Touch Detective | 
| From: Atlus Video Games
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $18.73
You Save: $1.26 (6%)
New (13) Used (8) from $16.98
Rating:  26 reviews
Sales Rank: 3300
Platform: Nintendo Ds
Genre: Air Racing and Flying Games
ESRB: Everyone 10+
Media: Video Game
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Operating System: Nintendo DS
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.2
MPN: 40005
Model: TD400058
UPC: 730865400058
EAN: 0730865400058
ASIN: B000FUG5TA
Release Date: October 24, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW, Factory Sealed items direct from the Studios. 30 Day Satisfaction Guarantee. Quick International Airmail!
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| Features:
| • | Gather evidence, talk to witnesses, and use items to further the investigation! . | | • | Four bizarre cases! Find a missing person, track down a stolen dream, and more! . | | • | Touch-screen, dual-screen puzzle-solving that takes full advantage of the Nintendo DS! |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Touch Detective is a unique mystery adventure as you become a private eye in a strange new world. When Mackenzie's father unexpectedly passed away, she inherits the family business: a renowned detective agency. In a world world populated by mechanized butlers and walking skeletons, mysteries are very different. With the aid of cheerful mushroom-man Funghi and robotic servant Cromwell, Mackenzie sets off to prove herself worthy of being called... the Touch Detective!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 21 more reviews...
 Wonderful and Delightful November 7, 2006
D. Porter (Moraga, CA. United States)
32 out of 33 found this review helpful
Quite simply, it's great, though a bit on the challenging side. Gorgeous art style and some great music come together for an atmospheric title, and one that, despite it's 'rated 'E' for everyone' approach, will appeal to adults as well as kids. It's not without some light frustration, but the good far outweighs the bad.
Ignore the mediocre reviews and pick this one up. Replay value is in the four different cases, as well as some unlockable minigames and a 'touch' list. If you like adventure titles like Phoenix Wright and Trace Memory (or Maniac Mansion, for that matter) then you'll really dig this game.
A good solid four stars.
 Touch Detective October 28, 2006
Mary (California)
19 out of 23 found this review helpful
This is a fun game to play. I am on the 2nd mystery to solve. I do love these types of games. This one is sort of like Trace Memory, alot of reading to do in it. I am an adult woman. My 11yr. old son says it doesnt think he would want to play it though.
 I thought as a non-gaming female I might like this game.... November 20, 2006
Twila C. Mcconnell (Atlanta, GA USA)
13 out of 18 found this review helpful
To me, this game was seriously disappointing. So disappointing, I didn't finish the second case before setting it down forever.
I was highly entertained - at first. It's cute, funny, and going around clicking on things for a new DS user was highly entertaining. However, it quickly got older.
1. You can't skip through the horrendously long dialog - ever. Even after you've heard it about a million times because you're clicking on people hopelessly in frustration unable to figure out what to do.
2. I found myself looking for an internet walk through, yes, on this simplistic game. I couldn't figure out what to click and wandering around hopelessly for thirty minutes reading over dialog you've read a thousand times just gets too frustrating even for my typical patience level.
3. Possible Spolier - There seemed to be a glich in the second story in which I talked to the wrong person at the wrong time and then I could never get a ticket into the planetarium. After that, I just couldn't take it any more and gave up.
4. The places and people never change. For each case, from my understanding, it's all the exact same tiny few places. I'm not a big gamer, but I like a world bigger than three feet.
I let a friend borrow it and thus far she is enjoying it more than me.
Just to help this review - I'm a college-age female and this is my first gaming console, although I've played the PS2 quite a bit. Maybe it's really a hit or miss but I don't really recommend it for anyone but someone with a high patience level. A REALLY high patience level.
Really WEIRD point-and-click adventure for DS. December 5, 2006
C. Forman (Central Illinois)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
(MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW.)
Touch Detective is a point-and-click adventure game, much like Trace Memory, or Phoenix Wright without the courtroom scenes. You go around talking to people and looking at objects to find clues. Sometimes you'll interact with items to solve problems, all using the stylus. The interface couldn't be easier. You tap a spot on the screen to have Mackenzie go there, or examine an object. There's an inventory bar for using things you find, and a close-up screen where you can inspect them in more detail, or combine them with other items. But whereas everything in Trace and Phoenix made sense to me, Touch Detective is just plain bizarre.
The strangeness starts with the characters. Mackenzie is the protagonist, taking over some sort of detective service (never really explained) left to her by her parents. She lives with a butler/inventor, and a little mushroom guy (never explained either) who follows her around and occasionally helps her. Her friend Penelope is always fretting about some problem Mackenzie must help her solve. Then there's Chloe, who thinks she can be a better detective than Mackenzie and is always trying to crack the "case" first. Some of the supporting characters are talking animals: Penelope's landlord is a giant talking bird, and there's a walrus who works at the skating rink and a shark who hangs out at the local bakery. After awhile you just sort of go with it.
The cases are equally off-the-wall. In the game's first case, Penelope is convinced that someone is stealing her dreams while she sleeps. So Mackenzie has to sniff some mushrooms (hence the ESRB's E10+ "drug use" rating) to let her enter the dream world and investigate. In another, Penelope asks her to rescue a "snow fairy" trapped in a skating rink that's about to be demolished. Some characters or story developments don't appear until Mackenzie does something elsewhere, but the connections between events aren't always clear, so there's a lot of wandering around to see if anything's changed as a result of your actions. Puzzle solutions range from "Okay, that kinda makes sense" to "What the HELL??" Since there's not a lot of logic involved, more than once I resorted to the old brute-force method of "click everything on everything else until something happens". Maybe everything makes sense if you're a preteen girl, or Japanese, or both. Personally, I found myself cracking up at the sheer weirdness of it all.
I don't think all of this is due to poor translation from the original Japanese text, I really think Atlus did the best they could. But since you can convey a lot more information with katakana than English, the localization people didn't have a lot of text space to work with. I get the impression they really had to condense it to make it fit at all.
The main game is pretty short, with only 4 cases to solve. Even never fully understanding what was going on, I managed to stumble through it in a few hours. Thankfully there is some replay value in the form of some bonus tasks at the end. There's also a scavenger hunt in which Mackenzie finds different objects to touch, and "rates" them according to how they make her feel. (I TOLD you this game was weird!)
In the end Touch Detective isn't a particularly great game, but the odd stories and conversations are endearing, and it was entertaining, so I decided to give it 4 stars instead of 3. I'd recommend it to fans of point-and-click adventures, so long as they come knowing what to expect. But do keep a walkthrough handy, and don't hesitate to refer to it.
 Touchy November 25, 2006
neek (Singapore)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
The DS seems to be the perfect platform for point-and-click adventures, and it's not a surprise to find another quirky mystery game making its way into the library. As far as Touch Detective goes, however, do not expect it to be as compelling as the Phoenix Wright series. Instead, what you would get is a somewhat nonsensical plot involving missing dreams, relocating aliens and an assault case involving fleas.
Gameplay in Touch Detective is as simple as it gets. You use the stylus to perform every action, which you will probably guess anyway from the game's title. These actions will include talking to people (and animals), picking up items, showing items, moving from one place to another, and the likes. When you pick up an item, you can also use the stylus to further examine it. All these are done in the name of finding clues, or rather, cues, to unlock the next event. The game is also pretty linear when it comes to unlock events, as with most adventure games. Unfortunately, the clues to unlock further events are usually non-descript, so expect to experience plenty of standstill if you aren't good in exploring every nook and cranny in the various corners of the town.
Playing as a successor to a detective agency, your character, MacKenzie, will come across some weird cases. Solving a case will unlock the next one, up to a total of four episodes. Upon completion of the last episode, a bonus mission will also be unlocked. This adds some length to a rather short game - if you are very thorough in your investigation, you could probably complete the four episodes in about three to four hours. Apart from just playing through the story, the game also has some collection-based side quests to boot. For example, there's a Investigation Report that details several actions that you will encounter during the game. Many of these options are optional, but as long as you manage to complete all the missions, including the bonus one, you should be able to fill up all five pages of this report.
Another collection-based side quest is the Touch List. There are a total of 50 "touchable" items scattered in the five locations in this game. Touching them with your stylus will add them to the list. The tricky thing here is that some items can only be touched after some actions are performed, so it's not exactly a straight forward, touch-and-go affair. Players who like 100% completion on the games will therefore find more things to do on top of the usual mystery-solving.
The graphics style in Touch Detective looks very much like a Japanese manga. Quirky character designs are blended well with slightly dark shades of colors to provide an unusually gothic feel to the game. This may not good down well with some gamers, but otherwise, it's a bold move that make the game looks different from other adventure games. This itself is a plus point in my opinion. Sound wise, it's pretty much standard fare here. You may, however, find it worthwhile to access the in-game Jukebox to listen to the scores again if you enjoy anime-style audios.
Overall, Touch Detective isn't exactly a great title. It places too much reliance on wild guesses rather than educated deduction. The intentionally silly missions also give the game less credit than it should receive. The biggest problem, however, is that as a detective story, the cases aren't intriguing enough, if at all, for a player with less patience to carry on with it. That said, the more patient players may still find this a neat little title to bring on the road despite its flaws. As for the rest, they should probably give this a miss.
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