Professor Layton/Headscratchers

The Curious Village

• In the first game, Baron Reinhold apparently created enough ridiculously human robots to populate the town of St. Mystere, and had his daughter grow up among them, to the point that they're really the only ones she can call family. And then set up the inheritance such that if anyone takes it, the robots will stop functioning and will essentially die. And Flora and Layton can't have that. So the question is, did the Baron intentionally set things up so that the entirety of his family's estate and wealth will go to waste? And he prides himself on intelligence?
  • Intelligence doesn't mean wisdom.
  • As noted in WMG, this may have been a Secret Test of Character. Makes sense to me imo.
    • The whole town is a Secret Test of Character. Proving that Layton and Flora are good people? Fine. Doing it in a way that ensures that she'll never see a cent of her inheritance if she passes? Not so fine.
    • The test isn't about ensuring she has wealth to live comfortably. The test is about ensuring she has love to live well. Besides, if they -really- need the money, they can ask the robots if it's okay to take the money.
  • It's possible that he thought once Flora found a suitable guardian, their purpose would be fulfilled. Flora, Luke, and Layton, however, happened to see them as their own people, and didn't go through with it.
  • It's also possible, though a bit of a stretch, that Bruno could figure out a way to rewire the robots if Flora really needs the money for whatever reason.
• If Bruno and the Reinholds know that they are the only ones in St. Mystere who aren't robots, why does Bruno have to operate in such secrecy? Why doesn't he just present himself as the "town doctor" and implant memories in the robots of coming to him for every little ache and pain, and wait for them to report for regular maintenance? It wouldn't even have to interfere with the plot of the game; Simon could still break down, and Layton and Luke could still run across Bruno carrying Ramon in a bag. The only difference would be that they would end up investigating the "mysterious doctor" instead of the "mysterious random guy," and the townsfolk wouldn't feel terrorized. Plus, Bruno would get to live out in the open as a distinguished member of the community.
  • I feel like Bruno's response to this idea would be: "Shit! Why didn't I think of that!".
• The apple tattoo. I accept the fact that it would only mark Flora as the true golden apple when she smiled, but the fact that this isn't explained bugs me. Is the Baron a wizard?
  • It's not a tattoo, it's a birthmark. The fact that it's in the shape of an apple is probably what prompted her father to dub her the Golden Apple. Now, why it only appears when she's happy is another matter altogether...
  • Perhaps Flora is just very expressive when she's happy, and laughing/smiling hard enough causes her neck/shoulder muscles to stretch in just the right way to make the birthmark look like an apple.
• Inspector Chelmey gives Layton a puzzle at least once, but the "Chelmey" here is really Don Paolo.
  • Sure, Don Paolo doesn't like Layton and theoretically has no reason to give him a puzzle based on that, but "Chelmey" has no reason to dislike Layton and Don Paolo is trying to keep up the disguise...
• When Claudia escapes at the start of Chapter 2, how on EARTH does she get across the river right outside the Manor? That really makes little sense.
  • Maybe someone picked her up and carried her across? Though given how she belongs to Lady Dahlia and all, you'd think that anyone seeing her would take her back to the manor... But that's all I've got.

The Diabolical Box

• How exactly is Flora related to the Professor? From what I gather, he ended up adopting her at the end of Curious Village, but when they unmask her on the Molentary Express in Diabolical Box, they act like they hadn't seen her since, which is really the only thing that makes sense, since I kind of doubt the Professor would just ride off to solve another mystery and leave the other orphan he's supposed to provide for behind without any explanation.
  • The man did decide to ignore her when she was tied up and possibly starving in Dropstone. Ignoring a charge isn't beyond him imo. Still, I suppose since Flora did have some money, he could've hired some nanny to take care of her while he was away.
    • Ouch. Both points are very valid and unfortunately paint an image of the good Professor I'd really rather not have.
    • Look a little deeper. We're looking at a well-dressed, upper-crust professor of archeology - Layton probably has enough cash of his own lying around that he would have indeed hired a caretaker for Flora for the duration of their trip. As for not going to find her once he realized she was still in Dropstone, there was no way out of Folsense - the train wasn't running and they were surrounded by wilderness. Granted, he didn't seem especially concerned about her, but maybe he just figured that Don Paolo wasn't quite Ax Crazy enough to kill the Tagalong Kid for no reason.
    • Layton's also a very British gentleman. He's not particularly known for his emotional outbursts, is he? He seems cool in any situation, and he was probably brought up to keep stronger displays of emotion to himself. Although he didn't show it, he was probably worried sick about Flora -- but knowing that he couldn't go back to her with any speed, he just kept a Stiff Upper Lip until they could really do something.
    • If memory serves, the big reveal happened when Beluga and his nephew were with them. Layton could've asked them when the train would leave, or even insist they leave ASAP, but he didn't. I'd say he cared a bit less then you might think.
    • Flora wasn't tied up, she was locked in a barn. They could have just had Beluga make a call to Dropstone about her. Granted, that's not seen, but it could have happened off screen.
    • Still, even if they couldn't leave, you'd think he'd show at least a bit more concern, Stiff Upper Lip or no, given how there was no way to be certain where she was.
  • It was the hallucinogenic gas. He was wrapped up in the hallucination, and, in the dreamy state of hallucination, all other worries seemed far away. Once he'd figured it out and Layton really realized what was going on, he probably made an immediate call to Dropstone to make sure Flora was OK.
  • On your question about their relationship, in Unwound Future, the character profiles say Flora is the professor's protégée.
  • As to why the professor goes to solve the mystery and is shocked to see Flora, I kind of assumed he enrolled her into a school or something and wasn't expecting her to skip it in order to follow him.
• In the end it's revealed that this whole Folsense mess came about when Sophia left Anton in order to keep their unborn child safe. Fair enough, but one has to wonder why she didn't attempt to visit her lover when the child was old enough to be away from mommy for a few days. Also, while the excuse could be "Anton was crazy," why on Earth would someone use a fancy expensive box to carry a important letter? Far better to just send it in an ordinary envelope.
  • Sophia and Anton's relationship was so full of overtly romantic glib that I didn't find the box to be too contrived. Stupid, yes, but not implausible. Why Sophia didn't try to contact Anton earlier is a better question, and the only answer I have is that she was too much of a coward to try until at death's door.
  • She may have found out that weirdness was going on in Folsense and decided that to return there was to risk her own sanity, or thought that visiting Anton would be too painful for him if she was just going to leave again.
  • This troper believes that Sophia was too filled with guilt to go back. Think about it for a second, she left him heartbroken and miserable but only because she needed to get their child out of Folsense, but hell he didn't know that. It's almost like a teenager who ran away from home and in need of help but is too guilty to confront his/her parents. In addition, Sophia possibly didn't want to be caught in the same hallucination that Anton was in and so didn't go back. True they would have been together, but Sophia had enough sense to understand that they couldn't be truly happy in a world that wasn't real.
  • The box was probably Anton's way of expressing his feelings. If you look back to the credits, you would see that the necklace that Sophia gave to Katia was a gift from Anton, and from the looks of it, that gift came right from the same box. Anton knew the significance of that box and had it furnished into something fancy-looking, probably to impress Sophia. Or I could be wrong and Anton is just a loony.
• How can Sammy possibly be Beluga's nephew? Beluga doesn't have any siblings aside from Anton, and he doesn't even know that he's had kids. Now, I don't know if the term nephew can be applied to an in-law's son, but it doesn't look like Beluga's married, either.
  • According to Wikipedia, the children of your wife's siblings can be considered nieces/nephews. I guess even a guy like him would have a wife. For appearance's sake if nothing else.
  • Not only that, what if he was a cousin's son? Those can be considered nephews too.
    • The son of your cousin is your first cousin once removed.
  • According to some of Beluga's dialogue in Professor Layton's London Life, Sammy is his biological nephew. Whether or not events in that game are meant to be taken as canon is up for debate, but nevertheless, the mystery of their relationship endures.
    • Truly a puzzle worthy of Layton.
  • Well, IIRC, the family portrait in the museum only showed Beluga, Anton, and their dad, right? Since their mom isn't included, it's possible that they have a sister who wasn't included as well who could be Sammy's mother. Though this is Wild Mass Guessing on my part and possibly has some Unfortunate Implications in it.
    • Not necessarily Unfortunate Implications. The mom isn't in the portrait with the Duke and his sons; there could have been a separate portrait of the mom and one or more daughters. Maybe Sammy's mother was Beluga's sister, and when she left Folsense upon her marriage, she took that portrait with her. It's pure speculation, of course, but it's not implausible.
  • And of course, there's no law against calling some younger, distantly related family member nephew, even if it's not technically correct.
• Wait, so Sophia did get a hold of the Elysian box at some point, and had it long enough to take out Anton's letter, read it, and replace it with one of her own. How come she didn't hallucinate and freak out like everyone else?
  • Well, there's a lot of possible explanations for this one. Maybe the gas is released only when the main container is opened, and Sophia somehow knew to look for the secret lock, though this doesn't make that much sense. Or maybe Sophia didn't know that it was the Elysian Box, and thus the box only played the occasional passive trick on her that could be chalked up to senility. Or maybe Sophia knew just how dangerous it could be and made only as little contact with the actual box as necessary.
  • I figured even if she knew about the box's curse, the personal significance behind the object made her confident an object sent by her lover wouldn't harm her.
  • They have super-intelligent robots, so why not gas masks?
  • Didn't she also solve "The Elysian Box"? There seem to be two ways to open the box; 1) Open it normally, and if you survive the hallucinogen, find nothing, or 2) Solve the riddle, open the secret compartment, and get the letter.
    • Yeah, given how the letter is in the bottom part of the box, I kind of assumed that she figured that out too.
  • My guess is that, since the "curse" only killed because the gas made people hallucinate they were dying, and they only hallucinate they were dying because they opened the box thinking about the curse, that she didn't know about any supposed curse. She probably got real high for a while, though.
• So everyone in Folsense but Anton is a hallucination. The problem here is that supposedly the reason why the town looks the way it does is that Layton and co saw the pictures in the train station and thus imagined the town to look like it did fifty years ago, but then you get the people of the town giving accurate histories of the place. That would make more sense if it turned out that they were all Anton's hallucinations, because presumably Anton knows the history of his own town, but... I don't know, the end of the game just breaks my brain.
  • A Wizard Did It. Though it's a cop out, I always figured that the gas had to be at least somewhat magical, considering the other vastly impossible things it does, eg. suggest people into a deep coma, no adverse physical effects after having it mess with your brain for fifty years, internally consistent hallucinations among all who inhaled it... the later parts of the game did read at times like the gas had conjured up the ghosts of the people who died in Folsense or something.
  • I thought that everybody, or almost everybody, was real, and just under the same hallucination. After all, the mailman is delivering letters to and from there, and even if he's hallucinating that he's receiving their letters, they're still hallucinations, and people would realize that something's up there. If one person can hallucinate that he's a vampire who's never aged a day, and people can hallucinate themselves to "death", then it's not hard to believe that a lot more people have hallucinated eternal youth, or maybe even hallucinated themselves into avoiding death.
    • Not to mention, someone had to be drinking all that tea.
    • That would explain how Layton and Beluga both were able to interact with the bellhop. Makes you wonder about the real ages of the children, though.
      • I've always thought they were zombie-like things, being kept alive by the gas.
      • Everyone was real, just 50 years older than they looked. One of the kids mentions that he's getting tired a lot.
    • Plus, one of the kids mentions that occasionally, when she looks at her father, he seems much older. Clearly, the illusion can temporarily fade; if she didn't exist, why would she be affected by the gas?
• Does it bother anyone else how Don Paolo could fit in a Flora-sized suit? Or the fact that he was jumping up and down on couch cushions while IN that suit?
  • Of course! He's a Spy! This explains... well, just that, really.
• At the end of Curious Village, you learn that everyone loves puzzles because they're all ridiculously human robots. So why does everyone in Diabolical Box -- and presumably Last Time Travel and the additional sequels -- also love puzzles? They can't use the same excuse this time!
  • Maybe they want to see if the Professor really is all that.
    • Unwound Future used this explanation quite a bit, actually.
  • They're all his hallucinations, he expected people to ask him puzzles since the last game, so they did. He really must be a puzzle master to think up all of those.
    • Impossible. The Molentary Express and Dropstone were hallucination-free, yet still packed with puzzles.
    • Professor Layton had mentioned he was famous for being a puzzle-lover at one point. People could've indirectly recognized him and asked him a puzzle. Or this is an AU of Europe where everyone loves puzzles, considering the amount of Anachronism Stew.
• At least some, possibly all, of the people in Folsense were real, and none of them were fans of home maintenance? I can buy most people would never bother fixing up their homes if they magically stayed in good condition forever, but there should have at least been a few houses that were still in good shape once the illusion lifted, ones owned by people who realize that regularly maintaining their home is as much about keeping problems from cropping up as it is about fixing ones that appear. Or who just like doing handiwork, so the illusion they see never bothers hiding things that go wrong on their own house!
  • Maybe yes. But if the gas makes them see what they expect, someone expecting to always be fixing stuff -- even stuff that isn't broken or in need of repair -- is going to go around breaking stuff while 'fixing' things.
• All the citizens of Folsense are hallucinations, yet they all somehow manage to give Professor and Luke accurate information regarding the history and happenings in the town...
  • They are obviously subconsciously deriving information from the environment. See examples of the 50 year old photographs; it's likely those actually existed in the room.
  • Not only that, but it is hinted through the events of the game about the hallucinations before it's revealed. The street lying in ruins, with a broken water pipe and rubbish heap? There were no pictures of that street in the station, so Layton and Luke are seeing it as it really is. The same for the mines and, later, the forest.
  • It is utterly impossible for an entire city to have the same hallucination to such a degree that they are able to function coherently. Differences must arise, and these contradictions lead to the inability to work together properly. Especially when Layton shows up.
    • You're right. It would be impossible to prevent contradictions. First, there's a game devoted to that >_>. But second, what's to say that such things didn't happen, and between the power of the gas and the power of the human mind, people simply rationalized it away or otherwise worked around the inconsistency, or even made the inconsistency part of the hallucination.
• "Katia's mother died shortly after she was born, but Katia grew up strong and sweet, just the same," says Sophia in her letter to Anton. Does this bother anyone else? "Katia's mother" obviously refers to Anton and Sophia's daughter - the child for whom Sophia left Anton and all of Folsense to protect before she was even born -- and she doesn't even bother to mention to her lover what she named their child? It seems like Sophia loved Katia more than she did her own daughter.
  • I have to agree. It looks to be the case. Maybe Katia's mother was a bit of a rebel and caused Sophia some, or a lot, of pain, especially when she was young, but Katia was always a sweet girl, so it was easier for Sophia to love her.
  • Alternately, maybe we didn't hear the entire letter because it wasn't plot-relevant? Sophia could've mentioned her daughter by name, maybe even wrote another paragraph or something, but it appears in the game as "Katia's mother" because it's the last ten minutes of the game and we don't need another character by this point.
  • Thinking back on it, maybe Sophia thought it would be simply too painful for Anton to know what his deceased daughter's name was and what she was like. She asked Katia to go to Folsense to make sure Anton understood her true reasons for leaving, so she might have felt better with talking about Katia in the letter instead of the young lady's mother since it was her hope that Anton would be able to meet Katia.
• Okay, if half of Folsense leaves to form Dropstone, why the HELL did Anton have to stay? He's clearly nuts enough to impair any form of governing he'd be doing, and it would probably just be smarter to evacuate the entire town, declare it unfit for human life, and move everything to Dropstone. Ancestral home or no, it's irresponsible to let someone keep living in a castle full of hallucinogenic gas. Why couldn't Sophia have told Anton her suspicions, said "I'm pregnant and leaving because even if I'm wrong, I'm not taking that chance," and asked him to come with her?
  • Anton may be justified by something like Honor Before Reason; yeah, he doesn't have to stay (and really shouldn't have, for that matter), but he felt like he had to. As for why Sophia and the rest of the evacuees never tried to tell everyone else about their suspicions... Well, they were just that, suspicions, and they weren't really sure of the specifics. In the game, I believe even some of the Folsense residents know that "a few years ago" (really 50, of course, but they don't know that), a lot of people started getting sick (from the gas, obviously), but they didn't know that the gas was a hallucinogen too. They probably just thought whatever was making them sick would pass and things would go back to normal soon.
• The ending scene with Layton and Luke riding the Molentary Express away from Folsense... without Anton and Katia. They're standing on a hill outside of Folsense's train station, happily waving goodbye. Then in the credits, we see Katia being reunited with some citizens of Dropstone, with Anton nearby. That's all well and fine, but, as seen from the background, they're still in Folsense. Why would all of the main characters of Dropstone ride the train all the way to Folsense just to be meet up with Anton and Katia? It would have made much more sense for Layton and Luke to take Anton and Katia back with them to Folsense, drop them off there, pick up Flora, and head back to London. Why would the professor and Luke not take the two back to Dropstone, where Katia's family is and where there is actually life and no hallucinogenic gas? It seems like staying in Non-Illusion Folsense would have been dangerous for Anton and Katia, what with the risks of living in any of the remaining dilapidated buildings, so what reason would that have to stay?
  • Let me ask you this; you live in a rural town, where you're so bored out of your mind you must make puzzles and trade them with random train passengers everyday to keep your sanity. Suddenly, two guys come back from this mythical place and tell this outlandish tale about how people lived in these ruins believing they were young due to some hallucinogenic gas from underground. Would you not drop everything that weekend and check that place out?
  • Well, at least the gas is gone now thanks to Anton's castle collapsing in the climax and plugging up the mines, so it's not like that part's an issue anymore. You have a point about all the dilapidated buildings, but given how everyone from Dropstone is seen meeting up with Katia and Anton in the credits, it's probable that they started repairing Folsense. Now whether or not they stayed there the whole time or actually went back to Dropstone to rest up in their actually functional homes every once in a while is another matter entirely...
• How did Chelmey get away with his screwups on this case? He used department resources and came very close to making a false arrest for a murder that didn't happen. What's more, he should have known it didn't happen before leaving London. You can't have a murder investigation without a murder. You can't have a murder without evidence that somebody died. And unless the body is missing parts, the only people who have the authority to declare a body to be dead are trained medical professionals, a category which police investigators and archeologists do not belong to. Since Shraeder wasn't dead, and a competent doctor would have known this, the biggest crime that he had knowledge of was that somebody wrecked a curtain to leave Shraeder's office without using the door, possibly in possession of an item which he had no solid proof of being there in the first place. Hardly serious enough to justify booking a trip on a luxury transport.
  • Correct me if I'm wrong, but this game takes place in Victorian England, no? Was medicine back then so advanced that they knew Shraeder wasn't dead? As far as we know, he banged the coffin lid as they were lowering it, after all doctors had proclaimed him deceased. Chelmey couldn't be blamed for that.
    • The series takes place in a huge Anachronism Stew, but the main era is the modern day. Therefore, we can assume that medical professionals would be able to tell that Schraeder wasn't dead, and thus Chelmey had no reason to be on the train.
• They board the Molentary Express in London and then travel for days before reaching Folsense -- England simply isn't that big. By the second day you'd be in Scotland, unless you were traveling around in circles.
  • Well, the place they were going to was supposedly hidden, no? Would make sense if the train traveled on circles to an extent. Or perhaps it's just a really, really crappy train.
  • The Molentary Express is often called a 'cruise ship on rails.' Cruise ships often sail more slowly than necessary to let passengers enjoy the trip. Also, schizo tech means alternate reality. Alternate reality can possibly mean alternate geography.
• Okay, so Layton and Luke see Folsense the way they do due to a combination of the gas and the photos at the train station. My question is, how do Katia and Mr. Beluga (and possibly Sammy by extension) see it? Katia and Beluga ought to know that the city is really 50 years older than it looks, so even if they don't know about the gas specifically, they should be able to "see though" the hallucination by virtue of what they know about Folsense's age. Minor, yes, but still something that just confuses me.

The Unwound Future

• Why on earth does everyone in Future London in Unwound Future act like it's really ten years later? Are they all actors? Did they all use the time machine to get there? When Chelmey evacuates them at the end of the game, are they all going straight to jail as accomplices?
  • I figure they're actors hired to play the part of people living 10 years into the future. In fact, most people don't mention it's the future (it makes no sense, after all) nor events in the past 10 years, so maybe they don't even know it's supposed to be 10 years in the future.
    • Oh, they know... remember the sign announcing that the bus stopped running the route Luke and the Professor wanted to take... 5 years in the future. And the newspapers, which would have to have the future date to keep the Professor and Luke in the dark if they picked one up.
  • I reckon they're all other people who want Dmitri and/or Clive to succeed. There are probably lots of people who'd like to see the whole Time Travel thing work out - the other relatives of people harmed in the blast for one, not to mention the entire Dove family and its friends who'd probably be happy to see someone alter time to prevent Constance from having to raise that poor, broken kid. Dmitri probably did a lot of covert snooping around before work on Future London started and found as many people as he could who were decent actors, wanted him to succeed, and were willing to lie to Layton to make it work.
    • If you go back to the clock shop at the end of the game and talk to Cogg and Spring, they reveal that they were once servants of the Dove family (which explains why Cogg accidentally calls Luke "young sir"), but apparently didn't know Clive was planning to destroy London. There seems to be various degrees of awareness, as one kid in Chinatown mentions that he knows his father is often working in a lab, but doesn't know what he's working on. They may be convinced that it's 10 years in the future, and that Layton and young Luke are actually that old in the future.
  • It's also possible that some of the citizens, not just the scientists, were kidnapped.
• When we first hear about the lab accident ten years ago, we're told that it caused a massive fire and destroyed half of the neighboring apartment building killing Clive's parents. However, when Dimitri recalls the incident, we see him running to find Claire's body in a scorched but intact room, which is clearly not destroyed or on fire.
  • There ARE in fact fires in the room, just not very big ones.
• Were we supposed to know who Clive even was before the reveal? I don't recall him ever being mentioned before that moment, but Layton calls out his name as if everyone was supposed to recognize it.
  • Clive was probably known between the scientists and politicians, since almost everybody in the room was involved with the killer time travel.
  • When Layton talks about the day of the explosion to Luke (the real one), he says there was a boy who lost his parents, and on the picture we see Layton holding the boy. It's foreshadowed.
    • It may have been foreshadowed to the player, but Layton didn't know! At the end, when Clive is about to be arrested, he tells the Professor that he was indeed the boy in that scene; Layton replies "That... was you?"
    • I always assumed that because Layton did so much covert, extensive research into the accident 10 years ago, he had been tracking some of the survivors of the incident. He probably knew about Clive as a notable survivor, but not as the boy he saved until it was revealed.
      • That's a possibility, and the scene mainly serves to show that there were more victims to the failed experiment besides Claire. I personally suspected that Future Luke was hiding something around the time it was revealed that "Future Layton" was fake.
• How exactly did the fake London located underground fool anyone? The sky, the clouds, and the sun were probably just painted on the cave walls, and thus never changed at all all the time they were there. Also, how was it made that it is bright there without it being obvious light bulbs or the like? AND, how could the room with the "time machine" be an elevator when you can't see any elevator shaft above the house when you are in future London?
  • I imagine it's a parabolic LED screen. Perhaps there's a computer managing the clouds and stars and sun moving across the sky. Lights that high up would blend together like pixels, and anyone who questioned the false sky would think they were crazy.
  • Actually, underground London has its own night/day cycle, as you can see in some places like the forest and the casino. And there is a disguised elevator shaft above the clock shop; you can clearly see it from the Midland Rd. (Fork) screen.
  • Fridge Brilliance: The other side of the Thames is full of industrial buildings and scientific research centers. Layton even comments at one point on the haze of pollution they create. Most of the time, therefore, you can't even see the sky from the ground of Future London - all you can see is a bright light behind the smog cloud, and you assume that's the sun. When the bright light is moved down and switched off, you assume it's now night.
• I find it hard to believe that Clive could have had the money to build an entire London-sized, fully operating city below Real-London. Unless half of the buildings were hollow or something. I mean, inheritance be damned, no one person would have that much money. On top of that, the worker the Professor and Luke meet when they first enter Future London says something like "we've been building for a year" -- how could you possibly build an entire city in a year? How long has Clive actually been working on this project, and wouldn't he have hundreds of accomplices all unhappy with the political corruption? Barely any are mentioned, aside from Dimitri.
  • He'd have been working on it for five years, at most, since that's when his adoptive mother died.
  • I thought that construction worker said they'd been renovating for a year. Anyway, I'm assuming that a good chunk of the buildings are hollow; there's no other way Clive would have the time, never mind the money, to build the city otherwise.
• The citizens of Future London are all scared stiff of Layton and his hat because he/it looks like the evil!Layton that's been heading the crime gangs. Assuming they're not somehow hired actors (exceptional actors at that, to convince Layton and co that they're really in the future), it's a bit of a Fridge Logic moment -- Dimitri, or rather the "evil Layton," has been underground since the time machine accident where the Prime Minister was captured -- a day, at the least, a week at the most. Yet all the citizens seem to believe he's been running things for years. Going on that logic, who's really the "evil Layton" -- Clive himself? Don Paolo, in his Layton disguise?
  • Could be a Big Brother thing: They all know what he looks like through pictures but have never actually seen him.
  • Given how the prime minister was the last guy they kidnapped, Dimitri had to have been going back and forth for at least a few weeks before then. That, and how it's implied that he and Clive had to have been working on the underground city for a few years, he's probably been down there pretty often.
• Since it turns out that the time machine in Dr. Stahngun's exhibition was a hoax, how did he get himself and Bill Hawks underground? There couldn't have been an elevator shaft under the fake time machine, because the police would have found it.
  • The explosion caused a messy enough distraction so he could simply have hidden Family members grab Hawks and drag him to the clock shop.
• Flora's voice. In the US version, she inexplicably speaks with an American accent while everyone else sounds at least passably British, which is very jarring. Not to mention her voice actress could do with a bit of brushing up on pacing and tone.
  • In her first scene in CV, she said "I'd... rather not say," in more of a British accent than American. Then, her voice-acted parts from "Goodbye then, little village"-on, she's American.
  • Her name -- Reinhold -- is of German origin. I figure the family was originally German and the Baron was taught English by an American nanny his family hired. He therefore would speak English with an American accent, and his kid would pick it up from him. Several years of living among British people would soften that accent perhaps, but it would still be noticeable.
  • What bugs me about Flora's voice is the fact that her voice actress voices a good deal of other characters and pulls off at least a semi-British accent for all of them. I understand that it would be difficult to come up with a unique voice for that many characters, but it's a bit strange that Flora is the only one without the accent.
• How exactly did Clive reassign so many of the scientists to the "mobile fortress" project without Dmitri catching on? Dmitri mainly needed scientists related to time travel, and since he's probably significantly involved himself, it seems unlikely that Clive's pet project would go unnoticed, even if the Family knew he was the real leader.
  • Dimitri probably accepted Clive as the leader, so if Clive told him he wanted to work on a pet project that may or may not help Dimitri's goal of building a time machine, Dimitri probably wouldn't question it.
• In the second flashback, why does Hershel have a mask of his face? It's just sitting on a bookshelf in background.
• The statue of the author and the boy. Did something seem off about that to anyone else? Sure, Clive included it on the set of Future London as a subconscious tribute to Layton for keeping him from going insane from the loss of his parents (as a child, at least...). That's well and fine. But when Luke sees it for the first time on the way to Chinatown, it’s strange that he has been led to believe that the Future Layton is a crime boss and that the Future Luke is leading a rebellion against him… and it doesn’t seem to bother him too much. This would clearly be something that would upset Luke, having his imagination wander, visualizing what it must have been like for his future self and mentor to go their separate ways so dramatically. So why does Luke go off by himself, back to the statue, after discovering that Dimitri had been posing as the Future Layton? Why didn’t he run away while he still had the prospect of an evil Future Layton? Maybe all of his worries of his and the professor’s friendship had been building up since then, and even though he finds out the truth about Future Layton, and he just needed some time by himself to think. That could be the case, but I just think that they could have made that more clear.
  • For me, I just figured that it didn't even occur to Luke they wouldn't succeed, and Layton (knowing his future as being a horrible person) would change his attitude, ergo he didn't think of Layton in terms of the future one, but the present one.
• What exactly does Clive need Dimitri for in his grand plans? Sure, Dimitri would benefit from Clive's resources and supposed support, but what does Clive gain from it, apart from the chance to manipulate one of the men responsible for his parents' deaths?
  • I gathered that Clive didn't really need Dimitri for anything. He just pretended to play along so that Dimitri wouldn't get suspicious about his real plans. So basically, yes, he was just trying to manipulate him.
• So you are rich, you want to make a political statement, and you have the resolution to do anything... would the first thing that crosses your mind be a giant machine of random (and I mean random) destruction? With that much money, I alone can think of 10,000 better plans, both statement-wise and revenge-wise... and half of them are better morality-wise. And if he wanted specifically to destroy London, why not just use a giant bomb? (A nuclear one would be kind of unfriendly.) Clive's plan just bugs me.
  • Clive's goal was revenge, and he himself admits that he wasn't really thinking clearly at the end. That, and he wasn't trying to make a political statement specifically, he was just trying to get back at Dimitri and Bill Hawks, and since Bill unfortunately happened to be Prime Minister, the destroying-London bit was an effect of that. Had Bill not become Prime Minister, Clive would probably have come up with something a bit less destructive.

The Eternal Diva

• Nothing was explained about the eternal nature of Ambrosia. NOTHING.
  • Are we talking about the ruins which rise upon the music being played, the people of Ambrosia, or Melina? We're given a sort of throwaway comment about how the people of Ambrosia didn't last forever because they had eternal life, but rather because we remember them -- their story is passed down to each generation. It's a bit kitschy, but it's something. I'm more annoyed about the fact that, as a man of science, Layton tells Luke that Melina could well have been a reincarnation of the Queen of Ambrosia.
    • The kitschy explanation bugs me a lot, to be honest -- the whole movie in general just feels like it's being written by a different writer from the games. The explanation feels tacked on, something they made up at the last minute. The whole ruins rising up because of the music annoyed me a lot too, but as a friend of this troper said, there were pipes all around Ambrosia and the different frequencies of the music could have been detected by the pipes as a password of some sort. But yeah, in general, the conclusion just really bugged me.
  • And another note, why does Descole want Ambrosia anyway? Profit?
    • If the fan theory that Descole is really Lando is true, then he might be trying to one-up the guy he taught archeology to, seeing how super awesome and famous Layton's become. That would also explain why he was so furious about Layton being the one to raise Ambrosia instead of being all 'Oh hey, thanks for doing my work for me' about it. I'm guessing we'll get the answer when it's revealed who Descole really is.
• Was the reason why the Melina inside Jenis was different than the one implanted into Emily because Jenis accepted Melina's memories? Also, how could Melina choose to just "move on" at the end if "she", as in her memories, was just a bunch of electronic information? Does that mean her father actually did something like a soul upload and not just a memory upload? If that was the case, the ending would make sense, because then it would be essentially her spirit leaving Jenis to leave for the afterlife. We were told, however, that Jenis was only implanted with Melina's memories and that she accepted it. Thus, Melina shouldn't have been able to disappear like that. Melina, in all likelihood, probably retreated to the furthest recesses of Jenis' mind so that she wouldn't bother Jenis anymore..
• In the beginning, when Layton is explaining the story of Ambrosia during the play, I got a little bothered. The villagers drink the immortality potion AFTER the queen is already dead. Why? They know she's dead and gone, if they want to meet her again, why not commit mass suicide and meet her in the afterlife? Living forever won't bring their queen back.
  • Because they believed their queen would be reincarnated and they wanted to wait for her. And besides, it was all only symbolism anyway.
• Why didn't Descole just use Nina to sing "a song of the sea"? She knew the song, why waste so much money to find another candidate for Melina's memories?
  • Two reasons. 1) Nina's copy of Melina's memories was incomplete and unstable; she might not remember the entire song (or be able to remain as Melina long enough to sing it). 2) For all Descole knew, the "song of the sea" was something that required the singer to have a trained/'adult' voice.

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