Operation Backlog Completion 2024

May Mystery Game Madness: Jake Hunter Detective Story: Ghost of the Dusk Review

 May Mystery Game Madness, Reviews, Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
May 252022
 

A little over a year ago, we talked about Jake Hunter Detective Story: Memories of the Past, which I found I’d mysteriously left in my DS and decided to play.

So as part of our mystery game celebration this month (if you’ve just arrived, be sure to read that post to learn about the contest!) I decided to follow up with the next localized game in the series, Jake Hunter Detective Story: Ghost of the Dusk for the 3DS.

(Which has become difficult to find everywhere except directly from the publisher.)

If you’ll recall, the Jake Hunter release history is rather chaotic. Memories of the Past included the first five mobile game cases and a sixth new case. Ghost of the Dusk has a similar model, this time with another brand new case as well as mobile games 21-24.

So what happened to mobile games 6-20? They’ve been re-released along with other new cases in games that were never localized.

Anyway, let’s get back to Ghost of the Dusk. The main case lasts a few hours and tells an intriguing story, while the other four cases are shorter, but still have their high points. Most of the gameplay is still handled through menus, but now you’ll occasionally have an investigation section where you need to tap objects to investigate, although sometimes the areas it wants you to click felt a bit too precise.

I found it to be much more straightforward than the previous game, with far fewer times where I needed to repeat actions to get new results.

I also enjoyed the mysteries more, especially Ghost of the Dusk itself. Focusing on an old mansion people claim is cursed, it starts out as a single murder and quickly spirals into a much larger conspiracy. They’re the sorts of mysteries where I could think over the clues to try to piece together the case as the protagonists did.

In addition to the five main cases, there’s also another Jake Hunter Unleashed case, a chibi story that tasks you with solving a smaller mystery.

Now, Memories of the Past is one of those games that is clearly set in Japan but tries to convince you its localization is set in America. Since Ghost of the Dusk takes place in the same fictional city of Aspicio, I assumed it was doing the same thing right up until one case had Jake mention how he once traveled to America. That’s right, unlike its predecessor, this game’s localization now claims to not to be set in America… but not Japan either despite its very Japanese background images, so it seems Aspicio now exists in a vague fictional country.

(It also continues to pretend its yakuza characters are mafia, except for one case that straight-up calls them yakuza, so I don’t know what was up with that.)

My guess is they wanted to drop the pretense of being set in America but keep the existing localized names, and since things like Aspicio and Tripudio don’t sound Japanese (not to mention the names of Jake and his supporting cast), that resulted in this strange change to the setting.

Anyway, I quite enjoyed Jake Hunter Detective Story: Ghost of the Dusk. It’s a nice collection of detective cases, and it makes me sad that Prism of Eyes still hasn’t made an English appearance. There’s a prequel game that was localized, though, so I’ll be sure to pick that up one of these days.

Jake Hunter Detective Story: Memories of the Past Has Some Fun Cases

 Reviews, Video games  5 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Mar 082021
 

When I started thinking of playing another 3DS game, I decided to check my 3DS to see what game I’d left in the system.

To my surprise, I found Jake Hunter Detective Story: Memories of the Past, which I hadn’t played and didn’t remember prioritizing, but apparently at some point it was the next game I intended to play.

So why not? I decided to play it.

Memories of the Past is a visual novel adventure game in which you play a detective investigating various cases. It contains six cases, but the Jake Hunter release history gets a little complicated, so let’s talk about that first.

The series began all the way back in 1987 on the Famicom and saw consistent titles across a variety of platforms from then on, including a line of mobile games.

The first five cases in Memories of the Past are actually the first five mobile games, the first four of which are remakes of the original four Famicom games.

Finally, the sixth case is titled Memories of the Past and was created for this DS game. In fact, while all six cases are unlocked from the start and I played them in order, the game clearly intends for you to start with Memories of the Past, because it prompts you within that case to play through the others, creating a single continuous experience instead of treating each as a separate game.

(If you play them separately, like I did, you can skip the previous cases in Memories of the Past, but it still quizzes you on the major points.)

Gameplay-wise, everything is handled through menus. You won’t be tapping around the environment to search for clues, but rather choosing “Inspect” and then picking an area/object to inspect from the list that comes up. It can be a little tedious, since occasionally it needs you to inspect things multiple times or in the right order, but it’s fine.

It also frequently quizzes you on the current case’s events to make sure you remember the important details.

I found the first three cases to be pretty straightforward, entertaining enough to see how the mystery plays out, but not too compelling. The fourth was probably my favorite, with two alternating points of view and a story that had some fairly emotional moments.

The fifth case was fine, and the sixth was interesting in how it tried to bring things together, but not particularly noteworthy on its own in my opinion.

In addition to the main six cases, there are also a number of “Jake Hunter Unleashed” cases, shorter mysteries with chibi art and an emphasis on humor. They essentially feel more like puzzles, since they give you all the evidence and witness testimonies right away and you need to figure out the truth.

One more thing I want to mention is that this is another series that decided to change its setting to America for the localizations. Unlike Ace Attorney, where changing the names makes sense for the pun-based humor, there’s no reason for that to have been done in Jake Hunter. I assume they thought western audiences would be less inclined to buy “Detective Saburo Jinguji,” but honestly I find “Jake Hunter Detective Story” to be such a bland title I’m not sure it paid off.

Anyway, Jake Hunter Detective Story: Memories of the Past was enjoyable enough. I wouldn’t say it’s a new favorite, but I’m intrigued enough to check out the next game that was released in English…

…which is not any of the five Jake Hunter games that came out after Memories of the Past, but rather the next one after that, Ghost of the Dusk. (And so far they’ve skipped over the next game, Prism of Eyes, despite it getting an English rating, so staying up to date with the Jake Hunter series doesn’t seem like it’ll get any easier anytime soon…)