Somehow, it has been 15 years since Professor Layton and the Lost Future (or 'the Unwound Future', depending on your region) made its debut in Japan. As with every entry in the mainline series to date, it took another couple of years until the third entry received a Western release, but when it finally did, we could see that Level-5 was onto something special with its detective puzzle series.
The time-hopping story that tied up the loose ends of the two earlier games, the continued puzzle quality from the late, great Akira Tago, and the emotional damage of that ending. The Lost Future is the Layton series firing on all cylinders, but it was also the final time (chronologically) that Hershel and Luke would take the starring roles before things went all Star Wars-y in the ensuing prequel trilogy.
With all the original three games now deep into their second decade, we started thinking about the age-old topic of remakes and remasters. It has to be time for a Layton collection on Switch, right?
We know that the next game in the series, Professor Layton and the New World of Steam, is coming to Switch at some point, but Nintendo's hybrid console is Layton-less as far as the mainline entries go — though you can pick up a deluxe edition of Katrielle and the Millionaire's Conspiracy if you really want to.
For a long time, we put this down to a simple case of hardware limitations. The translation from dual- to single-screen gameplay isn't the easiest, as we've seen from many DS to Switch ports such as The World Ends With You. It's a similar situation for Layton which was so reliant on touchscreen gameplay, so you can see why a Switch port might not be at the top of the list for a company like Level-5 which, just a few years ago, was rumoured to be halting operations outside of Japan.