Good but could have been better.
posted by claymsn (BONNEY LAKE, WA) Aug 22, 2009
Member since Aug 2009
I'm a fan of action/adventure/puzzle games. As someone who lived in Tokyo in the past, I had an extra reason for wanting to check this out. The good news is that the game has three cases which are fairly interesting. The graphics are in color (as opposed to Hotel Dusk) with mixture of real photos and drawn scenes (with a tad of basic animation at the end of a case). I was really pleased to see that the maps and photos were of real places in Japan. The controls were easy to grasp. The game wasn't too long, either. Some people might consider this a negative, but, for these simple stories, it's a good thing. (In comparison, I thought Hotel Dusk was too long.)
There's some negatives, though. First, they changed the setting to America and created imaginary (corny) city names. That may have been more frustrating to me since I have lived in Japan and I know the real names of places. This was made worse by the fact that they left a street sign for Shinjuku (the games first area on the box art). Second, the game doesn't allow for mistakes. If you make a wrong choice, it will make you choose again. This wasn't terrible, but I can see why it would really aggrevate some people. (From my point of view, it saves time.)
In all, this was a decent game. I don't know that I'll play the second game, but I don't regret playing this one. It's definitely worth a rental. It has a noirish theme. It's audience is late teens (who would probably enjoy it less) and adults. It includes visits to bars and has a dedicated button to allow you to smoke. That plus the gameplay make it unsuitable for kids.
Was this review helpful?
Report
Abuse
