YMMV / Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

• Foe Yay Shipping: Layton and Anton, when the latter's dialogue is taken the wrong way.
  Anton: "It's been far too long since I've encountered prey so… feisty…"
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Folsense is one letter away from "fool sense", and is pronounced "faux sense".
  • Sophia didn't tell Anton that she was pregnant with his child to avoid having their child stay in Folsense, the town plagued by a deadly disease, as a heir of the Herzen family.
• Fridge Logic: If Professor Layton and team were caught in the luxury car when it switched trains to go to Folsense, then where did their luggage go?
  • They evidently walk into town with them and have no reason to hallucinate them, either, so must actually be there; the real question is how did they get them?
  • The events of the Game begin, when Layton & Luke discover Doctor Schrader, who they believe to be dead, cause of the Box. He is actually alive, he actually got a scent of the Hallucinogenic Gas in the Elysian Box; but you would expect that someone as intelligent as Layton, or an Inspector like Chelmey, would make checking for a pulse the first thing they do, upon discovering him!
• Narm Charm: Especially the climax and The Reveal. There are at least two extremely lackluster voice actors; there's a fair amount of melodrama; and if you're smart enough to have played through the game to this point, then you're smart enough to spot the plot holes. And you'll still bawl your eyes out.
• Nightmare Fuel: See here.
• No Yay: Anton mistakes Katia for his lost fiancée, Sophia, and asks her to come to him. When Katia rejects him out of fear, he becomes a Yandere and challenges Layton to a Sword Fight, where he screams "Sophia belongs to me! You can't have her!". The Squick factor is made worse with the revelation that Katia is the granddaughter of Anton and Sophia, something Anton never knew.
• Signature Scene: Anton and Layton's fencing duel at the climax is well remembered for being well animated, the Diabolical Box main theme being played and highlighting Layton's swordsplay skills, which becomes a staple in the prequel trilogy.
• Tear Jerker: See here.
• That One Puzzle: “Plaza Puzzle”. The puzzle itself isn’t too difficult to solve as long as you can think outside the box. What makes this puzzle veer into this trope is the fact that you can know how to solve it, yet still have your solution rejected because your line wasn’t exactly where the game wanted it to be. Figuring out the precise placement for the line on the first attempt takes either an impeccable sense of proportion or, more likely, dumb luck. Of course, those who don’t accomplish this are likely to second-guess their logic, leading to a ton of wasted time spent searching for an alternative solution that doesn’t exist, and/or three wasted hint coins just to find out that the original logic was correct, and the game was just being picky.
• That One Sidequest: The Tea Set sidequest. You have to make tea blends from ingredients you find throughout the game and serve specific blends to people when they are thirsty. This is annoying for three reasons:
  • First, coming up with the tea blends requires using 3 ingredients out of 8 (max 2 of any one ingredient). While several targets hint at the blend they'd like, narrowing your search down, the total search space is 504 potential recipes. This can be tedious and time-consuming without a guide.
  • Second, people have only a chance of being thirsty before you've satisfied them, some only a small chance. The randomness involved means that you will waste a good amount of time going back and forth in and out of an area to try to trigger thirst in a character. Also, some characters will be thirsty before you have the ingredients to satisfy them, getting in the way of a puzzle or clue from them.
  • Third, there's no list of who you've satisfied. So, unless you wrote it down or are scrupulously following a guide, there's no way to tell the difference between someone you've served and someone who just isn't thirsty yet if you don't remember who you've served tea to.
  • They do provide a counter at the top of how many people you've given tea to, however.

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