Alternate Jake Hunter: Daedalus The Awakening of Golden Jazz

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

The Jake Hunter series is a long-running franchise that started out in Japan on the Famicom Disk System. A series of Visual Novel games with Graphic Adventure elements, the series follows the investigations of detective Jake Hunter, otherwise known as Saburo Jinguji. The franchise made its first appearance in the West in 2008’s Jake Hunter: Detective Chronicles, with subsequent series installments only sporadically being released outside of Japan. In 2019, PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch received one such game, the ponderously-titled Alternate Jake Hunter: Daedalus The Awakening of Golden Jazz.

Despite the overly-elaborate title, players who are unfamiliar with the series may find this to be a decent entry point, as it acts as a prequel and origin story, with players exploring both the childhood of Saburo, as well as more modern events that inspired his decision to become a detective.

In terms of presentation, Alternate Jake Hunter is quite good, combining very nice lightly-filtered panoramic photographs for backgrounds and reasonably-detailed anime-style artwork for its characters. The character animation isn’t great, and these characters do stick out amidst the backgrounds, but this approach does a good job giving the world a good amount of detail and realism that would be difficult to capture with anime artwork alone. These visuals are backed by a really nice mood-setting acoustic soundtrack, as well as some nice-sounding Japanese language voice acting.

The story here is good at bringing players in, building some strong characters and an intriguing scenario – Subaro’s beloved detective grandfather has been murdered, and despite said grandfather being estranged from the rest of his family, Subaro was only notified after the rest of the family already carried out funeral arrangements. Having said that, this story isn’t without issues. The localization is spotty in places, and when tracking down the culprit, it can become apparent what happened and whodunnit well before you’re able to actually do anything about it.

However, this game’s worst problem is undoubtedly its absolutely atrocious pacing. There were long stretches of the game where it felt like I was being given the runaround by the game to pad out its playtime, being told to go from location to location for seemingly no good reason, with no progress being made in the plot.

However, even worse than this are times when you’re not given any indication at all where to go, and you must move from place to place on the game’s map hoping you’ll stumble upon a character who happens to be in a given area and who can allow your game to progress. There were stretches of time when if felt like I was on this sort of wild goose hunt for hours. Oh, and you can bet that your character will be prevented from moving forward until you check everything in the environment and talk to each character multiple times, even if no one has anything useful to say.

Don’t get me wrong, Alternate Jake Hunter has some strong positive qualities too, although many of these come with their own issues. The game supports both traditional gamepad controls and touchscreen controls… but the gamepad controls occasionally don’t respond properly, which can be frustrating. And when you’re actually allowed to do detective work, it can make for some fascinating storytelling, and players must put their observation skills to the test at times when deciding what really took place in a multiple-choice sort of fashion… but unfortunately, these multiple-choice options are just as frequently nonsensical.

Quick, the deranged killer has you cornered and your only choices are “are you really going to kill me?”, “it’s not your fault”, and “it’s actually your victim’s fault”. What’s the right answer? Perhaps you think it’s “do you really want to kill me”, appealing to the murderer’s claims that their last murder was an accident? Nope, now you’re dead. Perhaps you should say “It’s not your fault” to calm them down? Nope, that just has Subaro blaming the murder on their romantic interest, enraging the murderer even further. The correct answer is “it’s the victim’s fault!”, which actually doesn’t convince the killer not to murder you, but for some reason you get rescued by a friend when choosing this answer. This is not a good way to make me feel like my observational and reasoning skills are being put to the test…

I started out Alternate Jake Hunter with a high opinion of the game, delighted by its strong presentation and great premise. Unfortunately, as the game dragged on, it became a slog of frustrating issues that began to overtake the experience as a whole. The incredibly poor pacing, having to constantly search for what I needed to do next to progress, the at-times nonsensical multiple-choice questions… the result of these issues is a game that had so much potential, but ultimately ruins that potential. And while the good qualities are still here and make the game at least somewhat worthwhile, I can only recommend this game if you have a huge amount of patience for the completely unnecessary tedious nonsense that the game will constantly throw at you.

tl;dr – Alternate Jake Hunter is a Visual Novel that acts as a prequel for the long-running detective series. The presentation and story premise here are excellent, but those strong qualities are dragged down by some atrociously bad pacing, completely unnecessary tedious busywork, and nonsensical multiple-choice questions where the answer doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the information you’ve uncovered. If you’re looking for a good detective-style Visual Novel game on Nintendo Switch, you have plenty of better options than this one.

Grade: C-

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