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- Arc System Works
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- Arc System Works
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- Arc System Works
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- Arc System Works
Alternate Jake Hunter: Daedalus - The Awakening of Golden Jazz
Released On: May 23, 2019
Metascore
Available after 4 critic reviews
3.8
Where to Buy
Where to Buy
There aren't many visual novels that are presented as well as Alternate Jake Hunter Daedalus: The Awakening of Golden Jazz. It's stylish, slick production that borrows from the classical masters of the crime fiction genre, while adding some genuinely creative approaches to the visual novel that help to make it both feel fresh and hard to put down.
While the mystery in Alternate Jake Hunter: DAEDALUS The Awakening of Golden Jazz is entertaining, the rhythm felt off with multiple lulls and heavy dialogue that hampered the experience of the story overall.
User Score
Generally Unfavorable
Based on 6 User Ratings
3.8
17% Positive
1 Rating
1 Rating
17% Mixed
1 Rating
1 Rating
67% Negative
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
User Score
Generally Unfavorable
Based on 6 User Ratings
3.8
17% Positive
1 Rating
1 Rating
17% Mixed
1 Rating
1 Rating
67% Negative
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
Good story, tedious pace. Also as a fan of visual novels I was expecting more drawn art to help the player imagine better the important scenes such as in the ace attorney series but they just tell you most of the story through text, as if you were reading a book
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Nintendo Switch
An interesting concept, with some decent UI elements. I imagine the Switch & PC versions play the best with the 360 degree investigation bits. For the Switch version, it's completely playable without the need for controllers. While it's nice to be able to use the touchscreen controls, this game has very poor accessibility. The audio (for the built in speakers, headphones not tested) as well as many other settings, needed immediate adjustments. Frankly, I can't get the widely used in visual novels "auto-scroll" feature to cooperate whatsoever. This is a point & click visual novel with some interesting art in my opinion. I'm quite unfamiliar with the Jake Hunter games, but I was under the impression that this was a prequel to the long-running series. I'm still very early in the game, which I try not to write reviews of things without getting at least halfway through it. But without criticizing the plot structure, I did want to put the localization under some scrutiny. I know it can't be a simple process, but it seems very subpar. I don't know if the game is supposed to be fully voice acted, but what's spoken as opposed to what's written (in English) seems to be very different. It's also very strange that there are several parts that are supposedly being spoken in English, because of New York being the setting. I've gotta say, it's very weird & unnatural to be introduced to an African American elderly man named Richard voiced in Japanese, & the line I'm supposed to believe he utters after they meet is "Oh, please, you'll make me blush." I do not need to know anything about this character to know that an older, dark-skinned American guy would never say this, especially to a foreign young man. Also when this Richard character first meets Saburo, the main character, he uses his "excellent deduction skills" to gather that Richard apparently has excellent posture yet he seems like a drunk. It also appears like Richard uses a walking stick to get around. These assumptions our protagonist made have no visual or contextual basis. I will continue playing this game & I will update my review if necessary, but the localization comes across as extremely inexperienced. It is very difficult to take the plot seriously with these inconsistencies. Perhaps if more of these games leave the shores of Japan, they'll consider putting more effort into making the lines more sensible. Or at least they'll make an auto-scroll that doesn't cut off the voice actors. I just hope there will be a satisfying payoff for getting to the end of this game.
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Nintendo Switch
I wouldn't recommend this even though I got it on a massive sale. At full price, it'd be just insulting. This is an investigation visual novel, but it's highly linear and without much user creativity or problem solving (unlike an Ace Attorney or Famicom Tantei Club).
There is an overarching story, but at any given moment, you're mostly working on smaller cases. I got a mild enjoyment from solving these cases - there's about as much mystery as an episode of CSI, but that can still be fun. The big problem with the cases large and small is that none of them are satisfactorily resolved. The game has multiple endings, but doesn't give you any sense of which one you're progressing towards, until you suddenly hit the end and didn't learn anything. Allegedly, the ending is determined by the choices you made throughout the game, but a lot of these choices are pretty similar (things like "you knew my grandpa?"/"I'm here for my grandpa") and it was hard to tell what was impactful. I was really surprised that the choices changed whether I as a player ever resolved the meta-story, and I'd have to replay the game in order to get a different ending. Nor did I really find out what happened to the one-off cases I solved, either, other than finding the criminal.
If you play visual novels for the art, run screaming from this one. The backgrounds are just photos that have been rasterized, and not even decently modified (say, to remove random people in the background of the photos). They aren't even thoughtful photos - the "small town" backgrounds are obviously still in New York, with lots of high rises visible. But even more than that, the character art is atrocious. People appear as mostly static paper cut outs on top of the photorealistic backgrounds (which is especially weird when the game hasn't edited out REAL humans standing right behind their paper counterparts). Although you get full body figures, there's minimal animation other than faces, and the faces are deep in the uncanny valley. The game doesn't properly commit to a realistic or an anime aesthetic and ends up with anime eyes above creepy teeth-mouths. No thanks. The lack of animation and the eerie faces also meant that none of the emotional moments really connected; I think this game would have genuinely been better as a solely text-based game.
The music, on the other hand, is pretty decent. Yeah, it can be repetitive, but I actually remember the soundtrack after I put the game down. I can't say that for many games I played as an adult.
Overall, even if you're a viz nov nut or love investigation games, I wouldn't bother with this. Watch a few episodes of your favorite crime show instead. The redeeming qualities don't make it worth playing a game that doesn't resolve the mystery and has such off-putting art.
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Nintendo Switch
I am giving this 1 score just because of the interesting 360 envronmental interface, the rest of it is total garbage and completely wasted its potential. The story is linear and boring, feels like doing series of fetch quests in RPG, but without the RPG part. The game system made Saburo as an annoying **** and I feel extremely difficult to immerse into the story. "I arrived in front of the supermarket." -> "I 'll head inside." -> "I arrived at the supermarket." Seriously WTF? What are you, 3 yr old? These kind of unnecessity dialogues are killing the tempo and atmosphere to the already uninteresting, keep finding and clicking the blue thingy game. Not even worth with 90% off.
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Nintendo Switch
Summary A new chapter begins in the Detective Jinguji Saburo series! One month ago today, someone murdered Saburo’s grandfather, Kyosuke, while he was living in New York. He soon discovers that his grandfather’s last word was ‘Daedalus.’ What does it mean? Why was my grandfather killed?
Rated T
for Teen
Platforms:
- Nintendo Switch
- PC
- PlayStation 4
Initial Release Date: May 23, 2019
Developer:
- Neilo
Publisher: Arc System Works
Genres:
