YMMV / Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires' Conspiracy

• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Katrielle is rather polarizing depending on who you ask within the fanbase. She tends to be seen as overbearing in contrast to her father, while others see her as a good Contrasting Sequel Main Character with a noticeably different personality.
  • Some fans dislike Emiliana for her condescending attitude, her huge ego and trying to compete with Katrielle instead of just cooperating. Others believe she's an effective Foil, or, to Katrielle detractors, far better than Katrielle.
• Broken Base:
  • The game’s more relaxed, less serious tone compared to previous entries and its more simplistic puzzles, with an overemphasis on the "trick question" variety, were a hard pill to swallow for veteran purist fans of the original Layton series, although newer fans are more forgiving.
  • You either love the characters, or find them very cliche/one dimensional.
  • People either love the simplified, easier to follow story or prefer the more nuanced complexity (and darker tone) of the Professor’s entries.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Cesar Chance being Ratman. It's easy enough to narrow Ratman's identity down to one of the three named characters associated with the paper, due to the paper benefiting from Ratman's coverage, but Cesar is the only one who doesn't want Katrielle to investigate Ratman(since he'd planned on retiring). By the time the maker of the Ratman costume gives you a package for Cesar(who'd previously mentioned becoming a father), the game may as well have spelled out Ratman's identity.
• Contested Sequel: Fans of the Layton games are deeply divided as to whether this game should be considered a true sequel to Hershel Layton's saga or merely an interesting spin-off, with the most frequent points of debate being its looser, more open-ended plot, its mostly superficial ties to the games before it, and the proliferation of stock "trick question" puzzles at the expense of deeper, more challenging ones.
• Foe Yay Shipping: A bit between Katrielle and Emiliana, if only because Emiliana is unusually concerned with proving her superiority to Katrielle, yet she'll risk her career to save Katrielle from being arrested. It's one-sided, though.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The satisfying "ding" of discovering a hint coin is topped only by the discovery of ten hint coins at once.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: This is the only game in the main franchise that wasn't directed by series puzzlemaster Akira Tago, since he'd passed away shortly before the game officially entered production. Katrielle shows just how important his guidance was, seeing how the Layton fanbase universally agrees that the puzzles in this game (designed by Kuniaki Iwanami) are the worst in the entire Layton franchise by a considerable margin.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Many of the puzzles are significantly easier than those of the previous trilogies (with those that aren't typically being of the "trick question" variety that the mainline series dropped after the very first installment), and the overall mysteries are somewhat more obvious. Even the post-game "Puzzle Rooms", typically the series' resident Brutal Bonus Levels, are an absolute breeze in comparison.
• That One Puzzle: One of the things almost everyone in the Layton fanbase agrees on is that, without series puzzle master Akira Tago's direction, the puzzle quality in this game is significantly below the standard set by previous entries. Some of the more noteworthy stinkers include:
  • "Happy Families" is a vague, ambiguous mess that perfectly showcases this game's drop in puzzle quality. At first glance, it seems pretty straightforward: guess the speaker's age based on clues about the ages of their siblings. However, the question is deliberately worded to trick you into making a false assumption that, when taken at face value, leads to an answer that is perfectly valid within the puzzle's constraints, and there's absolutely nothing in the puzzle to hint that your train of thought might be incorrect.Going based on the information/deductions that the oldest girl is 22, the second oldest girl is 19, the oldest boy is 18, and the youngest boy is 15, you'd probably figure that the second oldest boy is between 15 and 18; since you know that he's four years younger than the narrator, no one is 20 or 21, and the second oldest girl is specifically stated not to be the narrator, you'd likely conclude that the second oldest boy is also 18 (with less than a year between his and the oldest boy's birthdays), and that the narrator is the oldest girl, at age 22. This fits perfectly within the puzzle's parameters, so everything's fine and dandy, right? Wrong. You were supposed to somehow figure out that the "second oldest boy" and the "youngest boy" are the same person, and that the narrator is the second oldest girl's twin sister. Absolutely nothing in the puzzle even remotely hints at this being a possibility. Even the hints are completely useless, only giving you information that most players could easily deduce by themselves. Apparently even Level 5 must have realized at one point just how terribly designed this puzzle was, because it's replaced in the Switch version by a completely different and much easier puzzle.
  • "Caught Four Speeding" presents you with five cars that were driving over the speed limit and tasks you with figuring out which driver wasn't charged with speeding. There are subtle visual differences between the cars, leading Genre Savvy Layton veterans to conclude that the crucial detail lies somewhere in there. Nope; the trick is that you're supposed to assume the cars were driving in the order they're presented on the screen, and that the last car was the cop chasing the speeders. This might be considered a valid assumption to make... if it weren't for the fact that other puzzles in the game go out of their way to punish you for making that exact same kind of assumption. While the hints do help to steer you in the right direction, the puzzle overall seems deliberately designed to be a hint coin sink.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: It's pretty common for fans to dislike this entry or even say it's the worst in the series, mostly due to puzzles being either laughably easy trivialities or infuriating trick questions, with very little middle ground between them, rather mundane cases, greater differences in the plot's writing as compared to previous games, and the overall less-serious tone of a good majority of it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The two big mysteries in the introduction are that of Hershel mysteriously leaving a young Katrielle and the origin of Sherl the dog. While the former doesn't get mentioned almost entirely after the first hour or so, though it is resolved in the anime, the latter does get a passing mention in the form of a case coda.

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