MAKOTO WAKAIDO’s Case Files TRILOGY DELUXE

I played this game after playing Urban Myth Dissolution Center. Up-front, this game is not as good as that one, in my opinion. Playing this game you can see how systems were improved, revised, and added to for UMDC. The later game also has better characters in how they're established and presented, and UMDC also has an artstyle that clearly has built upon this game's. All that said, just because another game is better doesn't mean this game is bad. It's a nice collection of mysteries well-presented. Worth a play.

I wouldn't recommend this if you are looking for true gameplay, this is very much a visual novel and a tedious one at that. A ton of clicking through your notes and scrolling through pages. You don't solve any puzzles and you don't make any deductions yourself. The options are also a bit redundant too... The stories are decent and share a running thread, although the twist at the very end of the 4th one (Yes, this trilogy has 4 stories for some reason) was annoying. Love the pixel art though.

I gave this title about 45 minutes before I decided this one wasn't for me. "Tedious" is the word that I keep coming back to, and I promise I'm trying to be nice about it. The loop requires that you talk to characters or examine objects in a particular order and then circle back multiple times between it all to glean more information. That is ok, however, the clunky evidence UI has you exit completely out of conversations and then re-enter them multiple times to show new evidence to the folks you're interviewing. This has to be done with each piece, which can be frustratingly slow when you've got 4-5 items. When you learn about new places to go, you can't just go there, even though you have the evidence, until you've had a conversation with yourself in the "Deduce" function. Which really just repeats everything that you've already learned, again, in a way that is tedious since it works similarly to the NPC convos. And finally, the game holds your hand over what evidence to present to whom by providing you with an illustrated checklist. If you try to show evidence to someone not on that checklist, it simply doesn't let you. NPC's don't get to say "No idea" or "why did you show …

A collection of four short and sweet point-and-click detective games. The writing's pretty good and there's some great twists, and the pixel art is very evocative. I should however mention that there isn't much deducing or puzzling things out that you actually need to do, and nothing punishes you for guessing wrong, making this pretty much a visual novel. Overall, highly recommended. I picked this up because I had played the devs' next game, Urban Myth Dissolution Center, which is more ambitious in scope and plot and also very good. I do have one minor gameplay gripe - one of the game mechanics is picking which of your leads you want to discuss with an NPC, and to do that, you have to stop talking to them, pick the lead from your notebook, then talk to them again. Very often, at least when playing with just the mouse, clicking on the NPC for that last step resulted in Wakaido moving instead of starting a conversation, and I had to click one more time to actually talk. You can use space to re-interact with the NPC without hassle, but I figured that out pretty late.

Decent enough little game. Although it's in an investigative game, in the same vein as like "Ace Attorney Investigations," which is a highly interactive game, Makoto Wakaido really trends more towards pure visual novel. It's not a pure visual novel since it's interactive and you control the character, but there aren't any penalties for bad deductions or guesses. As such, like other reviewers have mentioned, you can just click through all the "evidence" or leads until you get the right deduction. Which I did at times. Yeah that's not as fun as Ace Attorney, where there's an actual challenge. Where you can actually game over if you choose wrongly too many times. But...Makoto Wakaido is, like I've alluded to, more about the story -- or stories -- than the gameplay. And I think the stories are interesting enough. As you progress through the four cases, they get more complex and convoluted, but there is a thin thread that links them all together. And each has an unexpected twist. I wouldn't say all of them are super strong stories, but again, they're interesting enough to keep me moving forward. I sometimes wish Steam had a numerical rating system. But it doesn't. So I'll give this …

Short & fun, no guide needed, recommended for anyone who would like a relaxing detective game.