Professor Layton and the Idiot Girl

First off: I have a Tumblr now! http://www.tumblr.com/blog/stereothinker

Secondly: I'm probably going to end up spoiling this entire game, because I can and because I'm lame. Sorry.

So yesterday afternoon, probably around two or three, I ripped open a grand new 3DS game - Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask. Twenty six hours later, and about 21.5 hours of game play later, I'm done. It was everything I expect Professor Layton games to be - full of puzzles, with a convoluted plot line, and some WTF moments that led me to seriously consider finding Layton and beating him about the head with something hard. That whim was at about 3 am, and I'm pretty sure that I thought I could actually do that when I had the thought.

I love the Professor Layton series. A lot. I have all the games, and I watched the movie, because that's a thing. I have kept track of the plot through increasingly ass-pully scenarios. I have sat through cut scenes involving giant remote-controlled Ferris Wheels of Death, entire cities populated by amnesiac robots and swamp-gas-befuddled citizens, and, my personal favorites, more than one building that was really a massive robot the entire time. I spent forty-five minutes in this game in an unexpected 3rd person dungeon game, burying ancient killer robo-mummies. I can accept a lot. But from a basic, bare-bones, people-dealing-with-people basis, I didn't like the ending of this game. It was the first game in a long time that didn't make me cry at the end. Instead, I just sat there, thinking more or less simultaneously, "That's so cliche," and "THAT WAS WAY TOO EASY."

Maybe I was expecting too much, especially from a game that had Nessie's little sister battle a Transformer in the last installment, but when given a situation in which a dude goes missing for EIGHTEEN YEARS, leaving behind his best friend Henry and his girlfriend - when the best friend has feelings for the girlfriend - when said dude went missing because he fell into a massive chasm in a booby-trapped ancient buried city, hundreds of feet underground - I don't want the missing dude to get the girl. I don't want him to come out of his roaring rampage of revenge because someone gave him a good talking-to, and for everyone to forgive him instantly for trying to bury an entire, extremely full tourist city in sand and nearly succeeding. I want there to be angst. I want more than him apologizing profusely and everyone smiling and raining rainbows and puppies on him, with Henry giving him back the girl and the entire freaking city that Henry built up over the past eighteen years. Henry did all that himself, for a friend to whom he was loyal, even when he appeared to be dead. But after eighteen years - I repeat, eighteen years, he and the girlfriend should have moved on a little. I wanted at least some angst about the fact that Henry is almost undoubtedly still in love with the girlfriend and now has to give her up. Or, better yet, for the guy to realize that he has no claim on the people involved anymore and not freak out. That would have been cool too.

I think my problem is that I was looking for a good story in a game that's basically a soap opera with an effects budget and less understanding of how people work. But now I want a story, dammit.