When you do eventually find someone to talk to (the map, thankfully, shows you exactly where they are), new problems arise. Some characters must be conversed with twice or more to progress, and others just once. However, if a character only needs to be spoken to once they will repeat their dialogue in its entirety when spoken to again, meaning that the only way to play the game is to persistently talk to people and skip through dialogue when they start to repeat. There is often no indication as to when a character has more to offer up, so you’ll spend a good majority of the game running back and forth, skipping through dialogue you’ve already read in the hope someone has something new to say. That, for the most part, is the gameplay.

Once you’ve gathered enough dialogue cues, it’s time to lay them out in what the game calls a clue chain. To do this, you must select the clues in the right order. The problem here is that there’s often no rhyme or reason to this order, with multiple clues desperate to fit, but counting as failure. While it is admittedly rewarding to lay out a correct chain, mostly that’s down to the fact that you can feel luck is smiling on you rather than due to any kind of deductive achievement.

When not wrestling with incoherent logic, there’s the option to play some minigames in order to earn points which can be exchanged for bonuses in the Mirapolis shop. What these bonuses are were beyond us as they made no appearance anywhere in the game after being won/purchased. All we can hope is that they were damn good, because the minigames are tiresome wrestling matches against the unresponsive motion controls. One particular minigame was flat-out unplayable due to the remote failing to register the correct direction when moved.

One final complaint has to be levelled towards the music. The primary theme of the game is a (highly) abridged version of one of the anime’s opening tunes. Four bars, repeated over and over in some kind of elevator Muzak arrangement. This plays for the majority of your investigation. So, in our nine hour playtime, we’d wager that about eight of them were spent listening to the same four or so bars of shrill, droning sound. Near to the end, we were forced to mute the music in-game, something that we’ve never done before in the history of D+PAD.

It’s doubtful this game will appeal to children, adults, or anyone who isn’t a die-hard Case Closed fan. If you fall into the latter category then by all means play – and try to love – it. Just be aware that to do so you need an iron will… and an iron stomach.

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