Level-5, venerable video game developer probably best noted for the Professor Layton series and the recent Dragon Quest IX, announced two extremely odd and exciting things for the Nintendo 3DS at their Vision 2010 conference.
First and wildly enough, Level-5 has teamed up with Capcom and announced a Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright crossover game called Professor VS Gyakuten saiban. Check out some prime shaky cam footage after the jump. Secondly and still wildly, the upcoming non-crossover Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracle will receive a daily downloadable puzzle for an entire year.
Level-5, also noted for esteemed games like Dark Cloud, Rogue Galaxy, White Knight Chronicles, and Jeanne d’Arc, will be developing the Layton and Ace Attorney mashup, while Ace Attorney creator Shu Takumi will be the head writer. The neatest facet to the Layton and Phoenix Wright mashup is the “VS” sitting between their two names. Details are slim at the moment, and a shaky cam screenshot (shown below) seems to depict Professor Layton, his young companion Luke, and Phoenix Wright working together, but the word “versus” has a pretty specific meaning. The only detail given for the game’s premise was the key phrase “witch trial,” which Shu Takumi mentioned while onstage at the conference. The game’s official Japanese website opens tomorrow, so hopefully there will be more details coming in the near future, but we can only hope the tagline for the game will be, “Two detectives enter, one detective leaves.”
As for Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracle, downloadable puzzles are nothing new to the series, but one puzzle each day for an entire year is unprecedented in terms of downloadable video game content, with only Harmonix’s Rock Band coming that close in terms of DLC frequency with their weekly tracks. Even more impressive, is that while Rock Band basically has an infinite catalogue of music to turn into DLC, Professor Layton has to design clever and engaging puzzles for each day, rather than simply choose a handful of pre-existing songs for each week.
(story and video via Joystiq, stories and screenshot from Eurogamer [1, 2])
