Thanks to Arc System Works for the review code
Title: Alternate Jake Hunter: DAEDALUS The Awakening of Golden Jazz
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $39.99
Release Date: 05/23/2019
Story
In this adventure game, you take control of a young Jake Hunter, (going by his Japanese name of “Saburo Jinguji” here) who after realizing his Grandpa got murdered, must set out with his old childhood friends to solve the mystery behind his death, along with a variety of other strange crimes, both when remembering their past events, and during the present.
Gotta be honest; this game, story focused as it is, really did not do it for me. I dropped it very, very fast in 2019 due to the subject matter of the main story hitting a bit too close to home for me having just lost someone, (and then later losing my own grandpa later in the year, though thankfully not to the same circumstances as Sabruo) but even now five years removed from that rough year of my life and having cleared several chapters… The game is honestly kinda lackluster? Right away, I figured out who the main bad guy is; not just of the first big chapter (though that initially threw me off, I quickly figured out the culprit there, too) but the entire video game. Of course, per the nature of these games, it’s learning how the criminals did it that makes the mystery worth seeing to the end, but even still, the story writing is pretty bland.
Chapter by chapter you learn new motivations and about the characters more, but none of them are that appealing. Even Saburo, the main character, didn’t do much to appeal to me outside of just being “the good smart guy”, which for a game that’s meant to be a soft reset of the series with his own name in the title, is rather poor! Here in Daedalus, he’s just a typical detective with barely anything I’d find different from the other video game detectives of the world.
There’s also a stance system where you can change your behavior during a conversation, and this helps to give a bit more variety during the investigation scenes, but that doesn’t always work so well when the game’s script is filled with the occasional typo and constant spacing errors. Many, many times I’ll be reading through the dialogue, only for a word like It’s to be formatted out with a space, like It ‘s. While not nearly as bad as Stay Cool’s translation, the localization of Daedalus has a lot more stilted dialogue than I was hoping to deal with.
Presentation
Being an adventure game, the presentation is what the bulk of your time is going to be spent with, and Daedalus here decides to go for an interesting gimmick; rather than the backgrounds being static images, perhaps drawn out or well-crafted by an artist, you have a bunch of characters plopped into a 360 degree panorama view of a real world location. Yes, this means you’re pretty much playing this game on top of blurry photographs.
The character art is fine enough and animates well, but when placed on top of some of these realistic backgrounds, they look incredibly strange, and while I get they were trying to go more for realism here, the art of the characters just does not fit. It would be no different than if I took a Panorama photo of my bedroom, blurred it a bit, and threw one of the characters like Ben on top of it and called it a day, they’re that peculiar to look at.
The music and voices are fine, with your typical range of emotions prompting the BGM to change when the story calls for it, but none of the songs are what I’d consider memorable in the slightest, and I’m unfamiliar with the other Jake Hunter games to tell if any of these tracks are remixes from older entries. The Japanese voice acting is performed well enough, but they don’t seem to go over every line of dialogue, and with how stilted the English translation is to begin with, it really doesn’t add all that much to the experience. I feel this sort of experience needed either full voice acting, or a more polished up Localization effort on the script.
Gameplay
The main objective of each chapter is to go around, investigate for clues, and solve the mystery in hopes of you figuring out the bigger mystery behind the entire game. You can navigate the game with either the analog sticks and buttons, or via the touch screen, but both control methods worked fine enough for me. You’ll mostly be investigating in a panorama view, and while 360 degrees may seem like an overwhelming perspective to search through, luckily hitting the Y button on the controller will shift into an investigative setting that highlights all clickable items, so you don’t have to just wildly tap on everything until the game lets you interact with an object.
You also can talk to characters you meet along the way, and often they’ll have multiple prompts for you to ask them in order to get their perspective on the current situation. Sometimes finding an item will unlock a new prompt, which progresses the story, and you rinse and repeat that as the game tells you where to go next. This means that as handy as the game is for letting you find items and interactable objects quickly, the game is still a slog of looking at having to talk to characters over and over again to exhaust all of their dialgoue, search every nook and cranny in an area, finding something, and then going all around the map of the chapter area in order to trigger the next event and repeat that again.
It also doesn’t help that transitioning between screens is painfully slow and repetitive, and having to go back and forth over and over and over again in some scenarios makes navigation a huge drag. Even if you figure what the ultimate outcome is and where you should ultimately go (like say, go to a shed with a rope you saw many screens ago because someone is going to take that rope and destroy it as evidence), the game won’t progress or let you do anything special and makes you follow a longwinded path.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to see extra dialogue options, as the stance system I mentioned earlier is a way to get yourself out of a tricky situation or see another outcome, but even this neat little way of changing the tone of a conversation doesn’t do much to be satisfactory, as amusing it is to be an abrupt asshole every now and again.
There’s more than one ending here, but the game autosaves very frequently, so you won’t be able to just make multiple save files and go back to the pivotal moments and change the outcome, meaning you’ll have to use the chapter select instead. And honestly, I didn’t get engaged enough to even make it that deep in the story. Two chapters was as much as I could handle before getting bored, and a lot of that was from seeing cracks in the translated dialogue which broke the immersion, along with the screen transitions driving me nuts
Conclusion
Honestly, I really wanted to give Daedalus a bigger chance, especially considering it still marks the most recent Jake Hunter game to date, even after the silly length of time it took for me to get back around to it. But alas, a lackluster story, very obvious culprits, stilted translation, and an absurdly high price point really make this one of the lower end adventure games I’ve come to play for SFG. At the very least, it does some cool presentational things with the panorama perspective, and a few of the alternate dialogue options are legitimately funny! But when I find smaller scale stuff like Parascientific Escape to be more of a memorable adventure game, Daedalus just doesn’t cut it, which is a big shame.
I give Alternate Jake Hunter: DAEDALUS The Awakening of Golden Jazz a 4 out of 10.