#poor randall

YOU SAID HE WAS YOUR BEST FRIEND

The ending of Miracle Mask is literally so insulting. It established early on that Randall and Hershel were super close to each other as well as to Angela, and Henry barely got a passing mention to set up our suspicion of him. The ending was literally, "Hershel wasn't Randall's best friend, Henry was." Which not only invalidates Randall's death and Hershel's guilt over letting him die, but it also strongly implies that Randall brought Hershel on his adventures simply because Henry couldn't come and not because Randall had any care for Hershel, which we know can't be true because of the entire section of the game dedicated to spelunking.

Henry and Angela got their closure, but because Hershel didn't, I somehow still feel like Randall really did die when we thought he did, and I know for sure he can't be in the sequel because anyone who played Azran Legacy before Miracle Mask would get a HUGE SPOILER, so bravo for ruining everything, Level-5.

I think the part that's the most insulting to me is that it had such an easy fix. The game tells us that Hershel doesn't forgive Randall for the sand thing even when Angela and Henry do, because Randall put Luke in danger, but that's not an ending, that's an explanation. Hershel, as the protagonist, MUST have closure, or the audience doesn't have it either. Like, seriously, you couldn't have given us a 20 second epilogue where Hershel and Randall reconcile after Hershel blamed himself for Randall's death, ran away from the fortune he discovered, locked himself in his room for days at a time only for the guilt to continue to eat him alive 18 years later, and become inspired enough to pursue archaeology as a career in Randall's place???

All of that has now been invalidated because instead of pursuing a solution, Hershel decided to run away, just like he did when Randall was presumed dead, which is not only insulting to his character, it actually makes him seem cold and unfeeling for rejecting that closure, especially from someone who you claim was your best friend. After what happened when there were similar situations in other games, I honestly expected better from him.

By the way, the place where I expected there to be an epilogue where the two "best friends" finally reconcile? They choose to use that to set up the sequel instead. Like, no wonder people tend to forget about Miracle Mask, it doesn't even give us the courtasy of a proper ending and instead makes the game feel very “run-on” into the next one. I've never played a Professor Layton game that felt this unfinished, and it's more than a little frustrating. Level-5 does kind of have a bad habit of giving everyone except the main characters closure, but it’s been fine in the past because they weren’t really involved in the first place, and whenever closure was needed, they got it without too much fuss. Just...why is it changing like that?

In conclusion, Henry wasn’t the one who watched Randall die.

Henry wasn’t the one who blamed himself.

Henry didn’t leave the fortune behind because it was too painful to even look at.

Henry didn’t collapse in the ruin to say, “Was this really worth your life?”

Henry didn’t walk miles home in the desert dreading how to break the bad news.

Henry didn’t constantly wonder how he could have done things differently to save his best friend.

Henry wasn’t there in the first arc.

Hershel was.

And since they didn’t figure out how to reconcile that in favor of their precious sequel, Randall is still dead for me because his second arc wasn't properly completed when his first one was.