when legends flop. 💔

was hoping this was going to be more of a "bad for a Cing game" but otherwise vaguely passable thing but that wasn't the case. i was full on not a fan.

the shift to more menu based navigation between areas compared to Another Code and the Kyle Hyde games is whatever and could've been fine if there wasn't so much backtracking. so many spots where you need to go talk to someone and ask them a single question or show them one thing to progress things only to need to return not even 10 minutes later. it wasn't as bad early on but by the end of the game when you're going from person to person showing them old photographs to see if they know anything about the people shown it was miserable as hell.

at least i finally got around to it, i guess.

As much as I liked playing through parts of Again, I unfortunately find it quite difficult to recommend within Cing's repertoire. The hook is that you're an FBI agent investigating the Providence serial killings from 19 years ago, and you have special powers that allow you to simultaneously view the past and present on separate screens of the DS. In order to do so, you have to manipulate your current surroundings of the present to match the previously undisturbed past through a series of inventory and touchscreen puzzles to view past events as they played out, thus imitating the real life crime fighting techniques of reconstructing and reenacting crime scenes. It's a little rough around the edges, given that not every difference between the present and past will result in an interactable area of interest, and the game is not great at signaling when the player must exit the crime scene for more clues/evidence versus simply not having investigated enough of their surroundings. Nevertheless, I found this core premise engaging enough to see the entire game through.

Sadly, all the surrounding elements greatly dilute the overall experience despite the fantastic conceptual hook. Again suffers from the classic detective adventure game issue I refer to as the "every" problem. You have to talk to everyone everywhere about everything, every time. This gets grating immediately, and is exacerbated by the sheer amount of menuing, screen transitions, and mandatory flavor text that you have to tap through. In addition, the game often requires players to exhaust every option to proceed in order to pass time while NPCs investigate leads and evidence on their own. The game's overarching premise also backfires here. Because you're specifically investigating past murders, most of your time is spent interviewing former co-workers and family of the former victims. As a result, many of the game's characters exist simply as vessels to convey information of what the deceased characters were like back then, and generally lack any significant identity of their own. Couple that with all the constant traveling since you must ask each witness a new single question every time with each new discovery, and it's far too easy to feel disconnected from the game's plot and setting as a whole.

In a sense, Again may as well be the antithesis of Hotel Dusk. Hotel Dusk was a succinct mystery where much was revealed over just half a day, filled with complex characters all coming together within a connected environment all contributing to the final revelation in their own way. Again on the other hand, plays out over the course of more than two weeks with fairly little happening per day, and is filled with many underdeveloped characters and separated locations that usually have little agency upon the game's events, long forgotten about once the game starts to escalate towards its denouement. I'll give Cing their due for delivering upon the core gameplay premise (aside from the absence of any microphone and DS open/close puzzles) and nailing the true perpetrator revelation and confrontation, but I must admit that Again lacks the cohesion of much of Cing's library and fails to fully realize its potential. Even the conclusion feels like a letdown given Again's cliffhanger ending, though I'll cut them some slack here given that Cing would unfortunately file for bankruptcy in less than a year after the game's release and was clearly setting up for another installment. All I'm saying is that if Arc System Works is looking for another overlooked Cing game to remake... Again might be right up their alley.

Again is a generic crime story with generic (and sluggish) adventure gameplay, so while it's certainly playable and able to be completed, it's most likely not going to stick with you. It's also not an engaging mystery; it doesn't really give you the tools to solve it as you go, leaving you to wait for someone else (or J's visions) to tell you most of the answers.

Considering it's completely devoid of the interesting character writing and physical location-personality of Cing's other works Another Code and Hotel Dusk, I sincerely hope anyone playing this game plays this after those. Then you'll just know what this one is missing, as opposed to losing faith in Cing's ability to portray them whatsoever.

The transition screens with J's outline walking are about as stylish as it ever gets. So those are cute, at least.

"Hotel Dusk hybridized with a traditional Japanese menu-driven adventure game" was an interesting idea but it doesn't really work all that well. The first-person adventure sequences are a bit basic but interesting; the menu-driven sections are very generic, which would be okay if the story was more engaging. It ends up comparing a bit badly against Hotel Dusk given it's neither as mechanically interesting nor as well-written.

The plot was always going to be pretty by the numbers, but I feel like the incredibly rough translation has made it a lot worse. Nothing is really wrong, but it reads like a first draft that hasn't been edited to sound natural or to give it any personality whatsoever.