Although not technically a Nintendo-owned property (Nintendo published the game, but did not develop it), Professor Layton should have been an Assist Trophy in Smash Bros. Hell, I want Professor Layton in as a challenger in the next Smash Bros.

And something else, for the non-Laytoned out there. Don't buy from Wal-Mart or GameStop, because they have the game for $35 like it's DS Year One or something. Merely $30 at TRU, so my years of painful loyalty finally pay off.

I have completed the storyline, to the tune of 112 puzzles and over 16 hours of playtime. There's still a few puzzles left to find (120 total inside the plot, plus a bunch of bonus materials). Although the game lets me jump back into the town to search for them, it's one of those deals where you're going back in time to just before the storyline's final moments. Ugh. I'm probably just going to look up the final puzzle locations somewhere online, because I'm missing at least two that will unlock additional bonus content.

Let me tell you how I played Professor Layton. I refused to use the hint coins (except in one case; explanation forthcoming) and once I found a difficult puzzle, I stayed focused on that one until I solved it. So I never quit a puzzle to work on it later.

One nice thing about puzzle solving... the game does not completely hate when you guess. Lots of puzzles can actually be solved through pure guesswork, which is nice when you've hit the Mensa wall. A wrong answer merely subtracts a few picarats (currency, sort of) from your reward total, and there's a limit on how many picarats the game takes each time. So once you get to your third guess per puzzle, there's no longer a penalty. Guess away. Guessing wrong often gets you a free hint, and that certainly helped put me on the right path in some cases.

So don't worry about getting things wrong, is what I'm saying. I've read some reviews where people gave up on the game because of the puzzles getting too hard... but in over 100 brainteasers, I either figured them out myself, guessed through them, and, in the case of the Seven Squares puzzle, used the hint coins.

I wanted to play without using a single hint coin, but I was just too sandblasted by Seven Squares. I must have an hour in on just that one puzzle. You're presented with an uneven assortment of pins (as shown above), and you have to figure out how to connect the pins to make seven squares, with each pin only used once. You just have to keep drawing until you get it, and I needed all three hints to master it. The third hint usually gives it all away, so there's another reason not to let yourself become overly frustrated by Layton.

My favorite puzzles were the ones that purposefully throw you off. Like this one:

Alfred and Roland have been hired by a farm to sow flower seeds. They've been assigned a 10-acre plot of land and split it in half so they can work independently. Roland starts from the east and Alfred from the west.

Alfred can plow the land at a rate of 20 minutes per acre. Roland takes 40 minutes to plow, but sows seeds at three times the speed Alfred does.

If sowing seeds on the 10-acre plot pays $100, how much of that money should go to Roland?

I'm definitely better at those type of tricky curveball puzzles than the math-based puzzles, although I often could not tell the difference at first. Then there's the puzzles where you just have to draw lines and slide tiles, like this one (Princess in a Box #2) where you have to shift the big red square from far left to far right:

Yep. Took me 790 moves to finish that one.

I'm surprised that the game did not include one of those stupid psychological pentagon diagrams, as found in the Everybody Votes Channel.

Your picarats don't even come into play until the game ends, so it's not like you're spending them right and left. I have 3766 of the things, and I guess they're just a threshold system to unlock bonus content. You don't ever spend them; you just open up more stuff automatically. I'm glad that one of the bonus menus lets you browse the animated cutscenes, because they are very, very nice.

Looks like I have another twenty or so under the bonus menus, not to mention the WiFi "download" puzzles... which is apparently a complete lie, since the WiFi stuff is already on the cartridge. I thought that download was awfully fast. Although the chicanery surrounding this is obnoxious, I'm more pissed by the fact that this means Nintendo definitely will shutter the Layton WiFi once they run out of the hidden in-game puzzles.

Maybe they're timing it so the sequel comes out this fall, when Curious Village stops accepting new puzzles. I'll be there. Interesting: there's a password in the sequel that you're supposed to enter into this game to unlock something else (probably... a puzzle). Pretty cool backwards passwordability thing there.

I used to say this about Brain Age, but now I'm revising it to Layton: Nintendo needs a Professor Layton Wii Channel, where every day you get a new brain teaser.