Dr Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights (3DS) Review
With the games industry as robust as it is, it’s hard to not just wind up comparing games, rather than simply judging them on their own merits. It’s always happened and a bit of healthy competition is always a good thing for the consumer. That said it’s been a while since I’ve seen a game compared quite as blatantly as Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights, even before the game was released it has already been dubbed a Layton clone. In many ways Konami did this to themselves and why wouldn’t they? The Professor Layton series is highly popular and doesn’t really have any competition at the moment. This all being said, I believe the game deserves to be reviewed on its own, as its own creation and as such, will have to stand up on its own, rather than being filler for the Layton fans while they wait for their next meal.
The first thing I noticed when I turned the game on, is something that continues to wow me with 3DS games. I find the sound capabilities of the console amazing and as a long time Game Boy (and GBA) fan, it astounds me to hear such realistic voices and music coming out of my handheld. The music is quaint and as with many other aspects of the game is desperately trying to tell you that the game is set in France. It sets a nice mood, but one that feels odd when the actors all speak with incredibly posh English accents, even when using French words. That said I’m always a fan of voice acting that isn’t American, it adds a nice change and the highbrow tone of the actors hides any incompetence on their part, as it wouldn’t feel right for the characters to show any more emotion than they do.
The characters themselves are reasonably compelling. There’s the eccentric and seemingly misanthropic Lautrec, whose aloof nature and self assuredness can be quite amusing, especially when he unwittingly (or perhaps not) insults the other characters. He’s followed around by Sophie, his assistant, who desperately scrapes for his approval at every turn and definitely wants him to remove those giant puffy pants of hers. They’re accompanied by Marie, a young quiet girl who kick starts the plot and becomes more and more intriguing as the game goes on. A few other supporting cast members, such as the ever flirtatious owner of the adventurer’s hideout and the main villains are also present, but they’re not really that interesting and to talk about those who are would only be spoiling it.
The story is intriguing but it loses track of itself and doesn’t always give you enough information. You start off as what appears to be an average day for Lautrec and Sophie, exploring a simple dungeon and finding another treasure to add to the collection. It acts as a good tutorial giving you a good idea about how most of the game plays. Upon returning to the laboratory they are interrupted by Marie and her escort, who have a strange mystery for you to solve. I hate giving away anything crucial to the story in reviews, so I’ll just say that this single mystery sparks the Doctor’s interest, and starts the race to find more clues and get to the bottom of it all. It sounds fairly standard, but the story is actually quite good and takes a few unexpected terms if you can stay with it. It’s hard to stay interested in something when it doesn’t really feel like you’ve progressed much and the game only gives you the tiniest of new pieces of information at a time. I don’t think it helps that Lautrec, the main character seems disinterested in everything going on, making me wonder why I should feel any differently. The pace is perhaps a little odd, considering the game’s real focus on building the story. I’d say the game is split down the middle between actually doing puzzles and listening to characters talk. They convey much of the story through dialogue between the characters. Having 2D images of the simply drawn characters, projected in front of rather pretty backgrounds is quite a nice effect on the 3DS. It’s very simple and in some ways cheap, but it is a really good use of that 3D screen. Some short animated clips are shown here and there and despite the simplicity of the art itself, they look crisp and clean and convey what is going on fairly well. I think the main problem is the characters talk so much and often about nothing, that glimpses of the story are few and far between which means it’s easy to get lost and stop paying attention.
Game play wise, I feel let down. There aren’t enough variations in puzzles and they start off so easy it feels like the game is pandering to you. Of course it doesn’t help that for so much of the time you spend playing you aren’t doing any puzzles. Lautrec will often ask Sophie questions about where to look next and unless you’re familiar with French much of it is just guess work. You’re not really punished for getting anything wrong either, aside from lose reputation points which can be used to purchase items, but I haven’t yet needed to actually use anything I’ve bought. The game is split into above ground and below ground game play. When above ground you’re on the streets of Paris and most of what you do is trial and error. There’s a lot of ‘this clue could mean these five things, lets look at all of them until we’re right’ which would be fine but there’s no ‘game’ to it. You simply go to the location and then the Doctor and Sophie will talk about how it’s not right before telling you to try another. It wouldn’t bother me if this happened once or twice, but almost every mission does it which is just off-putting.
The underground is much more fun. Navigating the underground passageways, dodging guards can actually get fairly challenging as the game goes on and I’m glad the only punishment for being caught is being sent to the beginning of the room, or it could get quite frustrating. Underground is also where you’ll find the majority of your puzzles, centred around opening doors or finding hidden rooms. The most common puzzles you’ll come across are making predefined words fit a crossword style puzzle, putting puzzle pieces together to fill a space, finding a difference between two pictures and a sort of reverse minesweeper. I never really found any of these particularly challenging and as such there was no real sense of accomplishment for moving to the next area.
Behind these doors is element that was supposed to set this game apart from a certain other top hat wearing game we won’t mention, the battles. The various treasures that you can collect in this game, and the only treasures Doctor Lautrec believes are of any real value are called Treasure Animatus, or living treasure if you will. The idea behind this is that treasures have some sort of spirit inside of them, which needs to be tamed and collected by battling with other treasures. The Treasure Animatus even come in a variety of types of spirits, that have weaknesses and strengths against each other and the combat is turn based. This game is starting to sound a lot like a different kind of clone, what with these monsters, that are inside treasures and thus could be put in to pockets! I was pretty excited after having all of this explained to me in the tutorial, I was ready to roam the streets of Kanto, I mean Paris, to catch all of the treasures.
The way these battles work is actually quite different to other catchable monster type games I’ve played in the past. You can only carry 3 Treasure Animatus with you at one time and they each have their own type, attack, health, and defence. When a battle is started you are presented with a sort of battlefield map that is different for each Treasure. There are several positions in which you can place your Treasures and some of these positions can have negative or positive effects. Upon placing your Treasure to fight, it will attack and depending on type/placing advantages do damage to the one that you are tying to capture. I was disappointed that you don’t really choose any attacks and that once your treasure has attacked once, that’s all it does for that fight, and you can’t use its space again. So although it is a battle, in reality it is more of a puzzle. The crux of which is that you need to get the opposing Treasure’s health down in to the capture area, using the treasures you own and the correct spaces on the battlefield, preferably without killing any of your current Treasures.
Treasure Animatus also level up from their battle experiences and become more powerful. I don’t really understand the need for them to level up, as by the time one does reach a new level, you’re probably ready to replace it with a new one that you’ve captured that is already higher. As there is no move progression, or stats to increase, there’s no benefit to levelling up your Animatus as opposed to swapping them, so the whole mechanic seems moot to me. Side quests usually give you two new Treasures to add to your squad and you’ll need to do these in order to have more powerful Treasures to continue along the main quest line. This is how the game boasts over 20 hours of game-play, but the grind is incredibly repetitive and becomes dull from the offset.
I think the most frustrating thing about Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights, is that it really feels like it has a lot of potential. I kept playing, hoping for a more challenging puzzle, or a new game mechanic, or more story, but none of it really ever scratched the itch. It suffers in some parts from being too easy and in others for not giving enough information, but most problematic is the lack of challenge, which I think is key to a puzzle game. You crave that sense of accomplishment, of understanding and cracking a difficult puzzle, but the game very rarely gives you the opportunity to feel so and other times it makes you put it down in frustration, for simply not having enough information (or knowledge of France, which it desperately tries to teach you) to continue on. That being said I am very interested in seeing what Konami come up with in the way of sequels, I think they’ve put forward very promising franchise here but this just isn’t the game to kick it off.
