REVIEW: London Detective Mysteria


Title	London Detective Mysteria
Developer	Karin Entertainment
Publisher	XSEED Games
Release Date	PC: July 31st, 2019, Vita: December 18th, 2018
Genre	Visual Novel
Platform	PC, PS Vita
Age Rating	Mature
Official Website

I haven’t played many visual novel games to be honest. Before now, I had probably only played a handful. Lux-Pain and the first Danganronpa game are just two examples of the very few I’ve tried out, but I do quite enjoy myself whenever I dive into one. It’s a much more relaxing genre to sit down and get into. And thus, when I saw London Detective Mysteria had yet to be reviewed here at oprainfall, I decided to hop in and check it out.

London Detective Mysteria takes place in 19th century England—London specifically—as the title states. The main character, Emily Whiteley (whose first name is changeable), grew up outside of town after her parents died when she was young. She’s come back to town to take over as the head of her family. Without her parents around anymore, she is now the head of the family by default, seeing as she doesn’t have any siblings. The Whiteley family is one of many English noble families. Emily plans to make her debut at the queen’s birthday party. Things at the queen’s birthday party don’t go quite as planned though. Emily ends up helping Herlock Holmes and his assistant William H. Watson find the queen’s cat who’s run off. Yes, Herlock Holmes, not Sherlock. Some of the characters in London Detective Mysteria are actually the children of certain well known people. Anyways, after successively finding the queen’s cat, Emily is given a ring which marks her as one of the queen’s detectives. She is then allowed to attend Harrington Academy and take an official detective’s course.

Much of the game will be merely reading along and enjoying the story. The interaction comes into play whenever you are faced with certain decisions. Some decisions don’t matter and the story won’t move along until you give the right answer or try them all. Others do, mainly those that give you invisible points towards getting closer to certain characters. See, London Detective Mysteria is not only a mystery visual novel game, but also an otome one. There are a variety of characters who you can get close to and ultimately end up with at the end of the story. But if you’re not careful, you might happen upon a bad ending instead. To truly enjoy the game as a whole you’ll want to eventually get every ending there is to find. Most of the endings leave you hanging and don’t resolve the main story whatsoever. Still, I had fun going through different paths and getting to know each of the characters better. Watson is one character I enjoyed a lot. He seemed to have a good head on his shoulders and was often pretty useful during investigations.

On another somewhat related note, one feature the game includes, which majorly helps reduce the annoyance of replaying it numerous times, is a skip feature that takes you back and forth between the different decisions you make. This made it easy to jump past the beginning story content with hardly any changes and quickly reach the various branching paths connected to alternate decisions that can be made. Something else I should mention real quick is that this game only has a Japanese dub. And speaking of the dub, London Detective Mysteria‘s only real negative is that the dub often took way too long to play. For example, someone might say half of what’s displayed in their text bubble and then only after so many seconds later do they continue what they’re saying and finish what’s displayed in the bubble. It didn’t sound natural at all.

The atmosphere of London Detective Mysteria suits it fine. The soundtrack isn’t anything to write home about, but it makes sense for the game and is by no means terrible or out of place. There are also quality sound effects throughout and it just does an overall good job of keeping you sucked in. The game’s art is decent as well. Whenever some art pops up that you particularly like, you’re able to remove the text boxes and the options above it so that you can take a screenshot. Also, the main menu has an extras section which includes stuff like the ability to re-watch specific scenes, key art with different characters for you to look at again and even epilogues with those characters if you unlocked them from getting the required endings. I really appreciate that they added all of this, especially the epilogues. It’s very much a welcome addition.

Out of the few visual novels I’ve played, I don’t think London Detective Mysteria was my favorite or the best. Nonetheless, I still had fun during the 25 hours or so that I spent with it. It has plenty of story content for you to enjoy for $29.99 and an overarching mystery which, as I said earlier, you won’t see a legitimate conclusion to unless you make your way through all of the possible endings. If you enjoy otome games and have a true appreciation for visual novels, then I think you’ll love London Detective Mysteria. This is one visual novel that’s worth picking up and enjoying for yourself.