After trailblazing by developing the first five Dragon Quests and trademarking both the "Mystery Dungeon" and "Sound Novel" genres, Chunsoft had managed to amass a great deal of talent both in-house and within the entertainment industry. Plastered on the front cover of TRICKxLOGIC Season 1 are the names of five such authors, with Koichiro Ito (Kamaitachi no Yoru 2/3, 428: Shibuya Scramble, The Centennial Case) at its helm. But even so, here is a game that never left Japan or the grips of the Playstation Portable.

Having been inspired by viewer-participation type detective television serials of its time, both seasons of the game feature five self-contained stories that involve a 'deduction' and 'solution' segment. Deduction involves reading the provided body of text and then attempting to combine highlighted phrases and keywords to form 'curiosities' that lead to 'inspirations' that are used as argumentative proofs during the solution segment. Not only are these satisfyingly clever mystery scenarios, but the systems for deduction are surprisingly exhaustive. During one session I ended up happily spending 6 hours forming arguments for suspects that turned out to be completely innocent.

Scenarios are bound to a frame-story involving a genius prosecutor Yoshikawa Itsuki whose soul has fallen into the underworld for unknown reasons and has been tasked by Yama, the judge of human souls, with unraveling the truth from accounts of the human world. During his ordeal Yama summons a few friendly faces to aid this prosecutor. These characters are entwined with each of the scenarios and serve to provide comic relief and even suggest theories of their own to help narrow down the options. As you continue to problem solve optional hints become available, and when you submit proofs you can see how your math is lining up and are given rough estimations of correctness.

It should be also noted that the game features fully-animated cut-scenes, some voice acting, and pretty unique character designs. Additionally, nouns are occasionally highlighted throughout the text which can be combined to solve tiny riddles to unlock chapters of a bonus scenario, comedic audio dramas, and production art. Another surprising feature is that each chapter of each scenario can be listened to in audiobook form, in case you needed to approach the text from another angle.

It's truly refreshing to play a game that encourages the process of reasoning and entertaining possibilities. In games like Phoenix Wright I often find this is thrown to the wayside in favor of wacky characterizations and melodrama. Those games often gate you out of all the intel, forcing you to prod every single dialogue option or string you along through discovery sections. In TRICKxLOGIC, the truth is always simply waiting for you notice.


P. S - When you go to submit the final solution in the final chapter, the game will prompt you to download the ending from the PSN. This can be bypassed by loading your Season 1 save file on Season 2, and completing it there.

it's like trying to read a 4-koma on an iOS app while being bombarded with adverts every 3 minutes.

to see a single ending it will take around 3 hours and require you to do roulette sequences, mashing minigames, and sit through several animations... 24 times, each loop.

after a little over 13 hours i had obtained 4/33 endings and sore digits for my troubles.

i like nichijou because of its animation and comedic delivery. there is nothing of the former and the latter is often undercut by the excessive bloat of mini-games and idle moments. only half of the game is voice acted, and for a game with so much CG you'd expect a more kinetic experience. often times you are just simply left filling in the gaps while staring at static character portraits. for example when Misato fires her weapons the screen simply flashes white, or when Daiku starts practicing go-soccer you just have to infer something amusing is happening from prior knowledge of the show.

a bummer, because i think the concept and the way the game is designed -could- actually make for a successful 'everyday' game that you play in small bursts. the game takes place over 8 hours in a single day with skits occurring every 20 minutes on the map. within each skit there is a set-up and an outcome that can vary depending on 3 moods - moods that can also affect which additional characters show up for the event. this in itself creates for a pretty massive amount of variance where you could actually see yourself becoming immersed in the daily lives of these characters.

but yeah, those damn minigames...

maybe if they had let you schedule an 'hour' at a time (instead of the 20 minutes) then skits would play uninterrupted and games would be reduced to 8 times per loop, but even then i'd probably tire of it.

there's a FFT-style class change system but they all ultimately funnel into two super classes, so why the run-around?

it's initially satisfying climbing through the first several regions on linear scaling but then it shifts into a more turbulent mana-based meta. as a result, your tasked with skewing your team towards mana generation and sinking all of your money into consumables to make progression.

i think, if i had some better metrics to evaluate my team along the way (dps/healing charts, something) i would have maybe been made aware of this sooner and course corrected.

in the process of shifting towards this stronger team composition i can no longer farm prior dungeons as easily or as cheaply as before, meaning i would need to create a new legion of units just for farming.

it is at this point that i have lost interest. had i have accidentally stumbled upon the 'correct build' i may not have reached this empass of potential tens of hours of grinding to compensate, but there's nothing to look forward to anyway since having had a taste of the super classes.

that and the game is rather demanding on systems resources, whether that be due to poor pc optimization or it potentially being a bitcoin farmer or whatever.