Where to begin... Daedalus The Awakening of Golden Jazz is a complicated piece of work. Just look at the title, for pity's sake. It goes on forever. The pedigree here goes back a long way, and yet it calls upon it very little, but just enough of that pedigree to make it difficult to evaluate independently as a standalone product or as a product of its franchise.

Let us start with the basics. Daedalus is a VN. The central gimmick of it is that every scene is set in a panoramic photo of real scenery with just a slight filter on it, with full camera rotation and no small amount of cool New York scenery. All of it a delight to look at, though the real life pictures sometimes required a bit of imagination. A cubbyhole with one shirt in it was described as a locker, paint cans described as drugs, and... a rather inexplicable sign suggesting the devil was pleased with your progress which I have to chalk up to the charming eccentricities of Japanese developers not being able to read English signs taken from the uncharming eccentricities of New York weirdos.

Beyond that you are doing standard detective VN stuff, talk to people, poke at things to try to gain evidence or find the item needed to progress the plot. Almost everything is simple and the game is completely linear with hardly a puzzle to speak of. Your journey casts you as a young Jinguji Saburo, grandson of the, unfortunately recently murdered, Kyosuke Saburo. Gramps has charisma out the wazoo, his stern, fatherly demeanor is explored quite a lot in flashbacks and how much of an impact it had not just on Jinguji's youth but also how the entire town loved him and relied on him*. This was laid on thick enough I almost felt nostalgic for the guy and I barely knew him for a few hours of gameplay.

This overarching mystery is split up into episodic cases that are each their own contained mystery complete with a final confrontation, yet they all tie back into the main storyline. Unfortunately it opens with a rather dire flashback to Jinguji and his friends as kids solving a summer camp mystery that is paced dreadfully. This ties into a problem I have with the game... ESPECIALLY on that awful case, so much of your time in this game is waiting on travel transitions. Fade ins, fade outs, dialogue introducing the area, it takes about 7 or 8 seconds minimum just to go anywhere, and when the cases expect you to travel through five zones just to see nobody is there before proceeding, or does not hint where you need to go next and you have to do that to guess... the result is incredibly tedious.

If you can get past the weaker parts, there is a lot of slow-burn tension that works fairly well. Do not expect to be using your brain to solve these mysteries, but you can enjoy the chase to try to get in the head and understand the suspected killer, or to try to uncover the curse hanging over a small town. It is a chill game and you have to enjoy the atmosphere it provides because it will not give you the pathos of something like Phoenix Wright. The killers are just nuts with impossibly precise neuroses and a flair for the theatrical**, there is amnesia, stuff gets kooky, a bad guy promises to show you TRUE EVIL only to just... kinda waste your time with a bog standard crime caper plot.... like most of the Jinguji Saburo/Jake Hunter games it is less a mystery and more of a detective story.

Yes, let's get to that. Daedalus is the latest in the long line of Jinguji Saburo games, localized as Jake Hunter previously (On that note I do recommend Jake Hunter: Ghost of the Dusk for 3DS.) but the translators for this time decided to make him Jinguji again. The Jinguji Saburo franchise dates back 20 years at least of hard-bitten detective stories, passed from writer to writer, developer to developer. These games laid on the noir theme stuff thick. Lots of jazz, Jinguji was as hard-boiled as they came, a dedicated "Light a cigarette and smoke" button. It was a distinctly Japanese take on a distinctly American style of storytelling, and I think the only reason it never caught on in America is that America looks on this sort of thing as generic, same with westerns or fantasy. The Japanese are still earnestly enjoying stuff we have either grown tired of or forgotten how to make. In spirit, a lot of what is in those games shows up in Daedalus. The atmosphere, the story-telling, the writing style (Complete with the trope of the mysterious killer with possible supernatural powers??? turning out to just be a conveniently nutso dude) is all represented here. However, Daedalus is meant to be a prequel to the Jinguji franchise. For a franchise run this long and with this many hands, this would be almost like making a prequel to the Simpsons at this point in time, so just on paper this idea is kinda nuts. But you see it in the story, the late game music taking on a jazz tone to suggest Jinguji is getting to where he has been in previous games. Jinguji's trusty assistant, in the normal franchise, shows up here for a first meeting with him for no reason. She has an awful new personality and contributes nothing to the plot except to be a girl Friday when Jinguji has nobody else to help him as the story nears its end. Beyond that, there is not many in-jokes or call-backs, at least of which I am aware of, so you can safely ignore all this and enjoy Daedalus on its own merits.

Back on topic, to close it out, I really enjoyed my time with Daedalus but it is difficult for me to offer a blanket recommendation for the same reason I have difficulty making a blanket recommendation of some of the other Jake Hunter/Jinguji Saburo games. Their value is in how much you enjoy the slow burn of the atmosphere, how much you can enjoy a game that does not really have a clear objective list of things to enjoy. Something that will never be a truly memorable story, but can give you a warm satisfying feeling when you play it. Something like a good episode of a TV show you liked from back when TV was good and not made by the sort of neurotic degenerates plaguing it today. It's not great, probably not even the best in its series, but it is still an enjoyable ride with the right mindset.



*Prior Jake Hunter/Jinguji Saburo games have often run with the conceit that a private investigator is almost the fixit man and support network for the entire town. It is charming and lets the writers explore sorts of little stories that don't directly involve murder (Most do. Murder is about the only thing worth your time as a customer.) as long as you are willing to just lie back and accept it for the sake of the story. Now Jinguji isn't the fix-it man here, he is still a young runt after all. But the amount of effort put in to letting you know everyone loved Kyosuke and Jinguji has a long way to go to catch up to the old man pays off in atmosphere, I feel.

**And by flair for the theatrical you better believe I mean a plot device to allow the killer to involve Jinguji in his schemes just enough to allow you to actually play the game and experience the story despite the massive difference in "power level" between Jinguji and the bad guys



EDIT: There is a good ending and a bad ending. In traditional VN fashion, the flags for said endings make no sense and essentially change how the characters react to the events that do not relate to the flags depending on if you found them or not. You get chapter select and a sign of the flags you have met once you clear the game, but if you want a vague, non-spoiler hint on how to get the best ending the first time every time a character says or does something awkward that does not match how they should act or what they should know, you need to question them about it at the very first opportunity you hear it. Those choices matter and if you notice them all, you get the good end. The bad end will give you hints of any you might not have reacted to.

This game has beautiful art & interface design, the story is also quite good. I also love the characters. However, I feel this game mechanics could use a lot of improvement; for example, I dont think the confirmation button everytime we change location is necessary. Also, it's kinda annoying that the dialogue option automatically closes everytime we talk to another person which requires extra step to click the person and check the remaining dialogue option. Another example is that every object we can examine needs to be zoomed in before we can check for its description (which sometimes have dissapeared). These little inconveniences piles up quite a bit. For a detective game, the case challenge feels a bit too easy. Instead of pondering of who the culprit is, I think i wasted too much time choosing the 'correct' location destination as this game requires specific order for the story to progress. It frustates me a bit that I have to go back to places I have been before because I cracked the clue before the game let me to mark certain object as 'clue'. On the other side, sometimes there are no clue on which location I have to go next at all. Overall, I still enjoy playing this game though.

I love games with strong stories, but the more emphasis they have on their stories, the harder I’m going to be on them. There are constants in narratives like pacing that must be observed no matter the medium, and genre tropes or standards don’t really change that. I came to DAEDALUS ready to sink into a deep, engaging narrative and I was offered just that from the intro, with interesting characters and a compelling mystery. But all that got shoved into a distant corner by some atrocious pacing and brutally tedious mechanics. I suppose if you’re accustomed to that in visual novels you’ll be able to look past to that gripping story, but for everyone else this is going to be an extremely conditional recommendation.

Saburo Jinguji is a young man with the eye of a detective. He learned his deductive skills from his grandfather Kyosuke, a beloved private eye living in New York. All that changed when Kyosuke met an unnatural end, prompting Saburo to travel out to America and track down his killer. He’ll have his childhood friends backing him up, but this journey will take Saburo deep into New York society and intrigues of the region. Kyosuke held many old secrets, and the evils hidden there will need to be dealt with if his death is to be understood. That means Saburo will need to have more than just a knack for investigating, and will need to track down every lead without fail to forge a path to the truth.

This being a visual novel, it’s important to note that the game more resembles a detective novel than an interactive mystery. Each of the many chapters has a central question to answer, and doing that requires you to click around scenes to uncover the clues that grow the “orchard of your mind”. More than just clever phrasing from grandpa, this is a sort of avant-garde note system that records important clues you find. Once you have all the clues, you’ll answer some very obvious questions about the mystery to close out the chapter. All of this happens linearly, so don’t worry about missing clues or important dialogues. You’ll get a few dialog trees using “stances” that represent different emotional responses, but again, there’s basically one way through the story.

I have no problem with this, but I very much have a problem with the pacing that comes from this linear approach to gameplay. With nearly no branching to events, the game is always directing you to exactly where you need to be, but these steps are often entirely pointless. You’ll be sent to confirm information with characters that you already know. You’ll have to search locations where there is literally nothing to find, because the game wants you to confirm there is nothing. And there’s an infuriating number of scenes where you’ll check some piece of evidence, Saburo will say “I don’t need that”, you’ll go do something else, and then the game will make you go back to the thing you already checked because NOW you need it.

All of this happens to an absolutely absurd degree in the game’s very first chapter, following a solid prologue that introduces you to the characters and mechanics. The first chapter is a flashback to Saburo and friends as children at summer camp, investigating some strangeness with the camp counselors. A huge majority of the gameplay here is going to search areas you’ve already searched, just to find that there’s still nothing there. This isn’t clicking around until you find the one thing the game wants, you are required to go somewhere and do nothing to progress the story. And it happens for hours. This design foolishness kills the game’s pacing, distracts from the story, and isn’t just confined to the first chapter.

Pacing is the biggest problem this game has, and is honestly enough to warn people off of it. I almost quit several times just in the first chapter, though ultimately I’m glad I forged on because the later chapters are much more engaging and better about pacing. It’s an interesting story they spin here, even if the game and even the writing can’t really keep up. There’s some weirdness here when characters tell you things that contradict the game, like a shop being around the corner when it’s like ten blocks away on the map. I also get distracted by how Saburo is very conspicuously a Japanese guy in New York, dealing with New Yorkers, yet everyone speaks perfect Japanese and acts entirely Japanese. It never gets full-on “eat your hamburgers, Apollo” in absurdity but there are scenes where characters comment on their English-speaking skills, in voiced Japanese dialog. Instead of being a story of cultures it just ends up being a distinctly Japanese crime drama dropped into New York.

I wasn’t kidding when I said this would be an extremely conditional recommendation, because DAEDALUS is not going to rub most people the right way. The pacing’s a mess, the game mechanics are thin, and the writing leaves plenty to be desired. I’ve not played a ton of visual novels and I know some of these complaints tend to come with the territory, and so VN fans may be predisposed to handle them. But like I said, there are constants in narratives that must be respected, and the missteps this game makes hurt its narrative dearly. There is a compelling story here, and I’m still playing it so it’s not a lost cause, but you really need to be all-in for the story to get past the tedium in its telling. DAEDALUS clearly has a lot of heart that’s hidden behind poor pacing and writing, and only the most patient players will be able to get at the good parts.



Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my curation page!

I know about Jake Hunter series, but never finished any of it, so can't say anything other than what I understood after playing the prologue, I liked how the VN is presented, art looks nice, can't save manually so far, In the game player can look and search for clues, talk with characters, ask question, present information to know more etc. Playing using a controller and works well. Game has no issues. The prologue works as a tutorial and explains well to the player how to play this game.
I will update as I progress, this is for those who want to know what to expect from this game.

Alternate Jake Hunter The Awakening of Gold Jazz (what a name) is a visual novel/detective story where we solve a mystery of how is it possible to produce such a bad game. I never played the other games in the Jake Hunter series so I review it as stand alone product.

The story is so dull. I could not focus on reading because there was no suspense. I could quickly tell who is the culprit for every case including the main one because the writer did not even try hide them. You could give them "hello, I'm a murderer!" t-shirt and that would not make a difference. Add to that contrived coincidence, lack of conclusion for certain events (even the ending) and potential plot holes.

There are a lot of characters but none of them are memorable. What can I say about one of Saburo's best friends, Ben, for example? He is stupid, his "friends" make fun of him all the time and he used to watch anime. That's it. A bald guy with a beard appears in a restaurant. We learn his name and his profession. The restaurant owner kicks him out and we never see him again. This character only exists to provide minor information about another character. That's it. It does not help that many characters behave like they were buddies with the protagonist for years despite meeting him 2 days ago. And I don't think they even had enough time to develop the characters because this damn game can be completed in 10 hours. In fact it should be about 6-7 hours if we remove all scene transitions/endless clicking.

The characters are partially voiced. This is really jarring. Why even bother? There are plenty of good visual novels without voice acting and it did not hurt them in the slightest. If you have no budget for full voice acting then spend your resources on something else. Maybe hire a composer to produce more tracks? Nah, let's use the same track 50% of the time to test player's mental endurance. How about hiring an artist to draw backgrounds? Nah, let's make panorama photos, slap a filter and put character sprites in them, who cares if they look out of place. Maybe spend more efforts on sprite animations (they look very stiff)? Nah, let's give them facial expressions that make them look like they are possessed by Satan.

I already mentioned endless clicking. Let's say I want to go from the archery range to the girls cabin. I click on the map, click confirmation button, watch veeeery slow scene transition, then I appear outside of the cabin, click on the cabin, watch veeeery slow scene transition again then I finally enter. The whole first chapter is full of this. Sometimes it's not clear where our protagonist wants to go next, so the clicking turns into repetition hell.

This game has no manual save, a revolutionary feature from distant cyberpunk future. There is auto-save instead. Imagine you finished the game but got the "bad" ending because you did not pick proper reply option. What are you going to do, load your previous save? No. You will pick a chapter, play it from the start with all obnoxious clicking you already did before until you reach the needed dialogue sequence. They could split chapters into segments for easy navigation at least.

And they dare to charge 40$ for this (7000 yen in Japan, Jesus). I bought this with 88% discount 1,5 year after the release so I'm not affected but damn, I feel sorry for the fans of the series. Clearly this a low effort cash grab from Arc System Works to rip them off. I don't even know what to write about the positives. Maybe the quality of voice acting itself? That's a given considering the expensive voice actors they hired. But I could write much about the negatives. The writing/story alone deserves its own standalone review.

P.S. I look at the most popular review for this game on Steam and wondering why did I even spend so much time writing this.

Truly this is one of those games I would like to put a "maybe" recommendation?
I played this game to a 100%, have never played another Jake Hunter before, and this left me with more questions than answers.
The overall package I enjoyed quite a bit. The artstyle is what initally drew me in, the music is nice(but very repetitive) and the story sadly falls flat in the end. So I can't in good conscience recommend the game, but I also don't regret playing it either.. I'm very torn.
Lots of reviews have made very good points on whether you should look into this game or not, my two cents only amount to a "it could be nice", sadly it didn't have the WOW effect on me.

6/10. A positive experience, but only barely. Odd controls, mostly useless gameplay, the story has some interesting points but doesn't explore them very much, and has an open-ended ending that leaves too much unanswered.

Technical details/presentation
Alternate Jake hunter: Daedalus: The Awakening Of Golden Jazz (hereafter "Golden Jazz," because ♥♥♥♥, man) is a VN, so nothing special going on technically. However, the art is a bit strange: all of the scenes are real-world images, and not just images, but "3D" images (like StreetView), and you can rotate around at will (and frequently must to explore an environment). The real-world bit is a little weird because the art style is somewhat stylized, so the two don't go together well. And the scenes being 3D is weird as well because the character sprites are angled towards one position, and if you rotate away from that position they look obviously flat and are pointed the wrong direction (last couple images on the store page show this). Furthermore, a number of times the game puts you in conversations with multiple people, where 1 of 2 or 2 of 3 can be viewed, leaving at least one off-screen. All in all it's a bit strange.

Also the game's set in New York, but at one point I noticed the L, so some pictures are clearly not accurate...

Gameplay
It's an investigative VN. You move between various locations, click on things in the environment, and occasionally draw conclusions from them. It is not very similar to either Danganronpa or Ace Attorney (apparently this series is older than either of those, but as a baka gaijan this is my first exposure to it), both of which are centered around courtrooms and producing evidence. Here there are very few cases (all tied together into one big thing, honestly) and there are only a couple incidents where you're expected to deduce things and pick one of two choices explaining a situation.

There are a couple other gameplay elements. One of them is this tree that gets branches whenever you find out information about a case. The other is "stances," where you get the chance to respond to someone in various ways (usually aggressive, diplomatic, and somewhere in between). The former (the tree thing) didn't seem to have any purpose at all, just at random times you'd lose control, the screen would pop over to this random tree covered with words, and a branch would pop up on it. The latter happens quite a bit during the game but doesn't seem to matter much. If you choose the wrong choice you get a couple dialogue lines then they shunt you back to the choice to try again.

Furthermore, in the situations where you have to explain past events, if you get it wrong the other character will point out that you were wrong, and then you get the chance to pick the correct answer.

All in all pretty simplistic in terms of gameplay compared to other investigative VNs.

Story
Golden Jazz is about a young man who travels to New York upon the death of his grandfather, tries to find out why he died, and gets caught up in something much larger. As mentioned, while there are a few different "cases," all are ultimately tied together into one story.

I really struggled to enjoy the story. There's a long flashback near the beginning, then later there's a segue to another town. Both of these wind up having some meaning for the full story, but they feel distracting. The story itself also feels somewhat surface level in the things it introduces, such as the villain's motivations or the secrets you uncover.

You interact with a pretty broad range of characters. They all feel believable, but only a couple really stuck out to me, mainly due to the amount of time the MC spends with them.

As mentioned this is part of what is apparently a very long series. it's meant to be an origin story, which means what it so frequently does: the game concludes somewhat ambiguously. It's a little unsatisfying.

Overall, it wasn't a bad experience, but I didn't get much out of this. If more games came to PC I'd give them a shot, but this on its own isn't very interesting.

Nice little detective ADV that offers a compelling story, but suffers from uneven pacing and cheap-looking character animation. Fortunately, it doesn't require moon logic to finish -- most of the time you'll have the right answers in your head by the time the game starts asking questions, and failures will only return you to the start of the sequence, barely losing any progress.

The soundrack is very nice, but I wish the game had more tracks. It was composed by Ayako Minami, who used to work for From Software on games like Armored Core: Last Raven. This sold the game for me, since I liked her take on 'mechanical' music and wanted to see her 'melodic' side.

Recommended if you want a 'casual' murder mystery adventure that will give you a few enjoyable evenings.

Alternate Jake Hunter: DAEDALUS The Awakening of Golden Jazz is a game that has nothing to do with the title with the exception of "DAEDALUS" and "Jazz".

I honestly couldn't tell you what the title of this game means. Alternate Jake Hunter: DAEDALUS The Awakening of Golden Jazz is about a young man named Saburo Jinguji and his grandfather (Kyosuke Jinguji) is murdered, so he travels from Japan to America to find out who murdered him. The game plays as a visual novel where you'll interrogate other characters you meet and investigate your environment that'll link to the murderer. The game does have different endings that you'll come across and other situational changes from your interactions with other characters.

Going back to my point about the name of the game, only "DAEDALUS" and "Jazz" make sense about the game's title. "Daedalus" is the name of a key element in the game that progresses the story that's linked to a bunch of murders that took place before the timeline of the game and jazz music plays throughout the game. There is no other correlation I can make for the other words.

The gameplay is like any standard visual novel; speak with characters learning about the story to progress the story. Saburo acts like a detective and does his own investigation for the murderer, so you can move over objects and get information about those pieces to this puzzling case. When speaking with other characters, you will occasionally take stances that will alter the narration and interaction with them, which can lead to different endings at the end of the game.

The visuals are flat 2-D images of the characters. The environment looks to have been captured by real world places with a 360° camera. The characters do change stances and facial expressions based on the conversation. In some instances, the character models of particular characters will move fluidly in the environment, which I quite like and wish they did for the whole game with all of the characters to make the game appear more lively. The audio consists of the same set of jazz music only to change when changing chapters. Some areas of the game world has its own background music, but the soundtrack will continue to play over the ambient background noise, which is rather annoying.

The story is alright. It has some interesting twists, but nothing really incredible. There are many unnecessary transitional scenes when moving from one area to the next (one prime example are the cabins and office in the flashback in Chapter 1). There are also things you can investigate, which then ends up only being one object, thus wasting time and effort rather than just clicking on the area and investigating it right away. The "orchard of your mind" logic tree for investigation points looks cool in theory, but you can't read any of the points clearly and just need to click on them to read them, thus kind of defeating the purpose of the tree. There are lots of pointless things to look at and waste your time reading. I get it, Saburo is investigating and just thinking on his own, but if the areas were highlighted a different shade or something to say you've already looked at it and won't get anything more useful out of it would've been nice.

I don't believe I'm a big fan in the visual novel genre of games, but even so, the story was mediocre at best. The relationships you build with the characters are kind of there, but not very engaging for the ones where the story can change at the end. The music is nice, but very repetitive. I wouldn't recommend this game.

This is the first Jake Hunter game I've played, and now I'm even more interested in discovering the other existing games. Quite a shame that there's no manual save because that will help out with backtracking the true ending choices, but I enjoyed my time with this game. Great art style & can't wait for the next game in the Jake Hunter series!