Murders on the Yangtze River

It's cute. I think this is especially good for younger audiences. I wonder if an older audience may find it a little ... lacking(?) BUT the story ties up very nicely at the end, the overall theme is explored well. It could use a tiny bit more polishing though. I think this is a good game to play before you play the ace attorney original trilogy games or attorney of the arcane (I might suggest playing attorney of the arcane after this but before AA OrigTrig. both this and attorney of the arcane are more forgiving and i would say somewhat more straight forward than some of the hardest cases in AA-OT.) but this is a GREAT introduction to the detective visual novel genre. There are points where i think the suspense and creepiness are very effective which i think is maybe the most engaging element to these kinds of games. I think without that pang of anxiety every so often these games would fall flat. So all in all the developers did a good job with story. However, I think the localization for english could use another go through. There are some phrasing issues and some minor details that i think would be beneficial for the overall experience if they were to to go through another round of editing. They're not egregious enough to make you stop playing but still i think it would be helpful overall to iron some minor things out. I didn't take notes on these things until the end of the game so these are just whats fresh on my mind having just finished it. From least to most important: - When you're cross examining someone i think the question button should be changed to confront because i thought with "question" we were just pressing them (very minor wouldn't make a big difference since you have to present evidence once you click it, but if i were polishing this that is what i would do.) - some grammatical/continuity editing throughout for instance this is not really a spoiler but ill mark it anyway: in the last case <spoiler> theres a phrase where the words "confusion" and "depression" (or maybe it was sadness or something) should probably be switched. and there is an instance where someones testimony mixes up dates and then the defense also says the wrong date directly after you present the evidence that they got the dates wrong </spoiler> - there is a point in the last case where people are talking slightly off screen and you can't read the text bubbles above them because it is cut off and the camera is on the playable character which actually turns out to be good info that you don't get and i don't think that is on purpose, (possibly because of the formatting differences between languages?) - there are times where the phrasing is confusing and led me to misunderstand the question like in (this is not the best example but its the one i remember) <spoiler> the boat case they mean to say what is the common thread that ties these two events together and they just say "what is the motive" when i believe at that point we haven't established the motive yet, just the modus operandi. i think they do say modus operandi a couple lines earlier but it still made me a little confused at the time </spoiler> All in all though super SOLID story and a powerful overall theme. I think that at the end of it the way the theme ties all the cases together is what really made me appreciate the overall story because it's an issue that still deeply effects us today and I don't feel like I've seen a game make it their thesis statement in this way before. I feel like it's usually more of a background element and not so often the moral at the end of the story. And it's done in a way that makes you respect the seriousness of the big picture that I feel like is not successfully done or followed through on often.