Professor Layton and the Unwound Future

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future is the absolute highlight of Level-5's first trilogy of Professor Layton puzzle games: coming with 200 (including DLC) of the best puzzles in the series after those of Pandora's Box, it offers a very well-crafted storyline concluding the trilogy, supported by gorgeous cutscenes from Production I.G. and a surprisingly good localization from Nintendo.

Actually, given the game's heavy reliance on some puzzles on Japanese language subtleties, it's rather surprising it got localized.

Name Entry Screen
As with most localized Japanese games, the sub-menus for kana are dummied out: Only alphanumeric characters are left. Oddly enough, a set of symbol characters got excised as well, though it is not difficult to see why. Circle, Square, Cross and Triangle symbols would be out of place in a game localized by Nintendo..



Talking Parrot Minigame
lRakSwtsxZw

The parrot in the Japanese version can talk to twelve people in the game. And by talking, we mean using 45 pre-defined words to complete sentences, to answer them. Your parrot start without knowing any words, but he learns new words as rewards for some puzzles.

You would choose from the Parrot menu the person you want to play the minigame with. When you get to the place where that person is, the parrot would appear above their heads. Talking to the person would start a minigame where they would say two sentences: you’ll have to fill in the blanks of the reply correctly.

A percentage appears on the menu as well of how friendly the parrot is with Luke: it unlocks the bonus puzzles when reaching 100%.

In the localized versions, this minigame has been replaced with another one where you tie ropes between sticks so that the Parrot bounces on it. The goal is to deliver objects to these twelve persons, and there are no more words to unlock, but just the twelve delivery missions for each of these people.

The text relevant to the parrot conversations is still more or less used in the English version, only as a regular discussion. The minigame might have been removed due to being redundant, with the Story Book already offering a similar challenge.



Unused Wi-Fi Puzzles
7w8RIw8moAE

While the main story puzzle count is the same between all versions, it is not the case for the downloadable puzzles… The original Japanese games all offered 52 Wi-fi puzzles, out of which 35 were localized for the third and fourth games (an improvement over the 26 of the first two games). Some of the DLC puzzles were added in the main story, and NoA considered it wasn’t worth it to replace the pun-heavy DLC ones as they were already struggling with the main puzzles.

However, the rest of the DLC puzzles (17 puzzles) are still in the US version, complete with unaltered Japanese graphics and fully working with the solutions of the JP release. Only their titles and texts are blanked out. They can be accessed by hacking the save file to unlock them.

Oddly enough, there is another unused puzzle, Puzzle W034: Cluttered Bag 2: Despite being functional and fully translated in English, this puzzle is never unlocked in the US/EU, which is a shame.