Okay, okay, all this being said, I might be a teensy bit to blame for my own disappointment in the gameplay. When I saw that Jake Hunter was being billed as a "digital novel," I thought, that's just marketing talk. It's how you trick people who think they hate adventure games into trying one, like convincing your kid that prunes are an exotic type of candy. But boy, those marketing guys weren't kidding. In Jake Hunter, ALL you do is read. Under different circumstances, that might not be such a terrible thing, but this is bottom-of-the-barrel prose. The plots are flimsy and cliché (so much so that I won't bore you with any of the details), the characters have zero personality, and the writing is just awful.

To some extent, the poor writing could be blamed on a bad translation, but with so many adventure games coming out of Europe with less-than-stellar localizations, I'm used to translation snafus by now. Even the Phoenix Wright games have their share of cute typos now and then, but Jake Hunter takes localization gaffes to the next level. Along with a slew of errors any half-decent proofreader should have caught, there's a lot of prose that reads like a first draft out of Creative Writing 101. I gazed at the clock intently. The 7:00 of my digital clock flashed back at me. It's [sic] red glow was unrelenting. Poorly translated, or poorly written to begin with? It's hard to tell. My mind was still fuzzy from last night's escapade, and my skull felt like a jackhammer testing facility. I was finally able to retrieve the month-old conversation from the corner of my mind. Ugh. Sure, there are a lot of poorly written video games out there, but since this one is 99.9% reading, the low quality can't be overlooked. Jake Hunter's text is boring at best and downright cringeworthy most of the time. Not a positive selling point for a so-called "digital novel." I suppose it could be argued that the writers were trying for a noir / pulp novel feel and simply went a bit overboard. Even if the tone was intentional, though, that doesn't make the writing good.

With the dual screens' small size, DS games have an advantage over other platforms in that a game can look pretty good with fairly low-key artwork. I wish I could say Jake Hunter excels in this area, but the graphics seem pretty blah to me. Other than a few crusty FMV sequences at the beginning and end of a case, the art is all static. Locations are represented by photo-real graphics, with hand-drawn characters overlaid to show who's speaking. The locations often contain signs with Japanese characters, which would be fine except that the text goes out of its way to try to convince us that the game is set in America. (I found myself yearning for the generic "this country" so often used in Phoenix Wright to avoid this very issue.) The character art is mediocre, not at all stylized or special. The characters' appearances and facial expressions don't change no matter what they're talking about, and their faces aren't all that expressive to begin with. Jake always has a square, clenched jaw; his assistant Yulia is always smiling. The rest of the characters are easy to forget. It's all just so boring, which is a shame, since with the game's noir detective theme, the artists had a well-established visual style they could have drawn from.

Okay, so the gameplay sucks, the writing sucks, the artwork sucks... did they at least score on the music? Nope, sorry. For many locations, the music just didn't seem to convey the right mood, and the loops are so short it becomes repetitive real quick. Because of this, I played most of the game in silence. Every once in a while I'd turn the volume back up to see if a new location had a less grating theme, but I didn't find one single tune in the game that I liked. As with the art, I'd expect the genre to provide plenty to mimic, but the music was not recognizably noir to me.

Perhaps the only thing Jake Hunter has going for it is that it's short. Really short. I finished the first two cases in about an hour each; the third took me two hours, but only because the story was longer (read: more tedious), not because the case was any more compelling or difficult. With a retail price of $19.99, this game is being billed as a budget title, but it's still the shortest DS adventure game out there, and it's not worth the price. Remember, you're only getting half of the game that was released in Japan! Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have wanted to play the three extra cases even if they had been included, but at least I might have been able to argue it as a good value for players who are more masochistic than I am. Oh well.

It was inevitable that this day would come. In fact, considering it's been just about three years since the first (brilliant) adventure games were released for the DS, we're right on schedule. If history's taught us anything, it's that good games are followed by copycats, and it behooves players to do some research before taking out their wallets. Even then, there's a chance you'll end up with a stinker. And on the bright side, how would we recognize the good games if we didn't have bad ones to compare them to? Jake Hunter: Detective Chronicles may be a terrible game, but this doesn't change the fact that the DS is still an excellent platform for the story-driven games we know and love. It might even turn out to be a good platform for digital novels, as long as "digital novel" doesn't always translate into "terribly written snooze-fest." We DS owners are just going to have to be a bit more selective from here on out.