Dragon Detective: A Friend from the Shadows

Sad because Ace Attorney has been on ice for the best part of a decade? Then I think this game is for you if you're looking for similar experiences. Closer in format to Ace Attorney Investigations, Dragon Detective does a great job in presenting itself as a mystery game. The mysteries in game managed to stay on that fine line where they feel rewarding to solve: while I struggled with some solutions, once I figured them out I felt dumb for not noticing, rather that cheated because the game was using logic I couldn't follow. The pacing of the game is also snappy, the game never stops moving forward, and investigations and confrontations never go long enough that they become tedious. There's no eternal confrontations, unlike what Ace Attorney sometimes falls in. I like the overall plot of the game, the setting of Rivulette is well established, and the unique factors of the place are often important to the story of the game, with the worldbuilding often being integral to solving the mysteries in the game. I also found Noxley a fun protagonist to play with, he's serious and driven, and he very much acts like a character with his own agency, even while I control him, which is what I tend to look for in a good protagonist. The biggest criticism of the game I can give is that the formats of Case 3 and 4 suffer for the clumsy way moving between places is handled. Having to physically move between places using dialogue options, and often constantly moving through a central location is tedious, and I think the game would have benefitted more if it had made use of the maps they give you as evidence as UI elements to move from place to place. I also applaud the dev for gently incentivizing playing the game on Detective mode—the "normal" difficulty— without also encouraging a lot of needless backtracking, by making achievements for finishing cases in Detective mode but NOT for getting an S rank on them. Since this a wholy linear, story driven game, it'd have just been tedious to play the game over again knowing all the right answers.

剧情和世界观还算挺有意思的侦探题材VN。 以场景调查和状况整理的玩法为主，对峙的时候会考察侦探对当前案件状况的了解程度以及考验一些人情世故方面的能力。推理的部分其实比较弱一些，如果对标推理小说的话，可能更倾向社会派的那一类推理小说吧。 有两个结局，一周目就都可以看，最后可以按照自己的喜好从中选择一个收尾。 仅有英文，无中文，无语音。音乐不错，通关之后买了OST。 有几个很帅很喜欢的角色，内容也是量大管饱，所以给了好评。

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.

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)

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 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.

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.

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

the characters are great i hope this game gets a sequel or something like that