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Touch Detective

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 19 / 23
Date: October 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is a fun game to play. I am on the 2nd mystery to solve. I do love these types of games. This one is sort of like Trace Memory, alot of reading to do in it. I am an adult woman. My 11yr. old son says it doesnt think he would want to play it though.

Wonderful and Delightful

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 32 / 33
Date: November 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Quite simply, it's great, though a bit on the challenging side. Gorgeous art style and some great music come together for an atmospheric title, and one that, despite it's 'rated 'E' for everyone' approach, will appeal to adults as well as kids. It's not without some light frustration, but the good far outweighs the bad.

Ignore the mediocre reviews and pick this one up. Replay value is in the four different cases, as well as some unlockable minigames and a 'touch' list. If you like adventure titles like Phoenix Wright and Trace Memory (or Maniac Mansion, for that matter) then you'll really dig this game.

A good solid four stars.

skip

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 6
Date: November 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game has a really high challenge, but it's not a very interesting difficulty, unfortunately. I feel that too much thought was put into the storyline, which isn't even that good. At least, I could never get into it. Maybe someone with a better appreciation for stories would be more interested in the game. Me, I think I'll pass. It's really not a game I was looking forward to, anyway.

I thought as a non-gaming female I might like this game....

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 13 / 18
Date: November 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

To me, this game was seriously disappointing. So disappointing, I didn't finish the second case before setting it down forever.

I was highly entertained - at first. It's cute, funny, and going around clicking on things for a new DS user was highly entertaining. However, it quickly got older.

1. You can't skip through the horrendously long dialog - ever. Even after you've heard it about a million times because you're clicking on people hopelessly in frustration unable to figure out what to do.

2. I found myself looking for an internet walk through, yes, on this simplistic game. I couldn't figure out what to click and wandering around hopelessly for thirty minutes reading over dialog you've read a thousand times just gets too frustrating even for my typical patience level.

3. Possible Spolier - There seemed to be a glich in the second story in which I talked to the wrong person at the wrong time and then I could never get a ticket into the planetarium. After that, I just couldn't take 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.

Touchy

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: November 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The DS seems to be the perfect platform for point-and-click adventures, and it's not a surprise to find another quirky mystery game making its way into the library. As far as Touch Detective goes, however, do not expect it to be as compelling as the Phoenix Wright series. Instead, what you would get is a somewhat nonsensical plot involving missing dreams, relocating aliens and an assault case involving fleas.

Gameplay in Touch Detective is as simple as it gets. You use the stylus to perform every action, which you will probably guess anyway from the game's title. These actions will include talking to people (and animals), picking up items, showing items, moving from one place to another, and the likes. When you pick up an item, you can also use the stylus to further examine it. All these are done in the name of finding clues, or rather, cues, to unlock the next event. The game is also pretty linear when it comes to unlock events, as with most adventure games. Unfortunately, the clues 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.

Really WEIRD point-and-click adventure for DS.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: December 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

(MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW.)

Touch Detective is a point-and-click adventure game, much like Trace Memory, or Phoenix Wright without the courtroom scenes. You go around talking to people and looking at objects to find clues. Sometimes you'll interact with items to solve problems, all using the stylus. The interface couldn't be easier. You tap a spot on the screen to have Mackenzie go there, or examine an object. There's an inventory bar for using things you find, and a close-up screen where you can inspect them in more detail, or combine them with other items. But whereas everything in Trace and Phoenix made sense to me, Touch Detective is just plain bizarre.

The strangeness starts with the characters. Mackenzie is the protagonist, taking over some sort of detective service (never really explained) left to her by her parents. She lives with a butler/inventor, and a little mushroom guy (never explained either) who follows her around and occasionally helps her. Her friend Penelope is 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.

A lot of style and not much substance...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I have to say, I really enjoyed this game. The interface is intuitive, the visuals are unique, and the overall atmosphere is well-developed. Yes, the world is pretty surreal, but that's part of its charm. The cases are original and definitely bizarre (for example, your first mission is to discover who is stealing your friend's dreams). I couldn't put the game down and finished it in a day.

So why the 3 star rating? Well, it is very linear. Very, VERY linear, so much so that you are forced to do everything in the correct order and there is no multitasking or keeping track of clues, really. The puzzles range from laughably simple to mind-bogglingly obscure. Why do you have to paste the photograph in the photo album before you can show it to anyone? Your guess is as good as mine.

After you beat the game, there is no real replay value. The missions are the same and the "bonus mission" isn't much to speak of. You wander around town and randomly get little missions such as "play hide and seek" and "find my missing necklace." This really amounts to you just clicking everything on the screen until you are told that you have found the object.

I had a great time playing this, but now it's just sort of sitting on my shelf. I definitely recommend it, but be aware that you are paying for a fun Alice-in-Wonderland type of diversion, not a lasting adventure that will truly challenge your wits.

Worth a look, maybe

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: January 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Remember point and clicker games? They were popular on the PC for ages with games like the Myst series and the 7th Guest, but have all but disappeared over the past few years. Touch Detective for the DS is about as close to a point and clicker as one could get, as it provides an entertaining mystery adventure, but is all way too linear for it's own good. Playing as young girl Mackenzie, a would-be detective, you hunt for items throughout the various areas (along with using the touch screen and stylus to tap) to find clues and solve mysteries. Throughout the game, you'll come across a whole cavalcade of colorful characters, each with some funny and memorable lines of dialogue. The game's art style also has a lot going for it to boot, and the look of the game just has a winning amount of charm. However, what kills Touch Detective is that the game feels incredibly linear. The gameplay has no real depth to it, and there's not much chance for replayability to be found here either once it's completed. There's also some puzzles throughout that are just plain boring to boot, which hurt the game's overall score. Despite all that, Touch Detective remains a charming, and different, game that DS owners should take a look at, but it's only a rental at the very best.

Best Game so far for DS

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: January 23, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I'm an "older" person who enjoys handheld video games. However I consider myself a novice. After receiving the DS, I've tried several games. I absolutely loved this one. It was not too hard, and it was not too easy. It doesn't have the jumping around as the Mario games, and there is no time limit involved which is something I prefer. You can pick it up from where you left off with little frustration.

It is very cute. I like the Tamagotchi game, and this has a certain similar cuteness. At times the antics of the characters made me laugh out loud.

I used the stylus throughout the game, and was amazed at the smoothness of the movement.

Solving the four stories is relatively quick, and I am not too sure of the replay value. However, it was an enjoyable weeks worth of play, and for about four dollars a day I consider the money well spent.

This would probably be good for a child of 9 or above. The reading is fairly minimal and it is mostly cartoonish comments that the characters make.

If you like Japanese Manga, you will probably enjoy this game. The humor is much the same as the "chibi" characters in Manga.

very interesting but too short

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

i really enjoyed this game. once i started playing i didn't want to put it down. there are only 4 real cases and they are pretty simple to figure out. i wish there were more cases in addition the extras. i finished the game pretty quick still wanting more. it's a good game but it would have been better if there had just been more.

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