation that makes the Ace Attorney series such fun. The story isn’t as good as I expect from either Layton or Wright, and in bringing the two playstyles together Level 5 and Capcom have softened the challenge of both, but none of that will stop anyone with affection for these characters from having a thoroughly enjoyable time.

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For the first few hours, Layton vs Wright alternates between Layton and his wee cockney sidekick Luke’s investigation of a strange chain of events involving a mysterious girl, and Phoenix and psychic assistant Maya’s visit to Layton’s hometown of London, where they end up defending the same mysterious girl in an English court. It is a delightful introduction, heavy on gorgeously animated and voiced cutscenes, with Layton’s British tenor serving as a counterpoint to Phoenix’s American accent. It takes its time reintroducing the basics of both explorative puzzling and courtroom battling, which makes it a slow start for veterans, but the look and feel is so good that I didn’t mind. I love Layton’s London; it’s so quaint and pretty, and so much friendlier than the real one. I bet it smells better, too.Playing Layton vs Wright is about 60% reading, 10% wandering around looking for the right person to talk to to advance the plot, 15% solving math, logic, and word puzzles, and 15% drama-filled trials where your job is to find holes in witness testimony and present evidence to highlight contradictions. The trails are brought to life by the exuberant witnesses, who fidget and exclaim and react with comical surprise on the stand to Wright’s revelations. In the first trial, a chef’s nervous tic is to produce various live fish from nowhere and unsuccessfully swipe at them with a cleaver; a security guard chomps nervously on chocolate when questioned.It’s the slapstick drama that makes the trials fun to take part in. They twist and turn constantly as new evidence comes to light, and Wright (and Layton, later on) point and declare “OBJECTION!” with aplomb. I sometimes arrived at conclusions quite a while before the script did, though, leaving me tapping through minutes of redundant dialogue intended to help me get there. Later trials introduce multiple-witness testimony, which is new to Ace Attorney, and has you grilling several madcap characters at once. It has the effect of significantly slowing down the witness testimonies, though, and forces you to go through the same material several times to wring all the possible dialogue and clues out of them.Layton’s sections, meanwhile, are explorative, sending you wandering around beautiful 2D scenes with a magnifying glass cursor to rinse them for puzzles, hint coins, and dialogue. I couldn’t help but feel that the Layton puzzles don’t quite have their usual meatiness and cerebral challenge; I suspect this is the reason Level-5 chose to bring the Layton saga to an end with Azran Legacy, before its well of delightful and surprising puzzles ran completely dry. That, or the developers were wary of putting off Wright fans with too much puzzling. If you do get stuck, hint coins are liberally scattered everywhere, and you can use them in the trials as well to narrow down the options and give you a push in the right direction. I found I rarely needed this help, and often used hint coins out of impatience rather than necessity.Strangely, Layton vs Wright’s main weakness is the setting. After the lengthy prologue chapters, we’re taken out of London and into the pages of a magical storybook, drawing Layton, Wright, Maya, and Luke into an alternate universe called Labyrinthia that’s heavy on olde-worlde cliche and supernatural mystery. This turned out to be a disappointment. Instead of seeing Layton and Wright interact with each other and familiar characters (imagine Layton in conversation with Gumshoe) on home turf, we get a whole host of new characters and settings instead, most of which sadly feel paper-thin. Both Layton and Ace Attorney have a decade or more worth of backstory to draw upon, and it seems like such a waste not to see it capitalized on in a game so clearly aimed at pleasing fans.Nonetheless, Labyrinthia’s mysteries were interesting enough to keep me going, and the sedate pacing slowly develops the intrigue. There were times when it moved too slowly, but it never flatlined. The story might not be as interesting as either series’ best, but Layton vs Wright more than gets by on gorgeous art and animation, a cute and funny script with spot-on localisation, and its four well-loved core characters.Ace Attorney and Professor Layton complement each other well, but in coming together, both have lost a little something of their challenge. I actually liked it most in the first two hours, before I was transported to Labyrinthia with all its medieval tropes and supernatural goings-on, when the thrill of hearing Ace Attorney sound effects against an aural backdrop of Layton background music was still fresh. Whatever else it is, Layton vs Wright is excellent fan service, and at 20-plus hours it’s far from insubstantial.