Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Originally intended to be a simple improvement over Nintendo’s Brain Age series with the collaboration of Akira Tago, Professor Layton and the Curious Village managed, with its unique European charm combined with gorgeous graphics and poetic plot, to reach a very high worldwide level of success, despite the first game being localized as the third game was already out in Japan.

Prototype Title Screens
This is certainly not the only DS game to have its graphics from the JP version left unused on the localized versions: The odd thing is that an early JP title screen with the 2006 date can be found: the game was released in 2007 in Japan. The most intriguing part is probably an even earlier Japanese title screen, with a completely different title (多湖輝の頭の体操 EX, Tago Akira no Atama no Taisou EX, Tago Akira's Mental Gymnastics EX) with the Akira Tago copyright (In the final, he is not mentioned in the title screen, but rather in the credit roll).

Hino mentioned in an interview that the original Layton concept was more of a clone of Brain Age. That concept was revived in 2009 after the release of Layton 4 when Level-5 released the Tago Akira no Atama no Taisou series under the Atamania label: these were four casual puzzle games with less focus on plot which used the DS sideway orientation from Brain Age. Professor Layton and the Curious Village might have been a rebranded Atamania game, just like the recent Layton Brothers for iOS (originally Atamania Mystery Room).



Placeholder Graphics
The gorgeous water-color introductory scenes, from when Layton hands Luke the letter while on their way to the village on the Laytonmobile, have early graphics. They seem to be drawn by MS Paint and have a hideous "hard-subbed" Demo Skip inscription. They were probably intended to serve as placeholder graphics.



This odd Dragon Quest-like monster serves the purpose of a placeholder for NPC dialogue graphics.



This checkered background was to be used during development as a BG placeholder.



Unused Demo Graphics
It is from a demo menu with three options.