LogFAQs > #957015043

I've investigated one room so far. I feel like since AA5, these games have gone really detailed on single-room investigations. Maybe it just feels super-slow to me because I'm looking at a TV screen, and using a joystick without sensitivity to how hard you're touching it is really making pointing at stuff hard. (Is the Switch touch-screen? Would it work if I just played it handheld and pointed?)

Anyway, our intro is via some HERLOCK SHOLMES narration, in which he tells of a tale involving him and Wilson (now clearly a Watson type) and a "speckled band" which he takes to be a snake. Then cutting to the present, he (with great theatricality) falls upon a locked room murder and points out the CULPRIT...

... And the moment that we're revealed to be the defendant again, it seems pretty obvious: Kazuma is the victim. Though we don't see his body, and he appears to have no external wounds, so maybe he's still alive? I'm gonna miss the hell out of his absolutely ballin' theme song if he's really gone, though we get generous uses of it during flashback themes. But anyway, Kazuma waved so many death flags I was really hoping to get something subversive out of it.

Despite this game having a lot more graphical advances and a lot more text than 1-2, the death doesn't seem to hit as hard. Having a jaunty sixteen-year-old girl making funny remarks is... I mean, I think it's fine - it's usually fun in AA - but it's a little tiresome to see the series keep going back to that same well; the reluctance to have a significant female counterpart above the age of 21 seems pretty suspect at this point. But more directly here, it also undermines the feeling of grief that I feel should be prevalent at this moment.

After a fairly trivial demonstration of our innocence - the fact there was an unbroken seal on the door while we slept - we do get some funny commentary about pulling a bell-cord and a vent and fanboyism over Sholmes, and a Susato Takedown that's funny the first time but immediately gets tiresome because viewing things upside down actually isn't very enjoyable. I think the count is now at four or five, and it can only go up as we enter the next room.

What is more directly enjoyable (and long-winded - am I just getting sick of the series, or is there a lot more "blabbering" in this series at a slower text crawl, or is it just playing on TV?) is Sholmes himself. He appears right in front of our noses as we're examining something. And he has a bunch of conclusions - that Kazuma is Russian, and that we are a face-changing Russian revolutionary assassin! I'm actually reminded a lot of Luke Atmey, which is pretty unsurprising. Sholmes also loves doing this hilariously over-the-top pose with his arms and touts his appearances in short stories as proof of his competence. He winds up giving us a Russian newspaper showing the revolutionary he's accusing us of being and, unrelated, a missing ballerina.

Just like that, Sholmes starts denying that he's named us the culprit. Wonderful!

Hosonaga is back! Doing a terrible job as bodyguard to Kazuma, at that. And he's still got his cough, so I assume that wasn't poison-related. When I thought it was significant, I found it interesting... but it's one of the less endearing recurring character qualities now, pal. There are three notable clues at the moment: the fact that the room is in disarray (did the boat encounter waves, or was there a struggle?), something pink and shattered with a smear on the ground, and the diary entry suggesting the speckled band. So finally we're going to be able to leave this room.

Already curious about how the court format will work here.

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* Another annoying animation that's getting old real fast: manacled wrists. We get it.

* We're a revolutionary, perhaps we've learned to revolutionize our appearance!

* It really does feel like it takes a long time to go through text in this game. Maybe it's just me.

* We remember eating the chicken dinner quite fondly, but as Susato notes, poor Kazuma spent his last night hungry. "It's just too sad..." Well that's actually a big bummer, yeah.

* The fact that the same defendant is appearing in consecutive cases also feels very Layton-esque. Glad these tropes didn't appear in the main series.

* We have a memory gap, because of course.

* Sholmes doesn't speak Japanese, so we're presumably speaking English to Sholmes. Interesting - no indication that we've swapped languages, or that we're struggling to speak it.

* When we present Hosonaga with evidence, he seems to be irritated that we're rubbing our SUPERIOR UNIVERSITY EDUCATION in his face. Kind of like that chip on the shoulder.

* If you lose your badge, "Yu mei not come in!"

* Rice as glue is a great little detail.
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yet all azuarc of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness