Jake Hunter, a Japanese detective series that originated over thirty years ago, has recently started making some appearances on western platforms. My first experience with the series was just eight months ago on the 3DS (Ghost of the Dusk review). While not as good as the two Hotel Dusk games I played in previous years on the DS, it was well-written, interesting, and worth playng through. So when I heard about Daedalus: The Awakening of Golden Jazz and how it’s actually a prequel to 1998’s “At the End of the Dream,” and written by Hirotaka Inaba, who also wrote “At the End of the Dream,” I was curious to play it.
So, Daedalus is one of those games you just have to be in the mood for to play, and I would also say it would play better on the Vita or 3DS than it would on a TV-attached console. The reason for this, for me at least, is that the pacing is very slow and deliberate, and the game has some design hurdles you just have to deal with and grind through. It took me way longer to finish the first chapter than it was probably meant to, for example, and part of that was it was literally putting me to sleep at times. I know that sounds really crass to say, but the pacing, the constantly looping music, the all-subtitled presentation, my disinterest in this kid-based flashback scenario — it was a slog to get through. The opening prologue and four subsequent chapters are more enjoyable, thankfully. Still, Daedalus is one of those games that you just have to be in the mood to play because there is a lot of reading, a lot of slow gameplay interaction and extra ‘hoops’ to jump through that I’ll detail soon.
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The story is based upon a young Saburo, series protagonist, and the death of his grandfather, Kyosuke Jinguji, who taught him a great deal about his detective skills. Saburo receives word that his grandfather was murdered in New York. Saburo flies to meet some of his old friends: Abbie, Leo, and Ben, and to investigate the death. The game starts with a prologue chapter introducing us to a very young Saburo who is hanging out in his grandfather’s fifth floor office suite. The two main gameplay mechanics are introduced here, namely, Stances and the Tree of Thought. You will speak with and question a lot of NPCs during your investigations, who will often reveal clues. While in the Searching mode you also examine items of interest in the game world and the combination of these expands your Tree of Thought, which eventually grows enough to bear fruit, which reveal truthful incites about the events that actually transpired (regardless of what NPCs may try to convince you of otherwise).
Speaking with characters, exploring the environment, and traveling between locations to repeat these is about the extent of the gameplay loop. For the niche genre that this game is, that can be fine, even expected. However, there are a variety of design choices, in both gameplay and in presentation, that I struggled with. I’ll jump around between these as I begin to elaborate because they overlap.
Controls are technically simple, sure, but nevertheless they are inefficient. Players advance dialog with ‘X’, and you can also toggle Auto dialog advancing with L2, but I would not recommend that because much of the dialog is repetitive and the pace of the game, in part simply by the nature of the genre, is already very slow. Anyhow; the sticks are used to look around and Circle to go back, that’s all fine. What I came to lament were all the extra ‘steps’ that you have to go through that add up. Want to change locations? Select your location, a question pops up if you’re sure, the default answer is ‘no’, and then wait a few seconds to load. There are times where you are switching locations faster than the load times in between (we’re talking seconds here, but still, it adds up). What about talking with characters? You aim the cursor on them press X to confirm, and then you have to press the stick in the direction of the option, the only option, of “Talk with <character name here>” and press X again — why the extra step? Wasted steps and backtracking is a nuisance in this game, and much of it cannot be avoided. Going through the hoops, getting to a location, only to have a two second pause before Saburo says “I arrived at <place you just selected to go to>” was another unnecessary step. Now all this may sound very nitpicky, but do it a few hundred times amidst other grating design choices, and it does add up.
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Not being able to walk around is also a struggle — an icon in the top center of the screen reminds you almost constantly that you have a 360 degree free camera, and that’s true, but not being able to move your feet felt bizarrely stifling. Switching to the Search mode with Square darkens the screen and pops up these little blue “bubbles” that help you zero in on items of interest, but this visual flare is one of many presentation designs that didn’t work to the game’s benefit. The weird font and layout of the letters seen with everything you interact with, the visual flares and pops and the sounds that go with them, and the soundtrack is often really annoying and loops way too often (at times on about a ten second interval)… The music also outpaces the actual pacing of the story sometimes, such that you think maybe things should be more dramatic and faster to develop, but the actual flow is much slower and it disrupts any sense of immersion you might have had.
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These flaws aside, what lies underneath is still an alright experience. For Trophy hunters, this is an easy one to snap up a lot of those, if that’s your thing. For visual novel/crime fiction fans, especially/obviously of the Jake Hunter lineage, you’ve probably played worse and this is worth the effort. I would love to see a patch that streamlines the flow of the game, because lets face it, you’re playing it for the story, not the gameplay, so when the gameplay/controls/presentation get in the way of that, it’s an issue — and nearly one big enough to warrant taking a pass.
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