Gave this a shot cause was genuinely curious about this and the possible application of tech like this though I have no clue how I feel about it just jammed into a remake of a game like this. Like I do get the hesitation people were having but I do think the way this was described could be a neat way to get around some of the inherent issues with text parsers in adventure style games possibly.

The problem here is that it's just a fuckin mess of implementation and basically nothing like they described at all. If anything it suffers from all of the same problems and much worse than other adventure games that have made better advancements and accommodations to player thought and actions. Like I checked out the OG game to compare and this works nowhere near how they hoped it would at all in comparison, shit it doesn't work. While I can respect them trying this experiment to test it and feel it out this just needed way more time in the oven than I feel it really got. This doesn't really react to the player and if anything is WAYYYYYY more annoying to use here because you have to constantly guess what the game wants you to exactly say and do. You're not having conversations or "natural flowing dialogue" with Yasu. You have to go down a laundry list of guesses and hope that eventually Yasu actually fuckin answers you after asking a million different variations of the same goddamn question over and over again.

Playing a bit of the OG game honestly having even just menu options and knowing that you have ways to actually ask questions, who to, what exactly you're asking, where a suspect or witness or whoever is an instant extreme improvement and it baffles me how little this game gives you to go on. Even using the NPL menu with "similar phrases to use" doesn't actually help at fucking all. Here it felt like every question I asked was met with confusion and eventually I hit a wall not knowing who to ask what and with the inability to present evidence to literally any of the suspects even though Yasu kept telling me that I could and should. I couldn't even ask most of them about their alibis or anything about any of the information they gave me. I dug looking around environments and pointing shit out to Yasu and picking stuff up on my own but wow the game does anything it can to stonewall you and that is definitely not intentional. Apparently using the "higher quality parser" and the voice parsing helps but it eats through VRAM like nobodies business and basically is only usable if your shit is fuckin good so I couldn't try it at all and honestly I doubt it if even the basic shit is fumbled this badly.

They should just rerelease the OG game for modern platforms and try this again with something all its own to really experiment with it down the line once they've worked more of this out or something cause as is this is a complete fuckin mess. Knowing Square though this is probably a complete one and done tho.

What a shame. On the upside its made me way more interested in finally giving the original game a shot so may or may not do that sometime soon. We'll see. If anyone's got any NES reccs feel free to go for it cause that's a huge blind spot for me honestly. Reminds me I gotta get on some PC-98 stuff too. I really need to play more detective/mystery/adventure games in general too.