Dragon Detective: A Friend from the Shadows

A game that mixes Ace Attorney with anthropomorphic animals, and it's amazing! Okay, where to even start? Well, the main pull for me is the story which kept me hooked until the end. There were some twists and turns that I didn't see coming and it was delightful to see how every case came together. It also helps that the writing is great. The soundtrack is superb, every track goes well in each scene. The artwork is great too and I do appreciate that there are more than just mammals and dragons, but birds as well. All in all, I would definitely recommend this to any fans of Ace Attorney, dragons, or detective games.

I'll be frank, I got this game after trying out the demo, thinking it was a funny cringe game to stream, but instead, me and my audience got engaged with the game. The game was compelling enough to take it seriously after you get past the preamble of the game. While I've only played the first act, the first act left more questions that just piqued my curiousity to play more. I recommend this if you like Ace Attorney games, especially when the music essentially exudes that certain cadence to it, and honestly, even with its furry presentation and potentially cringe dialogue, it grew on me, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

In Dragon Detective, we play as Sevyn Noxley, a "miasma-dragon" who uses his natural dragon senses and prior job experience to unravel mysteries and solve crimes across four chapters. This game is primarily a visual novel with minor point and click elements. Playing on "Detective" difficulty, it can be considered more interactive than a standard visual novel in the sense that there are more opportunities for player choices to hinder or even fail the investigation and require a partial restart. The standard gameplay loop is to observe, interview, deduce, hypothesize, confirm, interrogate, and accuse. The characters and story are compelling and interconnected. I really enjoyed Noxley's underlying inner conflict [spoiler]created by the setting: he is driven by a strong sense of justice and service to others but lives in a dystopian country. Navigating that environment with his background is a challenge[/spoiler], and we as reader-player see him make some tough choices. At the very end, [spoiler]we get to make those choices to choose an ending[/spoiler]. Personally, I have read many a visual novel, but I have not played very many detective genre games. During Dragon Detective, there were times when I knew the majority of what happened and who did it, but the challenge would arrive when Noxley needed to make connections when interrogating the accused. Sometimes it wasn't clear to me how he intended to begin the interrogation, and sometimes I thought he was referring to one piece of evidence but it was actually another. The suspects also like to lash out and create distractions during interrogations, and there is always a good, neutral, and bad response. Finding the neutral response seems to be easy, but there is an element of risk with trying the other options. One time I thought a response would play out in a sarcastic way, but it played straight and my assumption got me in trouble! I think the more I play detective games, the better I will get at selecting these connections to progress. Sevyn Noxley is a strong main character, and I really like his dogged pursuit of the truth. His inner thoughts often help to explain his process and show how he feels about the situation. [spoiler]I think the connection between his past (revealed in a flashback scene) and his fear of failure in the present could have been explored and explained a bit more.[/spoiler] The supporting character [spoiler]Chuck L'Estrade[/spoiler] is a positive contrast/foil to Noxley's personality and I enjoyed his consistent accented dialogue reflective of his upbringing. Last but not least, I was pleased that the depth of [spoiler]Asher Silverton[/spoiler]'s character went well beyond that of [spoiler]a simple rivalry[/spoiler]. While the ending [spoiler](I chose)[/spoiler] tied up many loose ends, I want to see more in a sequel! Perhaps we could go to visit [spoiler]a certain someone in the Felfather Empire and explore that country[/spoiler]. Toss some romance in there too—some fan service for us visual novel fanatics. I'm ready to revisit this world anytime. I would also like to commend the developer for including native ultrawide resolution support. Everything looks great and I did not notice any graphical issues specific to the ultrawide aspect ratio. Thank you!

A solid detective visual novel. It feels strongly inspired by the Ace Attorney (Investigations), but it stands on its own with unique cases, world, and mechanics. There are some moments where the storytelling feels slightly off (minor details or stretched scenes, not significant plot holes) or the need to use all the senses a bit tedious , but all the cases have been enjoyable. Difficulty is low even on "Detective" setting, but that's perfectly fine, especially if you just want to enjoy a good story (for which there even is a "visual novel" setting)

So I'm marking this as positive, but like, it's not a high HIGH positive or anything. I've never played ace attorney, but I have looked into a lot of indie games inspired by it; your paradise killers, your Nina Aquillas etc This isn't bad or anything, but it certainly doesn't come close to being as engaging/enthralling as those tend to be. It's not super hard to pin down why either. I could point to flaws in the story telling like certain plot threads not really seeming to go anywhere (Not much is done with the dragon racism for instance, besides flavouring some of the characters) or how the mysteries in this aren't particularly enigmatic or interesting (As an example, at one stage you find a guard with a pin prick in their neck and I swear that it takes an hour of dipping through the investigation system to arrive at the blindingly obvious conclusion that they were hit with a stun dart). But really, my dissatisfaction with this comes down more to the fact that the game is simultaneously lacking in charisma whilst also being very slow I think if things had been snappy, I would have found things to be fine; the story is decent, the mysteries aren't amazing but are serviceable, the art is interesting enough, the character busts are genuinely very good, the characters are reasonably well characterised... But conversations, especially during investigations, drag on for ages and ages without really playing with the character dynamics in a particularly interesting way; there aren't much in the way of interesting jokes to pass the time and whilst there is a fair amount of decent world building, it's not really a setting that you can get engrossed in as it just doesn't pose a lot of questions. It just got somewhat tedious at points, and that made me sleepy In fairness though, it's good; I do like the world, the art is decent but like, with there being so many similar but far better games out there, this game is kind of at the bottom of the pack in my mind

Self-Cannibalism is not a viable solution right now.

Only finished first case (a large part of my playtime thus far was the demo), but I'll leave a review for early impressions. I like it - a lot of its own individual identity and worldbuilding that ends up readily applying to the first case. There's characters you get to care about, good character art, well-written music, and some humor thrown in every so often. The protagonist, Sevyn, is a little bit straight-laced, but it seems like this builds well with the off-color personalities he interacts with. There's still plenty of playtime for the game to absolutely wow me, so I may edit the review, but I enjoy what I've played as a general Ace Attorney fan, and the price isn't much.

可能是同个制作人之前的两个作品太好了，文笔和角色都很好，拉高了期待，看到这作仅仅是及格成绩，稍稍有些失望。可能作者更擅长角色塑造，悬疑和推理只能说是差强人意，故事结构比较松散，几乎没有实质性的诡计，一半线索是关于动机的，另一半是状况证据。具体的游戏过程中，有些逻辑过于跳跃，不知所云，比如第一章[spoiler] 莫名其妙猜到走私的不是货物而是人 [/spoiler]，第二章[spoiler] 全部和送报纸小孩相关的推理 [/spoiler]，第三章[spoiler] 白龙想到哪说到哪让角色智商直线下降的论战，以及意义不明的通过油漆猜犯案时间的环节 [/spoiler]，第四章[spoiler] 强行把鹰和撕毁的照片联系在一起（强行让主角降智），以及线索没有指向性直接通过排除法猜凶手 [/spoiler]，互动过程略显欠缺打磨。龙人角色较少，由于只有龙人才会用魔法，魔法设定没有被充分利用，与案件相关的魔法屈指可数，大部分时候仅仅是被当成搜集线索的工具。 从往期作品来看，作者特别擅长描绘混居物种间的歧视，特别是这种歧视有时还会被宗教赋予正当性，比如这一作里某个全程在线的角色第二章对主角说的话写的还是挺真实的。但是这部作品里，作者没有涉及自己擅长的歧视和宗教内容，而是去讨论政治、军事。故事发生在一个小国里，四个案件大部分都和军队、征兵有关，最开始还显得很沉重，但是角色的反应都很刻板，结局也很儿戏，导致整个政治相关元素观感都很差。虽然有两个结局，但其中一个的后日谈明显比另一个糟糕很多。 另外，可能是因为主题虚浮，可能是作者对动机不上心，也可能是作者往已经设定好的人设上强行把他们设定成凶手，部分角色的行动和动机看起来也很扯，或许是美式推理故事的通病吧。而且这个作品凶手很好猜，角色定位都很明确，基本上没有对探案做贡献又没有定位的角色就是凶手。 不知道是不是制作周期的问题，好多伏笔都没有回收。比如第一章[spoiler] 小孩兄弟结局美美隐身（可能是不想做外国的背景图） [/spoiler]，第二章[spoiler] 死者与乡绅为什么分手 [/spoiler]，第三章[spoiler] 邪教和月亮龙的设定意义不明（我还在猜苍白龙可能其实是月亮龙，结果根本没有这一说） [/spoiler]，第四章[spoiler] 白龙透露的帝国秘密完全与案件和结局无关，警察是首脑儿子的设定作用不明 [/spoiler]。这个作品本可以写得更好。 虽然缺点说了这么多，独游制作不容易，里头的一些角色还是挺讨喜的，一些死的很快的角色都写得很白月光，一些整体上很烦人的角色也都给了些讨喜的设定。还是给个好评吧。如果要购买的话，推荐等打折入，可能七折甚至五折才会比较值。