case by case: GAA 2-3: harebrayned schemes
Welcome back once again to Case by Case, our Monday ritual in which we talk about murders. Last week we went back in time to help out a beleaguered budding novelist once again; this week, we are shattering our client's hopes and dreams! Spoilers, as ever, below.
I knew, going into this one, that it was going to be a long one, but I wasn't entirely clear on the why. It wasn't that long in my memory; as it turns out, it's because it is a case where, alongside the little The Prestige murder mystery we're dealing with, we're also learning about Dracula's dark past and getting some big setup for the grand reveal at the end of the game. It's like two cases in one!
It opens up fairly straightforward, with an investigation segment where we aren't really allowed to investigate very much, and then we take a seemingly unrelated detour to the wax museum owned by the hot witch lady everyone likes, and find out that a wax figure of a mysterious serial killer has been stolen. Some attempt is made to draw a connection to the current investigation, but it's pretty sparse. Then we have a trial segment which ends up feeling mostly expository; the core question is: do we protect our client's innocence, or try to prove that his science quackery is not quackery? (The game makes it very clear that it is definitely quackery; we are not meant, at any point, to believe that it is a non-quackery situation.) It's . . . not as hard of a question as I think the game wants us to believe, but Ryunosuke is struggling with it, so he needs Susato to show up and remind him what his job is.
We are able to prove that the experiment was, in fact, quackery about halfway in, which then frees us up to investigate for reals. We get our suspect, who tries to blow up the evidence and is only partially successful, and we do a lot more delving into the so-called Professor murder case from last time.
Also we find out Kazuma is still alive, so that's nice. As twists go, on some level it feels expected--we clearly weren't done with him as a character--but on the other hand, it didn't seem that heavily foreshadowed. He's now hanging out with van Zieks as his assistant slash apprentice, for reasons that aren't clear but involve Lord Stronghart (whose full name Mael Stronghart, and this case I noticed that's actually a pun on "maelstrom heart", so that's fun), and until the end of this case he had amnesia so that's why he's wearing a mask and cloak. And indeed, most of this case involves litigating the events of ten years ago, and not a whole lot involving this particular crime. (Van Zieks even comments on this, suggesting he had forgotten who was actually on trial here, which is admittedly pretty funny.)
This is the extent of my actual knowledge about this game; I stopped here because I had been really blitzing through these cases and getting hit with a surprise eight hour case prompted me to take a break, and I just never got back to it. So let's go over what we know now, before we delve into what I am given to understand is a long two-part finale.
Ten years ago, a fellow called the Professor did some serial killing of rich people in England; he was caught and allegedly executed, except the execution was actually faked, except someone apparently shot and killed him when he was trying to escape the grave he had been buried in. The Professor, as it turns out, was, in fact, Kazuma's father, and Kazuma's secret mission appears to have involved that in some way. The Professor is also the man who murdered van Zieks's brother, so that's why van Zieks is so racist about Japanese people. Also he did his murders using a large dog, so the whole Baskervilles thing from a while back is coming back. Oh, and we found out that Jezaille Brett was a pseudonym and her name is actually "A. Shinn", which, if memory serves, was one of the names on that mysterious list at the end of the last game. If I were to call my shot right now, we're going to end up proving that Kazuma's father was innocent, but . . . who knows, this game gets dark sometimes. Maybe our BFF is just related to a serial killer.
Even though I paced myself and played this through in two shorter sessions rather than one long one this time, the pacing on it is still a little odd. It feels like it's mostly setup for what's coming, and I can't help but feel that some of that expository burden could have been shared by the previous case. There are some genuinely good moments for our main cast of characters, and there is something novel about the twist being that the autopsy report was falsified by the coroner, but . . . overall this one has what in the literary world you might call book two syndrome. It's there to get us from where we are to where we're going, and it somewhat flags on the way there.
Still, onward and upwards! We've got two more cases to go, each clocking in at about six hours a piece, and this time I am fired up to get to the end. So join me next week, friends, as we begin, at long last, to bring this story, and this series, to its conclusion. I'll see you then.