![]() Her cases usually involve her two closest friends, the conniving detective wannabe Chloe and well-meaning bubblehead Penelope. You play as Mackenzie, a newly appointed member of the Great Detective Society and official "touch detective." (What exactly a "touch detective" is seems to be something only Mackenzie understands, and even though people ask her what it means throughout the game, she never wants to talk about it.) Mackenzie is a little girl who lives with her butler Cromwell and mushroom sidekick Funghi. The sequel's premise is identical to the first game. Touch Detective 2½? On the whole, it's pretty average. Still, some little part of me was hoping for an improvement, anything to show that the designers had paid attention to the criticisms of the first game and tweaked it to become, if not something awesome, then at least something better. In an amusing/annoying twist, the font Atlus used for the manual didn't display the ½ correctly so the game is referred to as "Touch Detective 2?" throughout-perhaps a more fitting title, as in, "They really made a sequel to Touch Detective?") Based on the screenshots and Atlus' marketing materials, I had a hunch going in that the game I was about to play would be more or less identical to the first. (I'm not sure what the point of that ½ is, other than to be cute. So here I am one year later reviewing the sequel, Touch Detective 2½. At the time, it was one of the few DS adventure games out there and helped fill the void until Hotel Dusk and Phoenix Wright 2 came out, but on the whole, Touch Detective struck me as extremely average. With its pixel hunts, obscure puzzles, and punishingly linear gameplay, the game suffered from pretty much every pitfall an adventure game can suffer from, and the fact that it did next to nothing with the DS's unique capabilities made it no better than a mediocre PC game. As the third adventure game to come out for the handheld system after the excellent Trace Memory and Phoenix Wright, Touch Detective had large shoes to fill, and it didn't fill them very well. A year ago, I reviewed Touch Detective, the debut Nintendo DS adventure game from Japanese developer BeeWorks and publisher Atlus. ![]()
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