Ikatan: Ikamono Tantei（いかもの探偵 -IKATAN-）

Ikamono Tantei is one of those games that come from the golden age of when Japanese game companies didn't need to make money overseas but then again CyberFront is gone so maybe they did need the money. This game isn't even very good and I would've been quite upset if I bought it at full price in 2008. Fortunately, I was too busy working 12 hour days as a salaryman corporate slave back then to buy low budget DS titles on day one. Anyways, the main appeal of this game seems to be the cross-dressing main character: Kai.

Oh the resetera threads I could make with this

The actual offensive thing about the whole poking game (or "non-consensual gaming" as Sony Cali would label it), is that it's just a cheap token segment that appears exactly once and has nothing to do with the rest of the game design. The gameplay is the weakest part of this mediocre game as it consists of you tapping highlighted key words in the dialogue and selecting the right key word at the end of each chapter to solve the mystery.

The dialogue won't progress until you tap the keyword so you can't miss them though then it begs the question,"why can't the game just pick it up for you?" This is yet another one of those games that just annoys you by having to touch the screen every once in a while. Not utilizing hardware gimmicks effectively seem to be a common theme for most games on every Nintendo platform starting from the DS and Wii.

INNOVATION!

Other than the pointless "gameplay", I thought the characters were pretty funny. The story tries to be unique in that you are solving silly and pointless mysteries apparently called "ikamono". For example, in the second chapter, there's a weird man dressed as cat that refuses to leave the Iriomote cat exhibit. The character illustrator for this game worked on the original novel illustrations for Boogie Phantom, yet another anime I need to watch one of these days.

Looks way better then Chrono Cross at least

Anyways, the best part of this game if you bought it used for about $5 like myself, is that you can finish it in like 5 hours. However, if you want to unlock the last 4 omake episodes, you need to collect ALL the keywords in each of the 4 chapters. I successfully did this for the first chapter but gave up after trying to visit every location on the map dressed as both male and female and still ended up missing some keywords.

Each of the total of 12 omake episodes are just a small bit of dialogue and I'm OK with only having read through 9 of them. I only have so much time left to play all my shit after all.

Score: 2 yet another game nobody cares about (including myself) out of 5

On a completely random side note, I played through Heavenly Sword after this game and it also has a character named Kai. What a weird coincidence!

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Dai Obake Yashiki（大幽霊屋敷 〜浜村淳の実話怪談〜）

Funny Jhipster story, I was searching for info on this game based on the cover art of the copy that yes I physically own and Google had to autocorrect because I thought 幽 was actually 山. The cover designer thought it would be clever to make little blue ghost lights instead of properly writing out the little 幺 parts. To add insult to injury, that's not even the regular Kanji for a haunted house, it's like geesh, stop trying to be "artistic".

Oh thanks (read as: fuck you) for the furigana

Ok yeah, talking about Kanji isn't exactly like super fun blog post but really that's the most interesting thing I could come up with when talking about this borefest. Maybe I played too many horror games and am jaded. Other Jhipsters might find it scary but personally, this game was perfect for turning off the lights, laying in bed, and just fucking falling dead asleep like a log bored to tree sap tears. The spine card says, "Please don't play by yourself" and they're right. You can seriously injure yourself if you suddenly fall asleep in random places. In fact, they should have added an extra warning to never play when operating heavy machinery. Lawsuit waiting to happen right there, IMO.

It's unfortunately not half as scary as it looks

To sum up the "game", you go through a series of PS1 era CG tour of the haunted house while you hear or read scary stories from the staff. The scary stories are very typical ghost stories like, "I was walking home at night and I saw a ghost! Scary!" For some reason, there were a lot of stories about obasans. Total speculation here but I'm guessing it's because they could reuse various pictures of the same old lady with the scary make-up.

Geesh mom! How many times have I told you to knock first?!

There's was a minor meta story about the owner of the haunted house and I liked the credits as they show where ghosts are hiding in the real life pictures that were used throughout the game. I liked the 90s Japan aesthetics as well.

Hey, that's my apartment working as a coporate salaryman slave back in the day!

Score: 1.5 scariest part is when the obasan opens the door while you're masturbating out of 5

If the idea of an audio book of "scary" campfire stories on the PS1 appeals to you, go right ahead and give this a whirl. (Needless to say, you also need to be fluent in Japanese.) It was a good one for me to go through in a couple of nights because I've been having trouble going to sleep due to stress. Additional bonus, it's a time respecter so it was nice to be able to purge this one and make room for another game in my hoarder closet.

You'll need to play through it twice to read and hear all the stories but you can skip through the repeats pretty quickly which is I why I gave it an extra .5 score for being technically easy to blast through.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely