NinDS - Touch Detective

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somewhere online so, don't let all this keep you from buying the game. Overall, it's worth the money!

NinDS - Touch Detective

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WANT TO SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH* fleas (yet again, who cares?!).

4. Undeveloped characters. There was room for a lot more characters and more intricate cases. Just the fact that this opportunity was there, and the developers didn't sieze it, makes me ill. I got a little tired of just solving things for Penelope.


Pros:

1. Cute characters. All of them are comical. All of them are funny. All of them are interesting. Even Penelope, who I became tired of. The main characters are: Mackenzie (the girl you control), Funghi (Mackenzie's pet and assistant, follows you around), Chloe (a girl who rivals you. Sometimes she helps, other times she just gets in the way. She gets into a lot of funny situations though *wink, wink*), and Penelope (the girl always in dire need of your services. Likes bananas. A lot).

2. Sufficient problem solving skills required. While I'm not sure younger kids have the patience to enjoy this, those of the age of 10 to adulthood will probably have fun playing this game (assuming they like mysteries and puzzles).

3. Good music. There are catchy tunes that suit the themes of this game, and the music is very memorable.

4. Good graphics. It's cartoonish, but not in a way that's too childish; more like a Japanese anime if you understand what I mean.


Conclusion: Overall this is an excellent game; it's major problem only being lack of replayability. It's well worth the price it's currently at ($24.99), but I wouldn't go too much higher than that. As long as it stays around it's current price, I recommend this game for those who like to exercise their craniums.

NinDS - Touch Detective

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WANT TO SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH* fleas (yet again, who cares?!).



4. Undeveloped characters. There was room for a lot more characters and more intricate cases. Just the fact that this opportunity was there, and the developers didn't sieze it, makes me ill. I got a little tired of just solving things for Penelope.





Pros:



1. Cute characters. All of them are comical. All of them are funny. All of them are interesting. Even Penelope, who I became tired of. The main characters are: Mackenzie (the girl you control), Funghi (Mackenzie's pet and assistant, follows you around), Chloe (a girl who rivals you. Sometimes she helps, other times she just gets in the way. She gets into a lot of funny situations though *wink, wink*), and Penelope (the girl always in dire need of your services. Likes bananas. A lot).



2. Sufficient problem solving skills required. While I'm not sure younger kids have the patience to enjoy this, those of the age of 10 to adulthood will probably have fun playing this game (assuming they like mysteries and puzzles).



3. Good music. There are catchy tunes that suit the themes of this game, and the music is very memorable.



4. Good graphics. It's cartoonish, but not in a way that's too childish; more like a Japanese anime if you understand what I mean.





Conclusion: Overall this is an excellent game; it's major problem only being lack of replayability. It's well worth the price it's currently at ($24.99), but I wouldn't go too much higher than that. As long as it stays around it's current price, I recommend this game for those who like to exercise their craniums.

NinDS - Touch Detective

...

WANT TO SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH* fleas (yet again, who cares?!).





4. Undeveloped characters. There was room for a lot more characters and more intricate cases. Just the fact that this opportunity was there, and the developers didn't sieze it, makes me ill. I got a little tired of just solving things for Penelope.








Pros:





1. Cute characters. All of them are comical. All of them are funny. All of them are interesting. Even Penelope, who I became tired of. The main characters are: Mackenzie (the girl you control), Funghi (Mackenzie's pet and assistant, follows you around), Chloe (a girl who rivals you. Sometimes she helps, other times she just gets in the way. She gets into a lot of funny situations though *wink, wink*), and Penelope (the girl always in dire need of your services. Likes bananas. A lot).





2. Sufficient problem solving skills required. While I'm not sure younger kids have the patience to enjoy this, those of the age of 10 to adulthood will probably have fun playing this game (assuming they like mysteries and puzzles).





3. Good music. There are catchy tunes that suit the themes of this game, and the music is very memorable.





4. Good graphics. It's cartoonish, but not in a way that's too childish; more like a Japanese anime if you understand what I mean.








Conclusion: Overall this is an excellent game; it's major problem only being lack of replayability. It's well worth the price it's currently at ($24.99), but I wouldn't go too much higher than that. As long as it stays around it's current price, I recommend this game for those who like to exercise their craniums.

NinDS - Touch Detective

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always fretting about some problem Mackenzie must help her solve. Then there's Chloe, who thinks she can be a better detective than Mackenzie and is always trying to crack the "case" first. Some of the supporting characters are talking animals: Penelope's landlord is a giant talking bird, and there's a walrus who works at the skating rink and a shark who hangs out at the local bakery. After awhile you just sort of go with it.

The cases are equally off-the-wall. In the game's first case, Penelope is convinced that someone is stealing her dreams while she sleeps. So Mackenzie has to sniff some mushrooms (hence the ESRB's E10+ "drug use" rating) to let her enter the dream world and investigate. In another, Penelope asks her to rescue a "snow fairy" trapped in a skating rink that's about to be demolished. Some characters or story developments don't appear until Mackenzie does something elsewhere, but the connections between events aren't always clear, so there's a lot of wandering around to see if anything's changed as a result of your actions. Puzzle solutions range from "Okay, that kinda makes sense" to "What the HELL??" Since there's not a lot of logic involved, more than once I resorted to the old brute-force method of "click everything on everything else until something happens". Maybe everything makes sense if you're a preteen girl, or Japanese, or both. Personally, I found myself cracking up at the sheer weirdness of it all.

I don't think all of this is due to poor translation from the original Japanese text, I really think Atlus did the best they could. But since you can convey a lot more information with katakana than English, the localization people didn't have a lot of text space to work with. I get the impression they really had to condense it to make it fit at all.

The main game is pretty short, with only 4 cases to solve. Even never fully understanding what was going on, I managed to stumble through it in a few hours. Thankfully there is some replay value in the form of some bonus tasks at the end. There's also a scavenger hunt in which Mackenzie finds different objects to touch, and "rates" them according to how they make her feel. (I TOLD you this game was weird!)

In the end Touch Detective isn't a particularly great game, but the odd stories and conversations are endearing, and it was entertaining, so I decided to give it 4 stars instead of 3. I'd recommend it to fans of point-and-click adventures, so long as they come knowing what to expect. But do keep a walkthrough handy, and don't hesitate to refer to it.

NinDS - Touch Detective

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to unlock further events are usually non-descript, so expect to experience plenty of standstill if you aren't good in exploring every nook and cranny in the various corners of the town.

Playing as a successor to a detective agency, your character, MacKenzie, will come across some weird cases. Solving a case will unlock the next one, up to a total of four episodes. Upon completion of the last episode, a bonus mission will also be unlocked. This adds some length to a rather short game - if you are very thorough in your investigation, you could probably complete the four episodes in about three to four hours. Apart from just playing through the story, the game also has some collection-based side quests to boot. For example, there's a Investigation Report that details several actions that you will encounter during the game. Many of these options are optional, but as long as you manage to complete all the missions, including the bonus one, you should be able to fill up all five pages of this report.

Another collection-based side quest is the Touch List. There are a total of 50 "touchable" items scattered in the five locations in this game. Touching them with your stylus will add them to the list. The tricky thing here is that some items can only be touched after some actions are performed, so it's not exactly a straight forward, touch-and-go affair. Players who like 100% completion on the games will therefore find more things to do on top of the usual mystery-solving.

The graphics style in Touch Detective looks very much like a Japanese manga. Quirky character designs are blended well with slightly dark shades of colors to provide an unusually gothic feel to the game. This may not good down well with some gamers, but otherwise, it's a bold move that make the game looks different from other adventure games. This itself is a plus point in my opinion. Sound wise, it's pretty much standard fare here. You may, however, find it worthwhile to access the in-game Jukebox to listen to the scores again if you enjoy anime-style audios.

Overall, Touch Detective isn't exactly a great title. It places too much reliance on wild guesses rather than educated deduction. The intentionally silly missions also give the game less credit than it should receive. The biggest problem, however, is that as a detective story, the cases aren't intriguing enough, if at all, for a player with less patience to carry on with it. That said, the more patient players may still find this a neat little title to bring on the road despite its flaws. As for the rest, they should probably give this a miss.

NinDS - Touch Detective

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it any more and gave up.

4. The places and people never change. For each case, from my understanding, it's all the exact same tiny few places. I'm not a big gamer, but I like a world bigger than three feet.

I let a friend borrow it and thus far she is enjoying it more than me.

Just to help this review - I'm a college-age female and this is my first gaming console, although I've played the PS2 quite a bit. Maybe it's really a hit or miss but I don't really recommend it for anyone but someone with a high patience level. A REALLY high patience level.

NinDS - Touch Detective

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and click presentation.