Satan is Happy With My Progress - A Review of Daedalus: The Awakening of Golden Jazz
I wistfully gaze out the window and take a long drag from my cigarette as I say "Sometimes...you need to experience the bad to truly understand the good..." to the cold night air.
Indeed, the best thing I can say about this game and its narrative is that it's taught me to appreciate things in life that I once took for granted, to understand *why* I like Ace Attorney as a murder mystery franchise so much.
The charm, the writing, the characters, the problem solving and resolutions of the cases...I now appreciate even the weakest Ace Attorney case, now that I've suffered through Daedalus: The Awakening of Golden Jazz.
I exhale a cloud of smoke. "Next time, I'll check the Steam page and see whether or not a game is labeled Mostly Negative by the community before downloading it off of PS Plus..."
I will not sugarcoat my opinions on this game, one of the few Detective Saburō Jingūji titles to get localized and make it stateside.
This is the worst visual novel I have ever played in my life.
Daedalus carries the pedigree of both Arc System Works and a long-running franchise name that's been around since the late 1980's as well as a price tag of 40 goddamn dollars, so you would think they'd put more effort into this. I've never played a Saburō Jingūji/Jake Hunter game before and now, after doing so, this dreary mess of a game makes me ask unflattering questions like "Are they *all* this bad, or is this like the Lunar: Dragon Song of Jake Hunter games?".
Daedalus is one of those rare cases of "Nothing in this game works", and I'll start with the presentation. The central gimmick of this game is that every scene is set in a panoramic photo of real scenery with a slight Photoshop filter on it with the 2D character artwork placed on top. The full 360 rotation is kinda neat and the photos are nice, but the problem is this never looks good with the anime artwork because it's always awkwardly pasted in like a Deviantart edit without accounting for perspective or whether it would clash with the real humans that often enter the shots.
Characters are never scaled right, with children standing larger than horses and policemen proudly standing at three feet tall. The characters are then animated with 2D puppet rigs and limited frames to express themselves and it just feels like I'm living in a world where I'm being haunted by glitchy Vtubers, all while the same three bland jazz tracks chase me down and fart the same blaring saxophone solo in my ear.
On top of all of this, they really half-assed the photography, a core feature of this game, by never dressing the scenes to fit this supposed period piece. This game is supposed to take place in Saburō Jingūji's past, when he's just learning the ropes of detective work to solve his grandpa's murder, who is also a private detective, and the game's writing tries to make you believe that they're still working with landline phones and no internet or cellphones, with our protagonist having to take multiple trips to the library to scour newspaper articles at one point.
(pictured: a restaurant that definitely isn't set in an era with only landline phones)
The problem is, the background photos will depict things like touchscreens in a restaurant, modern 2019-era model cars, and - my favorite - chalk graffiti in an alleyway that reads "Save the date, 4-20-19".
And, even ignoring the anachronisms, this game will do things like label a shelf of paint cans as "drugs". You're charging 40 dollars for this and you were too lazy to make fake drug props for your hard-boiled detective VN?
"I believe that is called "paint", Saburō."
I am, however, glad that Saburō Jingūji''s grandfather has a poster that reads "Satan is happy with your progress" in his office. Thanks.
As a quick aside, in terms of sound effects, this game likes to play a chime every time you press a button to advance the text. I lasted about 30 seconds during the grandpa flashback (you know, because advancing text is a key feature in a VN) before I muted this feature into oblivion with the settings and I shudder in fear at the thought of playing a version of this game that's somehow even more obnoxious to the senses.
Okay okay, you might be wondering "sure it might be ugly and half-assed and the music is also bad and the sound design is rancid as hell but what about the gameplay and story!?". Never fear, rhetorical question giver, they managed to fuck that up too.
Boy howdy, did they fuck this up...
(this game also Gets Racist at certain points by using really loaded imagery with zero self-examination)
The story revolves around Saburō Jingūji traveling to New York City to solve his grandfather's sudden murder, broken up into five cases as you gradually unravel a mystery that involves a small town that was once the center of a bloody mafia dispute.
What is Daedalus? Why was your grandfather Kyosuke tied up in Daedalus and who could've killed him? What cruel tangled web ties this small town to all of these people? These are all questions with very boring answers. The game gives you the illusion of gameplay by having you poke various background elements and characters to gather clues, but there is barely a drop of problem solving or puzzle to work your brain and none of the flavor text gathered from clicking the scenery is at all engaging or funny or interesting.
Your charmless detective protagonist has zero personality and is less of a genius prodigy and more like the dude who luckily stumbled upon a town's serial murderer because said serial murderer got drunk in a bar and went "oh yes, I love my knife that stabs people!"
The main impression I got from Saburō Jingūji - besides he just so happens to coax murder confessions out of serial killers by just standing there - is that he is plagued with some sort of sleeping disorder. He'll have a single conversation with one person in the middle of town before going "Man, I'm beat. Time to hit the hay!" while the photo background is still depicting a beautiful sunny afternoon.
He does this multiple times in a town with a terrible secret despite getting threats against his life from the serial killer living there, just as a side note.
The cases in this game are as follows:
Chapter 1- A flashback episode where Saburō and his three friends (Abbie, Leo, and Ben) as kids solve the mystery of a camp counselor's disappearance at summer camp because Ben (who has a giant head and is wearing a "Goodam" shirt) has a crush on her.
By far the worst and longest chapter in the game, and this game made the bold choice of opening the game like this. I will never make another joke aimed at Twilight Town ever again, not when this game traps you in The Summer Camp From Hell for almost two hours and expects you to be okay with it.
This chapter is when you truly realize this game's shortcomings, as most of the gameplay is just scene transitions as you go from empty locale to empty locale and wait for either your character or one of the big-headed children to go "Nope, still no clues here".
Who needs clues and intuition and problem solving in a murder mystery visual novel when you can just bumble around for 35 minutes, visiting and revisiting the same forest photos over and over, until you find a bloody shirt in a shed, tell the murderer about it, and then bumble around for another ten minutes until you find the murder weapon right next to the murderer?
Also Jerma is here for some reason.
This flashback ends with a ten year old boy (Leo) stabbing an axe-wielding murderer in the stomach, causing them to fall off a steep cliff and die a horrific, gory, organ and bone splattering death in front of this group of small children before the game jumps back to modern day and all of these adults at a restaurant declare "Boy, that sure was a fun adventure!" like they were in an episode of Scooby-Doo instead of the movie Stand by Me.
This does not come up again ever, not even when you confront one of these characters about their childhood trauma (which is dad-related, not "take someone's life with their ten year old hands and watch their blood spurt everywhere"-related)
"Ha ha, I ended a life once!" "Yay!" "Yippee!"
Chapter 2 - A suspect in the grandpa murder turns out to be an old man with dementia. That's it. Yes, you're introduced to some main characters (like Dan, a member of the NYPD who looks a bit like Kurt Cobain and Yoko, a Japanese exchange student who can't wait for Hot Topic to be invented) and find out how Peepaw Jingūji was killed (he was stabbed by someone left-handed. This never comes up again even when you're trying to find the real murderer) but a mystery's resolution being "oh no, this old man is just really old!" really lands like a dull, wet fart after one hour of gameplay.
Chapter 3 - Saburō Jingūji pokes around a small town to solve a case because it's somehow tied to his recently killed grandpa and ends up catching a serial killer who is doing copycat murders by draining people of their blood and using them for a kooky blood ritual to be reborn anew. This is the best case in the game due to its self-contained mystery and gruesome nature of the killings, even if the murderer is a complete idiot who will say "YEAH I LOVE MY ELECTRICIAN'S KNIFE, WHICH CAN CUT THROUGH A HUMAN BODY" to random strangers.
This chapter also contains my favorite moments in the whole game. When Saburō asks enough questions (which means he talked to about three people) that he has to retire for the night in a motel room, the serial killer that he's tailing leaves a threatening letter that says something akin to "if you keep sticking your nose around here, you're next" under his door, showing that he knows where he's at and that Saburō is playing with fire.
"That's why we keep it readily available at this public library for anybody to use"
Saburō keeps doing his detective thing, like researching what typewriter could've been used to make the threatening letter, but then gets tired once more and falls asleep in the same motel room. This causes the serial killer to break into his motel room while he's sleeping and...write a second message in red paint on wall to show he means it...?
At the risk of sounding like Cinemasins, why didn't the serial killer just kill him after breaking into his motel room while he slept. When this serial killer confesses to his murders, he talks about how easy it is to just scoop people up and start draining them of their blood for his blood rituals until they die of exsanguination. Why did he decide, that one time, to leave threatening letters first before doing his serial killer thing.
(Check out the dude on the left. He's not reacting to the dialogue, he just naturally stands like that)
Chapter 4 - Saburō Jingūji hangs out with Dan some more, reminisces about the dead grandpa who is still dead, and find out that Dan's mom is actually Daedalus. Who is Daedalus? Why, a cool femme fatale assassin that would take out hits for the yakuza and had a cool tattoo on her neck and was really badass until she had a baby and then was hypnotized into forgetting her cool assassin past by the yakuza to be a good mother.
Another assassin for the yakuza, who once went to jail, then confronts you on top of a building and he says super deep stuff like "Life is a series of events from birth until death" and then kills Dan to try to awaken Daedalus. Dumb knife fight. Everyone gets away.
"I can do anything!"
I'd like to take the moment to say that the treatment of women in this game is really bad. The twist that Daedalus is a female assassin who later quits her job and starts a new life when she gets pregnant and has a kid could've been a compelling twist in light of the copycat serial killer but this game stumbles at the finish line by introducing hypnotism and locking away memories. Her big choice wasn't made by her. Her employer instead hired someone to use hypnosis to lock her evil memories away once she had her baby because she...wouldn't be a good mom if she was also an assassin? It goes from "this mom used to be an assassin" (cool!) to "this mom used to be an assassin but don't worry we used hypnosis on her against her will so she'd be a nice, gentle mom that dedicates her life to being a mom" (what the fuck is wrong with you)
Saburō can also compliment women on their cup sizes as a joke interrogation response including complete strangers trying to work their front desk job. This is pretty much the only other character trait Saburō has beyond being a sleepy lad and really loving his dead grandfather.
Chapter 5 - Saburō Jingūji has to use the power of goth girlfriend to find Dan's de-hypnotized assassin mom and they narrowly thwart the other assassin guy before he kills the Mayor of New York. At one point Saburō Jingūji finds some cans of paint underneath a Catholic church and calls them drugs.
Turns out the other assassin guy isn't actually the murderer of Saburō Jingūji's grandfather, but rather, his friend Leo, who apparently learned how to stab so good at summer camp.
As you confront Leo in the alleyway of your grandfather's death, if you hit all the right conversation flags to get the best ending in the game, Leo says that the reason he killed your grandfather is because he wanted to get back at his emotionally distant shitty mayor dad but he couldn't do that if some private investigator solved the case first.
(this same man saw someone fall 20 feet off a cliff and land on the rocks below after stabbing them in the stomach, but I guess his dad not clapping hard enough for winning a spelling bee was harder on his mind)
This causes Saburō to forgive him and hug it out, breaking the cycle of violence I guess. Then Saburō leaves for Japan and takes up smoking. Why? Because Hard-boiled Detective Saburō Jingūji is always smoking and this ending shows that he's finally become the famous Saburō Jingūji we all know and love.
Credits roll. Dramatic jazz solo. Loud sustained farting noise.
There are also multiple endings. If you *don't* hit the right conversation flags, your grandfather's killer basically tells you to go fuck yourself with your random accusations of murder and walks away. Then ending then plays out the same as it did in the good ending, save for a few different lines right when your grandfather's killer walks away and faces no justice for his crimes.
Turns out Saburō isn't all that broken up about his grandfather's death after all. You know, despite the six hours of gameplay telling you otherwise.
You can also coax a love confession out of Abbie if you compliment her in Chapter 1 before you start talking about the time someone died at summer camp when you were ten but honestly, why would you. Abbie is barely a character. 90% of her scenes are at summer camp.
I close out this review by lighting another cigarette and standing underneath an awning as rain pours from the sky, as if an unseen force is trying to scrub the filth that coats both the city and the wayward souls that live within. I then tip my hat and gently whisper "Don't play this game" into the uncaring cruel mistress that is the wind.
On the street before me, a ten year old stabs a camp counselor in the stomach and then gets ice cream with his friends. I smile.
It is my humble opinion that non-japanese GBA boxes were a crap design. The massive branding on the left distracts from the art and it is harder to arrange text in them. Japanese box-art wasn't always great, but in general the box design allowed for way more pleasing compositions. So here's a bunch that I like:
Probably not a coincidence these are mostly fantasy and rpg games, since they have to sell you on the mood and style as much as possible with a single image.
Also, you know what's fun? Collecting these covers I found one of the rare Japan-made art for a western game:
An ad for Jake Hunter: Detective Chronicles, the first English localization of the long-running adventure series known as Tantei Jinguuji Saburou in Japan. The game contains several remakes of Famicom titles that were originally released for mobile phones.
Detective Chronicles was heavily rewritten to take place in the US instead of Japan and only included 3 cases, whereas the original contained 6 along with bonus episodes. But all of these were later translated in a re-release called Memories of the Past. Read more about this release of Jake Hunter here.
This is a mystery text adventure game I've been playing in-between. I actually really like the Tantei Jinguji Saburo / Jake Hunter games ever since playing Ghost of the Dusk for 3DS. This game is a revisit of the original cases for the Famicom, connected to an all-new case, so it's a treat to be able to experience Jake's beginnings and be fully acquainted with the original cast.
This is probably THE most obscure media series I adore, lmao. In part because of how little was localized despite the series being hugely influential in Japan. It's very simple and your standard hard-boiled detective flair, but I like it regardless!
And it's illustrated by Katsuya Terada, known for his early Legend of Zelda guidebook illustrations and The Monkey King. The art in this series is just as stellar.
I’m watching hunter street for like- the sixth time, and I just realised we never figured out the website or company or whatever it was that found Max’s biological parents, he didn’t sign up to it AND it just suddenly disappeared? OH! And Max also mentioned that his bio parents were acting weird but he suddenly just started to permanently live with them? So many questions.
