Private School Private EyeĪnd yet, despite all of these gripes, I can’t say that I didn’t end up enjoying my time with Lost Judgment overall, and that’s almost entirely thanks to the surprisingly meaty undercover side cases that Yagami can undertake at the Seiryo High School. It’s still relatively restrictive since you can only use the exact search terms you’re given, but as far as actual deduction goes it at least made me feel I was getting my hands dirty rather than merely having them held. In doing so, he can sift through a feed of text messages and triangulate specific points on the map where new clues might be uncovered. The one aspect of Lost Judgment’s sleuthing that does feel a bit more involved is Yagami’s ability to eavesdrop on conversations between pedestrians in order to pick up certain words or phrases that can be used as search terms in the Buzz Researcher app on his phone. The added detection gadgets, like a highly sensitive microphone and a detector for hidden cameras, are certainly welcome but in practice they’re effectively not that different from the simple crime scene pixel-hunting from Yagami’s first outing. Then there are the parkour sections, which are clunky enough to make an Assassin’s Creed fan want to fall on their hidden blade, and the stealth scenes that force you to throw coins in very specific spots to distract guards before you can take them out (just quietly creeping up behind them greets you with a greyed-out button prompt and no course of action other than to scurry back to your overtly signposted hiding spot). Meanwhile, the covert tailing missions are slightly less frustrating this time around thanks to the ability to press a button to “act casual” and hide in plain sight, but no less plodding. Quick-time event-heavy chase sequences are repetitive and often ridiculous, running laps of the same small circuit and always seeming a few comedic toots of Yakety Sax away from being an actual Benny Hill skit. I felt equally apathetic towards Yagami’s detective work which, despite some minor tweaks and additions, remains as disappointingly shallow and inflexible in Lost Judgment as it was in the original. I kept waiting for a rug-pulling plot twist that never arrived, and despite the customary escalating boss fights in Lost Judgment’s closing chapters, I couldn’t help but feel like it was just going through the motions. This initial intrigue doesn’t last, though, since all of the major parts and players in Lost Judgment’s main case have been identified and unmasked roughly by the start of the third act, which means any sense of mystery evaporates from there on out as the characters talk in circles and at length while re-examining the same pieces of evidence without revealing any new details. It’s a provocative jumping off point to be reunited with private investigator Yagami and his likeable crime-solving cohorts, and it kept me enthralled in its opening hours as a series of contradictions were picked apart and modern concepts like deepfake technology were posited that made me feel like I was leading man in an episode of CSI: Shinjuku. When a body is found decomposing in an abandoned warehouse, the prime suspect has an airtight alibi: getting caught committing an entirely different crime at the exact same time the warehouse murder is believed to have taken place.
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