2012.36: Devil's Attorney

Time took to complete: I'd say around 4 hours I think

I was on metacritic and this was one of the highest rated games and when I read it was a turn based RPG game, I had to give it a go. It definitely has it's own charm, the main character is the stereotypical, but well written, cocky lawyer type and some of the dialogue before the gameplay between you and your rivals is pretty amusing.

The gameplay is the well known turn type deal. You have AP and HP and you have to eliminate the other lawyer's 'deck' so to speak. They themselves have special powers like one of them gets +3 boost to attack per turn and one replenishes the health of his party each turn etc. all that good stuff.

You have three skill trees that unlock new moves along the way and you can pimp out your apartment, buy new suit & cars to either help those trees or help a specific action (be it, it uses less AP or does more damage).

So overall it had a lot going for it but not with that much depth to each element. Also one thing I really didn't like was the randomness. Most attacks do "0 to 2" damage kind of thing. So if someone has 1 health and you use the 0-2 attack and it does 0, you get pretty annoyed. I found in some cases my tactics were right but I just had to wish my moves didn't fail. If they did, a restart is quick and painless and you do the same tactic hoping not every freaking attack you do does it's minimum damage.

There was one annoying bug though sometimes either when you restart or start a new case your APs would go to some ridiculous number like 45355252 and just when you think you hit a lucky bug, it's not the case as that's what it shows but you still run out after your real AP points and the game literally doesn't move on from there (you
can't attack and neither does your enemies) and restarting doesn't help much so you have to quit and relaunch.

Another similar bug is where moves take more AP than allocated. So sometimes you do a 3AP move and it takes 6 away or something. And also sometimes you damages took AP, made the sound effect but just didn't do the damage. The game would sometimes hit a deadlock after that too.

Overall it has 54 cases but after a while it becomes kind of 'linear' as in there is only so many combinations, giving how much AP a move takes and whatnot you end up using moves in similar order throughout the cases. It ends up feeling more like a puzzle game to figure out which moves to use when than a turn based RPG game. Perhaps there could have been items to use during 'battle' and stuff like that too. So lack of complication and depth comes across to you after a few battles.

A sequel that has more battle options, more things to upgrade and less dead-end bugs would be pretty good. For now, it is 'just' good.

6/10.