If you grew up in the 90s, you know what pokemon (as in the creatures, therefore NOT CAPITALIZED) are because you most likely were obsessed with them, like most children who happened to watch the show. So I suppose it's only fitting that a game came out (Red, Blue, and Yellow) that was wildly popular and took the gaming world by storm. Casual gamers and hardcore gamers both tried to raise pokemon that would beat the Elite Four and the Champion (Gary Motherfucking Oak) and become the very best, like no one ever was. 

Thanks to this prick, I had to change the rating to Caution. Damn you, Gary Motherfucking Oak!

And so when the next season of Pokemon (as in the franchise, therefore capitalized) came out, of course the games that came with this season became popular too (Gold, Silver, and Crystal). No one had a problem with this. The original Pokemon had a total of 150 pokemon which, while being a lot of pokemon, is a goal that people could actually reach, and with the addition of Johto that made about 250 or so total pokemon to catch. Again, this is within reach, after all, most of these pokemon were simply evolutions or de-evolutions, and it's not like it was hard to catch them. Off to Hoenn, then!

You can't go to Hoenn until you get your money back. 

Up until Hoenn, all Pokemon games were on the original Gameboy and the Gameboy color. Now, Pokemon was moving to Gameboy Advance, and while some good things came of this, something else came along with it. The addition of EVEN MORE POKEMON (136 to be exact) bumping the number of pokemon to catch up to about 380. Is this ridiculous? Well, sort of, because unlike Johto and Kanto in Red, Blue, Yellow, Silver, Gold, and Crystal, it was impossible to catch some previous generation pokemon without trading from your old game. Oh, and some of them only evolved using the power of love. Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald, the generation III games, were all relatively well accepted regardless of this fact, and to fix the problem with the trading issue between Gameboy and Gameboy Advance, there was a reboot release of Red and Blue (but not Yellow) which moved the original 150 to the Advance as well. The generation III games also introduced pokemon natures and abilities, IVs and EVs, Pokemon Contests, berry growing, and the Battle Tower... and became the best selling Gameboy Advance games of all time.

So now you would think that Pokemon would wipe their hands of creating games, but as it turns out, a new season of Pokemon started giving rise to the generation IV games, Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum. These games are DS releases, introducing 107 new pokemon, bumping up the total number of pokemon to about 487. They are backwards compatible with the previous Pokemon games for Gameboy Advance by using the (now antiquated) GBA slot in the DS. They brought back somme older features (the night and day transition that was a part of Silver, Gold, and Crystal was brought back) added new abilities, new moves, Poffins, gender differences, a different system for the Battle Tower (Now called the Battle Frontier), and the ability to record battles and share them over wifi. Furthermore, there was a reboot of Silver, Gold, and Crystal for the DS, SoulSilver and HeartGold, that introduced a new feature-- the pokewalker.

With 487 pokemon, most of which you can't even catch in the game you're playing, SOME OF WHICH requiring special conditions to evolve, and some of which being special pokemon that come via events... it's nearly impossible to actually catch all of the pokemon (which, I remind you, is the point of the franchise Pokemon as referenced by the catch phrase), the addition of Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum tossed the Pokemon franchise over board into the realm of ridiculousness. Whether you're a fan of the franchise or not, you've got to admit that 487 pokemon of which you can only catch a fraction of per game, is a bit ridiculous. Which is why they made the newest generation, because why stop at being ridiculous?

Gary doesn't think it's ridiculous.

Generation V is the generation of Black and White, and I assume at some point we will have the addition of Gray with some new feature we don't know about yet. With the addition of 156 new pokemon, bumping the total to about 643 pokemon this game does pretty much everything. EVs, IVs, natures, abilities, berry growing via the internet, global trading, global battles, backwards compatibility (kind of, as it seems you have to do special stuff to get this), new games you can play with your friends, ANOTHER NEW RENDITION OF THE BATTLE FRONTIER (now called Battle Subway)... it's pretty much your average Pokemon experience ON STEROIDS. Which isn't bad, but it certainly adds a new dimension to Pokemon.

And after all this explaining about stuff you already know, you probably would assume that I hate Pokemon. But I don't. I love Pokemon! I just realize how silly it is to have a franchise where I'm told to catch all the pokemon... and I can't (this coming from the view of someone who does actually want to get all of the pokemon in the game). But there's a lot of good stuff about Pokemon, which I'll get into after I go over the things that kind of suck donkey balls.

There's a lot of stuff that Pokemon does to make sure that you play through the game in a linear fashion, and they've been doing these things since Red, Blue and Yellow. That is, sometimes gym leaders are off fighting crime so you have to go fight crime with them in order to battle them, and sometimes you can't cross a bridge because it's being fixed, but that's okay because doing something somewhere else will open it up for you but Black and White take this to the next level. You reach a city that has bridges on both sides leading to two other cities. Both bridges are closed. One bridge opens after you beat the gym leader, and the other stays closed until-- get this-- you beat about THREE gym leaders. Plus, in the city you're forced to go to there's an subway system or something that I still can't enter, and I'm not particularly sure how to do so. Furthermore, when you reach one city, you have to a) beat the gym leader in order to... b) access a tower where you must... c) beat Team Plasma so that you can go all the way to the other end of the map and continue on through the game. All of this while having your hand held in about a third of the gym leader battles, since there's a guy at the front of every gym who gives you a fresh water and tells you the weaknesses of the gym leader's pokemon.

Team Plasma is another thing Black and White takes to an extreme, because these guys are literally everywhere doing absolutely nothing. There are many of them who don't even battle with you, they just point you in the direction of people you can actually battle, which is ridiculous. Almost every Team Rocket member would demand you fight them before you could even THINK about finding out where their bosses were, but apparently Team Plasma doesn't need to fight you since they've got bosses to do that, I guess.

"We're People for the Ethical Treatment of Pokemon... and also nuns."

Sometimes when you enter a town people will ask you about your pokemon, but about half the time they're asking about a specific type of pokemon that you can catch nearby that has the super power of beating the gym leader in that town, leading me to wonder why a gym with this specific type that can be defeated by a pokemon that lives right outside the town would be built IN THAT TOWN. Nimbasa is a prime example, since you can catch all of 1 rock type prior to reaching there, but you can catch about three different ground types, which renders electric useless. Though to be fair, Nimbasa's gym leader is also a master of cheap moves, so there is that.

In the idea that this game should be played in 3D, there are plenty of elements that make each gym into a puzzle/psuedo 3D adventure. Every gym has some gimmick, and when you reach Nimbasa, this gimmick becomes "LOOK AT HOW AWESOME THIS IS IN 3D!" You go on a roller coaster and get shot through cannons and so on and so forth. It isn't tiring, per se, but it's... ridiculous. There's also a couple of bridges in 3D, the Skyarrow Bridge in particular, that's there specifically because the game is in 3D and it is super long and super annoying.

Some people apparently live on this bridge. Pokemon: bringing realism in spades.

Another element that has been added that is a bit annoying is the C-gear, because finding other people who play Pokemon/have a DS Pokemon cartridge is DAMN NEAR IMPOSSIBLE. You would have to already know someone with the game in order to use it AND have the agreement to be playing the game in order for the C-Gear to actually function. As an example, I own Pokemon White. But I also have about 20 or 30 other games that I could be playing. And the odds that I've chosen to play Pokemon White is high right now, but the odds that other people have the game is low, and the odds of people around me having a DS are even lower, so really there's not a high chance of me actually using the C-Gear to its fullest potential. There used to be an issue like this with trading, when someone in Nintendo finally realized that Pokemon does not make people become friends with each other, just like the pokewalker did not encourage people to walk. This issue was amended by adding the internet to the game. All DSes can connect to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, and thus, all people could use this to trade and so forth. But that leaves the two biggest components of this game, the Entralink and the Dream World.

If you think this is shiny, wait until you actually get it.

The Entralink, and by proxy the Xtransciever, only really works within talking distance of the person that you're connecting with AND on top of that, it barely works EVEN THEN (if the two DSes being used are different, DS vs DSi). As a trial I sat in my living room while my roommate sat in her room and we tried to connect using two very stable internet connections, and my DSi XL was the only one that could make a decent connection while her DSlite would only make the connection if she sat next to me first and THEN went to her room after the connection was stabilized. The Xtransciever is, for the most part, just for talking to one another, so it's a pretty much useless application when it comes right down to it, and the Entralink gives you powers so that things cost less in the store or... your attack power is boosted for a couple hours... essentially it's meant to be helpful to your friends, but in order to use it both people need to be in a town and not doing anything of extreme importance (and I'm pretty sure you have to have already reached the city beyond Chargestone cave in order to even use it). Therein, for the first 1/2 of the game, YOU DON'T EVEN TOUCH IT, and during probably the remaining 1/2 you won't touch it either because there's nothing supremely important about it. And again, you need to have friends PLAYING THE GAME in order to even access it.

But with all these complaints, what's fun about this new Pokemon game? Well, for starters... it's Pokemon. Even with new pokemon included, it's so nostalgic you probably don't even mind the fact that you can't possibly catch all the pokemon in the franchise. And the sprites move IN BATTLE, it's awesome. Furthermore, the 3D element, while sometimes annoying is actually pretty cool. Again, the Skyarrow bridge is an example of this. Sure, it's annoying to cross, but you SEE THE CITY RISE UP, rather than just popping up out of nowhere, in an effect that does make the game seem more realistic. Also in the town after that very bridge, you get to walk around in populated streets, which is pretty cool. The addition of new types of battles, rotation and triple battles, are also amazingly fun for reasons that I can't explain. They even added this thing called the wonder launcher that's pretty cool, albeit sort of stupid since I never got a clear explanation as to what it was. The weather changes every month, which changes the places that you can access. Also, some pokemon only appear in certain places under certain weather and daytime conditions. By the way, the weather is another 3D effect that is kind of awesome.

While the Entralink and the Xtransciever are both kind of dumb, the Dream World is awesome. I'm not even sure why they added it outside of just doing something ridiculously over the top, but this thing is intense. You can catch pokemon, receive items, and make friends online with this new feature, although the premise behind it is kind of campy. It's like, "What do pokemon dream about" and the answer is "Living in a house with rainbows coming off of it and growing berries and getting furniture" which... I doubt pokemon ACTUALLY dream about. You can't battle or anything in the Dream World, and there's no like... nightmare mode where all of a sudden everything gets all badass and edgy, but it's still fun to play and for some reason, a bit addictive. You can get pokemon from older games in this little minigame of an application (to be fair, though, I've only run into Ponyta, Rattata and Bidoof) and for the most part... the minigames that they make you play are fun, making friends is easy, and visiting people to see their pokemon is almost always amusing. The people in Japan all have these huge, crystal houses made out of what I presume is cotton candy and awesome, while the rest of us have... uh... huts. But it's okay, because it's YOUR hut, and for some reason every one of your pokemon dreams of the same hut... I don't actually know how that is, but whatever! It's a cool aspect of the game. Also, it's not necessary to gameplay, in the same way that Contests and the Pokeathelon and the Pokewalker weren't necessary but just peripherals. Thought to be fair, you NEED the Dream World to catch some of the old pokemon. So it's kind of give and take.

Would I recommend this game? Yes! For all the gimmicks they stick into the game and the ungodly amount of pokemon you need to catch... the game is still GOOD... but I wouldn't say that it's necessarily very different from the others. So if you're trying to decide "Should I upgrade from SoulSilver to Black and White" and you don't have $50... keep SoulSilver. It's the same thing (seriously) as Black and White. You might be missing out on new pokemon, but you would've missed out on the old ones just by having Black or White, so really it's not that bad. Plus you can actually catch 200+ pokemon in SoulSilver (without peripherals) so it's not a bad thing to keep that game.

Although I previously said something about Again DS that I afterwards deleted for the sake of length and how much I didn't really care, it occurred to me that a blog reviewing games for the DS that most people don't usually pick up wouldn't be complete without AGAIN because I doubt people would pick it up, given the chance to play it or go get a PSP. And so here's AGAIN again, only this time I'm going to spend a little less time talking about it from a game play standpoint and a while lot more time pointing out obvious flaws.

Sometimes I find that, when playing games on my DS, the games that should be the most reasonable are the most ridiculous. I mean, I played Luminous Arc, where witches fight God alongside a boy turning into a dragon and an assassin and a strangely out of place Asian guy amongst Western swordfighters. And I also played AGAIN, which is supposed to be a cool noire-esque tale about... I guess a serial killer and the FBI. And about 3 hours of whining and angsting later, it ends up like replacing every character in your favorite TV show with Jar Jar Binks-- you're sure what they're saying is somehow funny and or important to the story, but you don't really give a shit because they're all JAR JAR BINKS.

"If it weren't for me, all would be right with the Empire."

AGAIN is an interactive crime novel. But when we say crime, we really mean murder, AGAIN is a interactive murder novel. Notice how I never mentioned mystery? that's because there IS NO MYSTERY. You literally start the game and meet a bunch of characters and as soon as you meet one of the maybe seven main characters, you will know it's him. Obvious McBadGuy shows up in the beginning of the game and continues to be obvious and a bad guy until the end of the game. And the stupid thing is that I can't figure out how exactly Cing (the developers) managed to fuck this one up since THEY'VE MADE THIS TYPE OF GAME BEFORE and that game wasn't made of suck and wank.

So you play as Jonathan "Call me J, My Parents are Dead" Weaver, who is an FBI agent and his parents are dead. He mostly whines and writes in his diary unless doing both of these things somehow get in the way of his rampant pouting, in which case he chooses to pout. You have a partner, Kate Hathaway, who is there specifically to slow the story down by repeating things you've already heard and to provide a female character to the game because girls exist too, you know. There a bunch of other characters of little to no importance who show up primarily to talk about how J's penis is biblical in scale. This includes an Asian scientist, Maureen Yashima, who seems to be in love with Pouty McDeadParents and J's boss Henry Mills, who gets sick like halfway through the game in a weirdly quick emergence of cancer. This game takes place in what, seven days? And this guy goes from like stage 0 cancer to super holy shit cancer in like ten seconds.

HE HAS A STRONG PERSONAL CONNECTION TO THIS CASE, WHY IS HE INVESTIGATING IT?

So the killer in this series of cases is called the Eye of Providence. The Eye of Providence could be a symbol of SO MANY things, which does the game choose? A) All seeing eye of God B) a disapproval of undertakings made by those killed C) A cry for attention towards the greed of the United States (as represented by the eye of Providence being clipped from the back of a dollar bill) D) All of the above

Cing chose E) None of these, you silly cow, there's no need for symbolism when there could just be killing for no reason! Later they sort of make a reference to B, but it's not even a real reference, because Obvious McBadGuy pretty much bawls and says something like, "AND THEN THEY LAUGHED WHEN I STUBBED MY TOE" almost immediately after he tells you his motive behind killing people, so... all of a sudden the Eye of Providence seems more like a satire than an evil villain.

So J has this ability to see into the past, which he's using to solve crimes because doesn't that sound like the kind of power a balanced, well-adjusted FBI Agent would have? In the "gameplay" aspect of the game you play "Find the differences" with his past vision. It probably sounds like it's fun, but it's not. J moves really slowly, like he's got all the time in the world to examine the variety of shades of gray his world is made of even though there's a murderer on the loose. And the control screen is kind of wonky, you use the D-pad and the touch screen together to do everything. Want to walk? Use the D-pad. But for some reason J strafes instead of turning, which would make you think "Oh, so there might be shooting in this game." But no, there's no shooting. Then why have him strafe?! You have to turn using the touch screen, which is also used to touch the items you need.  And no, the touch detection isn't any good, so yes, you do touch items that cause you to lose health or whatever all the time.

But just in case you can't figure out when J is going to be investigating stuff, there's a movie of him suffering when he enters an area to investigate. I guess it's supposed to make us feel bad for him, but it's not working all that well.

Hmmm... no, I still don't give a shit.

There is also a movie after you save. It's a bunch of google images of eyes and close ups of people's faces, which makes me wonder what the hell these guys think this is. Eyes are not MYSTERIOUS, they're not scary... so what the hell is all of this about? But the music is pretty much a bunch of kids slamming pots together, so I guess that would scare you. Which I didn't think was the POINT of this game, I... thought it was about solving mysteries. But then every once in a while it's like CLASH KLINK BANG ROAR ARE YOU SCARED YET which is then totally killed by the slow, slow, slooooooow game play.

Now all the murders are pretty much shown to you in nightvision, for whatever reason, and it's also super grainy, even though it's a bunch of the cell shaded creatures from Super Smash Bros. Brawl just hitting each other in slow motion with various blunt objects all colored green against a black background. I'm *pretty sure*, but too lazy to check, but this was one of the things that the game boasted on it's box art and it looks kind of like one of the fanime channels on Youtube managed to put together some fight scenes where the two characters are fighting in nuclear waste.

So let me ruin the game for you: NOTHING HAPPENS. You enter the game to a murder. BAM! you don't even know what happened. They used this as an opportunity to put the game title in the game.

So...cheesy...must... make constipated faces...

So you look at the past and the present, play "Find the Difference" and then go see your boss, who apparently has taken solving mystery lessons from McGruff the crime dog, since he pretty much just slaps J's shoulder and says, "Whelp, all I can do is tell you to look into it, kid whose parents were murdered by the suspected killer of this case. AND TAKE A BITE OUTTA CRIME" So you go around and meet the rest of the cast. Obvious McBadGuy immediately goes about being obvious, and Kate points out all things obvious EXCEPT Obvious McBadGuy. You run into a reporter named Hugo Watt, and seriously, just wait for the guy to call you and read what he has to say, because he pretty much solves the entire case. J and Kate just wander around like toddlers looking for their parents in a department store while this guy and his superhero-like journalism powers pulls up so much dirt on everything that matters in the game that I figure the game should've been about him.

Then you set into this tired ballet that goes a little something like this: Meet a new character who immediately hates you for being an FBI Agent or "you just don't understand" them (one, two), go play find the difference, but be unable to solve it because you don't have information/deus ex machina to move forward (three, four), go talk to some minor characters who don't like you because no one likes the FBI (five, six), pirouette your way back to the crime scene and solve the crime (seven, eight). There is a twist that is not actually a twist because they play it out for the first three murders, and by the time the fourth one comes around it's honestly quite a surprise that they change it up, but they don't do it very well, and here's why:

There is one character who gets sick and to be honest, I don't see any reason why not to tell you who it is, but just in case SPOILER ALERT: it's J's boss Henry Mills. He gets insert_terminal_sickness_here in just about one day flat, which the game tactfully mentions THE DAY BEFORE SOMEONE IS MURDERED BY SOMEONE WITH THE SAME CONDITION AS HENRY. So of course, you're thinking, "Wha? No! There must be some other character with an obvious disease like Henry's!" But there isn't, because that wouldn't make any sense, I suppose. "But there's no one like that ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD" Kate says, her eyebrows furrowing in thought as you smack yourself in the face. And after you shout at your DS and perhaps hurl it across the room in a fit of DS tossing, but your two main characters just waltz around dreaming of Jeanie until FINALLY they say that it's the boss and arrest the motherfucker.

One other thing that I would like to address before I move on is the inclusion of several deus ex machinas in the "find the difference" investigation scenes. You need to "recreate" the scene, but sometimes J's psychic power is nitpicky and requires that you smoke the correct cigarette or play the correct song or tickle it in the right way or read all the monsters in the scary voice because that's how Mommy does it and it OBVIOUSLY is just a ploy for time WHICH IS COMPLETELY POINTLESS because this game moves about as fast as a glacier in an ice age when it's moving forward at all. What with Kate telling you things you learned two chapters ago like it's something that is difficult to figure out, you practically spend the entire game with your thumbs up your ass. And the amount of talking you do is staggering, after a while you'll just stop wanting to talk to people because you don't really care about what it is that they have to say, since not all of it is very good dialogue.

PLEASE GOD NO, NO MORE TALKING

Also, it's fairly easy to guess what's going to happen next at any point in the game. "What's next?" you ask, scratching your head and swatting flies away with your tail. "Uh, I guess another murder, because murder is always scary if you follow a murder with another murder and then for desert have a heaping helping of murder with a side of murder and a tall cool glass of redrum, right?" is the snarky response. There are no cases with murders in them in this game, which I suppose is because the murderer is a serial killer, but the dude kills everything that crosses his path WITHOUT FAIL.

Obvious McBadGuy has an Obvious McBadHideout, which is in an Obvious McBadGarage/AbandonedWarehouse, where he spends most of his time lecturing people who visit about how people should never lie or cheat their friends, but killing is okay, and by the way, did you know Obvious McBadGuy killed J's parents? No way! So eventually you'll trudge through the game and make it to Obvious McBadGarage/AbandonedWarehouse, where you will have a predictable "I've been waiting for you J" "How could this happen to me, why would you kill everyone precious to me" scene, where all is revealed and J, for some reason, is surprised that the kill knows he has a brother. Uh... he only kidnapped your brother and killed your parents, J, it's not like he knows anything about your family, amirite?

Kate proves herself useful after a pinch by showing up just after the criminal is like, "THESE ARE MY PLANS, NOW I WILL KILL YOU" but unfortunately J is still alive and Obvious McBadPlanner is put in jail. High fives all around, peanuts for everyone, but not before Obvious McBadGuy makes an obvious sequel reference like so: "Your brother's waiting for you, J."

Of course, in playing the game you learn the very poor motive behind the killer's killings, and there is no reason that J's brother would take up this mantle because his brother is probably not batshit insane, but considering how stupid everyone else in the game was, I guess it's not a far stretch to say that there's pretty much a lame sequel setting in place that COULD follow the story, but luckily they'll never make it since this game is beyond bad. It's like they didn't even bother pretending to put any work into the characters or anything, they were just like, "Herp derp, noir is supposed to be gritty and black and white, right, so let's do that! We don't need a story or anything, just black and white stuff and a gritty feel to it, awwww-right"

In conclusion (again), AGAIN is probably not worth the play. You want mysteries, you play Hotel Dusk and you're happy with it, because Hotel Dusk was good and AGAIN is... well it's an experience, but it's not the BEST one. Suffice it to say it would be worth it to spend your money elsewhere than on this game.

So I've been playing with HTML pretty much all my life and I noticed that most of my reviews lost about a third of their bulk due to my HTML being extremely shitty. Sorry. I'll work on it, although... like I dunno, some of what I write just doesn't work with Xanga at all so... meh.

Anyway, I've played a lot of new games and a lot of old ones, and I have a few games that I would like to talk about. The first of which happens to be AGAIN by Cing. I touched on two Cing games when I talked about Professor Layton. Those were good games by Cing. This, on the other hand... Well, let me put it this way. Imagine you were watching a Law and Order Criminal Intent episode and instead of Detective Goren, you get Edward from Twilight and then Eames is someone who is even more one-dimensional than Edward is (so...Bella from Twilight? Are they on the same level?). Everyone else in the show is themselves, but watered down so that they're all pretty much the same except for their jobs, their accents, and their age. That's AGAIN. It's an interactive mystery where the plot is good, but you can figure out who the criminal is after about a couple of seconds and all the characters are either pansies or blandly uninteresting.

And you know something? If you don't believe me, you can go to Metacritic.com and see for yourself. AGAIN gets a 52 out of 100, where Trace Memory had a 70 out of 100 and Hotel Dusk had a 78 out of 100. Prior to this game, Cing had a mean score of 74, and after? it's about like...66 and some change? That's about an 8 point drop. And so, without further ado, AGAIN.

AGAIN DS

Plot

Once upon a time in Clockford, there was a chain of serial killings. Within five days, there were five incidents with six victims, one child lost, and one child wounded, and they loom over the city like a dark cloud. Each death was different, but the evidence left behind was the same-- nothing but a corpse and an Eye of Providence, cut neatly out of a dollar bill. The police dubbed this killer Providence, and chased him for all they were worth. But the case grew cold and the police had no choice but to focus on more pressing matters. Though the terror of those five days played through each citizen's mind as they wondered when the killer would strike again, people of Clockford began to move on, almost all finally forgetting the terrible incident. Nineteen years have passed since then and the wounds have almost all healed.

But then, the FBI receives a letter, addressed to one of their operatives. It asked that operative to go to the first murder site, Hotel Miranda. The Chief of the Clockford Branch of the FBI, Henry Mills, sends the operative to Hotel Miranda. That operative is Jonathan Weaver, also known as J.

J is the soul survivor of the serial killings, an FBI agent who has the ability to see into the past.  He and his partner Kate Hathaway, are assigned to find Providence before he strikes again!

Characters

Jonathan Weaver is the main character and the guy you play as. He's... uh... a terrible FBI Agent. Seriously. He's got no talent for it. Now the game might have you thinking he does, but TRUST ME, there is nothing further from the truth. He's leagues worse than me at deduction and having hunches and I'm not an FBI agent in the slightest (and I didn't realize you could be bad about having hunches until this game). He's the Edward-like character in the sense that he's a normal guy to everyone but the few people who know about his secret ability, his family and his partner.

Kate Hathaway is the piece of cardboard Jonathan calls his partner. I call her a piece of cardboard because she contributes nothing to the game but the occasional "Oh, there are women in this game" realization. I'd write more, but I don't know what she does that's helpful. and yes. I played this game.

Henry Mills is your boss. He gets fatal insert_terminal_cancer_here at some point in the game. I actually had more fun trying to figure out his sickness at one point in the game because you don't find out it's cancer until way late in the game. And I think it's cancer of the esophagus, which they don't either bother telling you about.

Lane Martinez is a police officer who doesn't like the FBI, but then he starts liking them after...uh...nothing really changes? There was another murder by Providence and he thinks that the police and the FBI should work together and all of a sudden he loves Jonathan. Weird.

Hugo Watt is by far the game's best character. He's a reporter who finds out all sorts of information for Jonathan. The two of them went to Clockford U at around the same time and somehow are friends, even though Hugo is way more awesome than Jonathan is. ._.

Maureen Yashima is the forensic analysis and she's Asian. I don't really know what else to say... she seems to really like Jonathan, God knows why. She was friends with Kate at insert_school_here, but they barely ever talk because Kate is a piece of cardboard.

Gameplay/Controls/Graphics

This is an adventure game and a visual novel on top of that. Therefore, if you dislike reading, this is not your game. Furthermore, if you have a hankering for something that's got a lot of action in it, this is not your game. It sounds like it would have some action in it, because you're playing as an FBI agent, but for the most part you are just moving from place to place and talking to people.

The first thing you will notice is that the graphics are sort of alright, but very pixelated and at times, blotchy. But you can tell what things are, so... I guess that's... good? The next thing you'll notice is that you move like you're a snail wearing concrete shoes underwater. You're just SO SLOW. The controls for moving and interacting are mixed between the d-pad and the touch screen in an awkward sort of way. I mean, if the game were more like Hotel Dusk, it would be all Touch screen based and easy, but this is like... Move with the d-pad, swivel the screen by touching the touch screen and waiting for a specific cursor, and interact with touching or tap-and-holding.  You get used to it, sort of, but I haven't played that many games with that weird control scheme. 

Anyway, the only time you manually move the character with the D-pad is during investigations. There really are not that many of these and they aren't all completely intuitive, so I apologize if for some dumb reason you decide you really want to play this. ._. Mostly you spend your time talking to people and that's pretty much the entire game.

I think you can deduce from my character descripitons that the main characters are pretty bland, so... you can also guess that the minor ones are bland too. There's a blind woman... I think that's the extent of variation in the characters. You talk to them pretty much for the entire game and they're all the same, with different names and ages and pictures because I guess that... uh....allows us to differentiate? Sure, yeah. Something like that.

The menu is full of useless things. You'll end up using the history button most, because you'll fall asleep while playing and OF COURSE miss like three or four things that could be important (but usually aren't). There's a useless button that is supposed to be your cell phone. You use it a total of three times, so why is it even there? There's an items button that brings up an item menu, but you don't show people stuff until near the end of the game, if you're still playing by then. ._.  And, the items menu has three menus inside of it, which just makes me think to myself, "Why do you need three menus inside of this menu when you only ever show people things from two of the three?" Then there's the move button and the talk button and the save button, which you use pretty much all the time, and the vision button, which is blacked out unless you're somewhere where you can investigate. And trust me, you never need to touch that button.

Also, there are a lot of god damn movies and I don't know why! Everytime you walk into a vision area, they play a movie of Jonathan suffering, but like extremely close up and annoying-like, when you get a chance to save, a movie plays afterwards, of eyes and people. And! When you go places, theres an animation for that, on top of all their talking before you're allowed to talk to the person you came for. My god, it takes for ever to play the game with all of that.

The investigations are all pretty easy save a couple near the middle and the end where it's kind of like guesswork just to get the right places. I never actually died...but at the same time sometimes I'd get so stuck that I'd have to go to the internet for help. There's only one walkthrough for this game, thankfully a spoiler-free one, and used it twice-- and one of the times it couldn't help me at all anyway. By the way, the only puzzles occur in the investigations and there are only three or four things that I would call "puzzles" in this game. The rest of it is like, "Peel this away from that and play find what's wrong with this picture" for the most part.

"But GoGG, my main squeeze," you say, "this doesn't sound terrible. I mean, it's BAD... not terrible."

Well, firstly, I say, don't call me your main squeeze. And secondly, to appreciate how bad it is, you have to play it. Everything is so transparent that it's not a mystery, and THAT, my friends, is my the game fails. Read on.

SPOILERS THAT ASSUME YOU HAVE SOME KNOWLEDGE OF THE GAME

There's a lot of little annoying things that pile up and become a... how do you say this... metric fuckton of annoying? A clusterfuck? One of those.  For example, one of the kind of main characters you never talk to is Edward Gordon. I knew something was wrong with him from the moment I met him. I thought he was Providence. He's a profiler for the police when you meet him, but he seems to be all about perfection, which is weird for a profiler, since profiles aren't usually completely right or helpful especially given nothing to work with, such as with this case, where there is nothing to work with. Also, he's creepily sure that Providence isn't behind the newest murders, even though no one knows Providence's motive for killing, just that he has a trademark of leaving behind no evidence and the Eye of Providence clipped out of a dollar bill. the characters inn game don't suspect him at all. And then it turns out that he is Providence. OF FUCKING COURSE. Plus he's a terrible villain. Like he spends his time at the end lecturing J about how it shouldn't have taken him so long and how people show their true character when cornered and close to death. Then he goes on and ASKS YOU A BUNCH OF UNRELATED QUESTIONS instead of just killing you. You have to explain to him that his dad is a crooked cop, which, for some reason, he believes, and then he just talks to you some more. It's ridiculous. Like, do criminals really do that? Chat up their next kill like they're talking over lunch? Annoying.

All of the Providence murders are brought on by Gordon, but he doesn't do them himself. All he does is send threats to the killers from their victims. The killings are all just a chain of deaths brought on by Gordon, who is evil and bad and oh my god, who the hell cares. More importantly though, is that in the game, when you find out who killed the first victim, you're like, "Whoa! What a strange twist!" and then it happens again, and you're like "Not really that strange..." but the characters in game are still like, "OMG I WONDER IF THE NEXT VICTIM WILL BE KILLED BY THE VICTIM THAT FOLLOWS HER LOLOLOL!"

There are characters like Lane, who don't like the FBI all that much, right? Well, after the second killing, anyone who treats you like a douchebag from the first killing will all of a sudden really, really like you. For no reason! They say that it's because they think Providence is behind the killings, but that's not a reason to all of a sudden like someone out of nowhere. And this happens so often that it's unrealistic at it's worst and stupid at it's best.

Oh, here's the best thing. ONE character, Hugo, gives you pretty much all the information you need to figure out the case. He's the only one who ever surprises you with anything. And you never see him. Seriously, he calls you on the phone (which J automatically picks up) and tells you pretty much the entire case. I mean, he's GOOD. It makes you think that reporters ought to be detectives.

Remember when I said Henry gets insert_cancer_here? Well, it turns out that he's the copycat killer (yeah, there was a copycat killer. You'd be able to tell this from the way that Gordon is so adamantly against the new series of killings being Providence, even when three cases show up with the same imprint of Providence). But you know he's the one doing the killing because of how absolutely randomly he gets cancer. Newsflash- Cancer does not occur in one goddamn day. You don't just wake up like, "Oh shit, I have cancer and it's terminal. This is awful." I know, you're thinking, "Well, maybe he didn't," but the game doesn't allude to him being sick until he takes a day off. Then the next day, he comes into work coughing and being grumpy-- no one says anything about cancer until WAY later. When you find out that the killer vomited blood on the floor in the murder of Burnett Johnson, you know EXACTLY who did it. The question becomes, "Why did Henry do it?"

There's one puzzle where you're putting broken... glass? I dunno what it is really... back into this box. It is the hardest puzzle you will ever waste your time on. No, seriously, you will spend forever on this puzzle because wehn you finally realize what you're supposed to be doing, you will probably have already decided you'd rather do something educational, like learn the Dewey Decimal System.

The end of the game basically is a cliff hanger, but there's two things about the cliffhanger that kind of sucks. The first is, it's not a good cliffhanger because the providence murders had a purpose and the purpose was for the most part carried out. The second is that I actually want to know what happened to Jonathan's brother Danny, but you can tell he was probably set up to be the criminal.

END SPOILERS

Ending Remarks

What sucks is that the premise is such a good one that it's almost ridiculous how BAD this game is. It sounds interesting enough, but it deserves a low score for being utterly transparent. I mean it! Had the characters been better and the plot moved along a little quicker in places, I swear to you, this game would've been great. And in the moments where I was actually lost and trying to figure out whether I really did know who Providence was, I found that the story was actually really good (even if the characters aren't engaging). I would welcome a sequel if the sequel promises to give all the characters fair play. Kate, your partner, does nothing the entire game. That's RIDICULOUS. I mean, in Trace Memory, D couldn't touch things, but he could explain things to you and was a big part of the story in many ways. In Hotel Dusk, the cast is colorful and ranged, and each of them has their own way of contributing to the final conclusion (and not the silly first ending that you get when you play Cing games).

I didn't play AGAIN again. I don't need to. There's no special file where you continue from the beginning again, but this time with a star on your save file, so you know you've already beaten it. I don't even know why there are three save files in this game. But I know there's no special ending for beating it twice, making it's replay value close to none.

So overall, I'd say if you're a fan of Cing's games and mysteries, I'd maybe buy it? If you go in with high expectations, I think you'll be let down. But if you're looking for a good adventure game, this probably isn't the one you want. I know this, because that's what I wanted. I thought that Metacritic would be wrong about this in the same way that it was wrong about Time Hollow, but I think that the score was accurate. But I dunno, maybe there's a little group of devout Cing fans that went gaga over this game. In which case, I need to join them so we can talk about Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk!