Professor Layton Retrospective: The Pandora's Box

Curious Village sold 5 million units worldwide and was loved by critics and gamers alike. The Layton character became Level-5's mascot and the franchise is now the company's flagship series.
Since it was originally planned as a trilogy, Team Layton started work on the second game right away: Pandora's Box. Let's take a look:

The Story:

After receiving a letter from Layton's mentor Dr. Schrader about the Pandora's Box, he and Luke travel to his home to find more about it. To their surprise, they find Dr. Schrader dead and the box stolen. It's up to them to solve this mystery, which goes way deeper than they can imagine.
The story is phenomenal, it gets more and more interesting the more you progress through the game, and as in the first game, it all builds up to a wonderfully emotional climax. All the new characters are very interesting and memorable, and the returning ones are just as charming as ever.

Overall it's a wonderful story with great characters.

9/10

The Gameplay:

This game takes the gameplay from Curious Village and refines it. We still solve puzzles to advance in the story, but now there are puzzle-like mini-games like assembling a camera that gives you 9 "Find the differences in both images" challenges and for convenience we now have the ability to take notes during puzzles. Aside from that the gameplay is pretty much the same because well, if it ain't broken don't fix it.

9/10

The Audio:

Tomohito Nishiura returns to score the game, giving us one of the best DS soundtracks ever made. The music is still very accordion-driven and always fits the mood of the situation. Emotional tunes, atmospheric tunes, Ominous tunes, it's all here. The voice acting is again brilliant especially in the climax, and this time there's more voiced in-game cutscenes instead of just the first one like in the first game.

10/10

The Graphics:

The handmade look from the first game returns and is more detailed this time, with more animations and more detailed backgrounds. There are also twice more FMVs than the first game, which helps the story experience a lot. Character design is also like in the first game, and there's alot more variety this time around.

10/10


Overall, Pandora's Box is an excellent sequel that expands on everything the first game did. It's a brilliant game that any DS owner should own.

Final Grade: 9.5/10


Next time we'll do something different: We'll take a look at the first movie in the series: Eternal Diva. See you then ;)