Finished Staffer Case, it's fun but not really excelling in any way. It's an Ace Attorney style in a world where people with Jojo-esque special abilities exist (don't be confused by usage of magic/supernatural in describing it, every magical character/item has one trick that can be very circumstantial), you play as a normie in a government detective agency that mainly deals with people and objects with those types of abilities. I originally started it about a month ago, but now they added a voice pack so I finished it.
The gameplay itself is alright and pretty standard, needing to tie in bullshit powers to events while you get evidence by coworkers with their own brand of specific powers. Biggest issue in gameplay is that sometimes it's not clear what kind of contradiction you are looking for while there are multiple contradictions to point out, or having very similar sentences to compare with despite them all being rather similar, it's just frustrating. The cases themselves are pretty high quality once you start to solve the multiple contradictions showed.
My main issue is that it's unmemorable. The game never dwells on the characters or the city, which really hurts it when those character interactions and life in the city is the backbone of the plot. A lot of revelations could have been way more impactful if the game spent some time building them up beforehand, for example one case deals with people raising magically mutated creatures for meat, which only comes up 2 minutes before showing the case, rather than being talked about in the episode prior (or being common knowledge). The whole city of London with magical people is never interacted with, which makes prejudice suffered by those people fall into the "tell, don't show" category. The government itself comes across as cartoonishly evil for no real reason, but it's never really shown. The game also does the usual sin of having an alternate history without any changes, despite those type of people would be massive, ESPECIALLY when you are dealing with Cold War Britain where you'd think most of the plot will deal in using the magical people for spying. But even if the writers don't want to jump into that rabbit hole, it should be a massive deal from a history and religious front.
The main cast is unfortunately very stock, and it doesn't help the main character gets constantly fellated for being smart despite coming to rather plain conclusions at the same speed as the reader. None of the characters are bad, but there's a reason people still remember Ace Attorney's cast 2 decades later, while I doubt I'd remember anyone in a week.
Overall it's good for a puzzle experience, and hopefully the devs expand on what works in the sequel and get better with the writing.
