Professor Layton and Fantasy Life Getting Mobile Sequels

Level-5, the studio behind the Professor Layton and Fantasy Life series, has announced that they are developing new titles in both franchises...for smartphones and tablets. Cue the depressing trombone sound.

The next games, currently titled Professor Layton 7 and Fantasy Life 2, will indeed be exclusive to smartphones and other mobile devices, signaling what could be the end of a long-standing and fruitful relationship between Level-5 and Nintendo.

Based on early screenshots from Kotaku and Siliconera, Fantasy Life 2 looks to be staying true to the original's formula, letting players create and maintain villages via performing different jobs. Professor Layton 7, on the other hand, is a multiplayer tabletop party game that seemingly has no familiar features to the rest of the series outside of the names and faces of the characters.

The focus of Layton 7 is to figure out which player is "The Vampire" by out-strategizing other players in the game involving cards and some sort of fortune telling mechanic. Worse yet is the revelation that there was supposedly a Nintendo 3DS version of the game in development as well, but Level-5 made no mention of it with this announcement.

Look, we understand if Fantasy Life was to go all mobile, as only one game launched on the 3DS and perhaps sales figures weren't to Level-5's liking. Professor Layton abandoning ship, however, is very disheartening, considering how the top-hatted gentleman starred in two trilogies worth of adventures. We're crossing our fingers and toes that this is an one-off experiment and that Layton will return to the 3DS, but admittedly we're not confident with that being the case.

Both of these games are set to launch in Japan this summer, and are likely to get Western releases before the end of the year.