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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.

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.

A great game totally misunderstood

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: March 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

people are giving bad reviews for this when its a very good game it alows you to play in a small town and most people are saying the enviorment is to small and it is hard if it was any bigger it would be to hard i love playing the first mystery over and over because its the most interesting sometimes im up all night playing it it very addictive and i cant wait till the next touch detective because it has been announced there will be more touch detective games

Fun Detective Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: April 14, 2007
Author: Amazon User

In "Touch Detective", a girl named Mackenzie goes around her neighborhood solving various mysteries by talking to people and gathering clues. This game is entertaining although at times it can get a bit frustrating because one doesn't know what to do next. Overall, it's a five because the mysteries are fun to solve and a bit of a challenge is a good thing for video games because it keeps them interesting.

The characters have their own personalities and stories, which makes the game fun. Very good game!

best series ever!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: February 01, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is my new favorite series! played these games in the wrong order and I would recommend playing this one before 2 1/2 because there were some extra features and improvements made into 2 1/2.
This game is adorable in the typical Atlus style, which, if you're unfamiliar with it, is cute anime-like characters with some strange personalities. They have a range of expressions, from exclamation points to hopping up and down in anger. The format is 3D and the title character, Mackenzie walks wherever you point to with the stylus. There are several areas on a map, office, apartments, and shopping center to begin with where you will find the rest of the cast. Mackenzie "touches" things (tap with the stylus) to examine them, add them to her list, or interact with them.
There are four episodes, each with a new case to solve complete with side tasks.
One of the best aspects of the game is Mackenzie's running sarcastic commentary thought-bubble on the screen above. I wouldn't recommend this for kids because some of the jokes are directed at adults and some of the puzzles require the persistance to do the constant back and forth work of re-interviewing people and checking the same spots. Upon completion, you are rewarded with the bonus episode that consists of small mini-tasks to solve such as hide-and-seek, finding ingredients, and solving problems. The game is complete when you have filled in your 50 item touch list, 4 cases, and 4 pages of mini-tasks. I hope they will release more in this series, look to Japan for that.
Replay? Yes becuae it's so charmingly cute.
Ages? Depends on maturity, most kids won't have the patience, won't appreciate the graphics, and won't understand many of the words and jokes -definitly not for kids in the single digit age group.
Is it for you? If you only like certain genres of games -no. There's no fighting, no racing, no learning for small kids...

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.

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.

Cute Comic Book Mystery

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 29, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This is overall a cute game. The characters are funny. It makes excellent use of the DS stylus and is easy to play. It is a completely linear mystery game, meaning you cannot do steps in any other order. There is only one outcome, so you can't screw up. This is nice in the way that its more like reading a comic book mystery, but sometimes not so fun if you can't figure out what the heck to do next. There were some steps in the game that seemed completely bizarre, and I really would not have figured out what they wanted me to do without reading an online game faq. Or you had to talk to people in a very specific order, which made it difficult to figure out what I hadn't done yet. Overall, I enjoyed it.

Great Game For Ladies

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: February 24, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I got this game because I love playing role playing mystery game. The graphic & charaters are cute and very easy to get the hang of it w/o reading the instruction. I love the stories and I actually finished solving (w/o seeking help online) all the cases after 1-2 weeks of playing.
The only that I will complain is that the game is too short. No fun to play/resolve the mysteries again.

fun but....

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: March 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is fun yes, but some of the puzzles really do not make much sense.

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