London Detective Mysteria English Demo Review

A couple months ago, Xseed released a demo for their first otome game: London Detective Mysteria! (aka Eikoku Tantei Mysteria). I finally got around to playing the demo earlier this month. The demo only covers the prologue, but the game will be released onto both Vita and PC. The full game releases today on the 18th, but for now here's my impressions on the demo.

CHARACTERS

The demo introduces a small amount of the main cast: Emily Whiteley, Herlock Holmes, William Watson, and (Ralph) Pendleton. They're a fun and memorable gang that shine best when combining their abilities. Pendleton would probably be my favorite at the moment, but I don't believe he has a route in the full game regrettably lol.

SYSTEM

I can count only a handful of voiced otome heroines, so it's nice to see that Emily can be added to the list. Considering her age, her voice is fitting. Sadly, only her last name is spoken by other characters, even if the default name is used.

The demo includes the standard visual novel features: auto text, quick save (though quickload is currently unavailable at the moment), backlog, love status, etc. There also appears to be some sort of choice jump system, so that could definitely be helpful depending how long the game is or how often routes intersect.

There is a backlog, however you can't rewind scenes in the demo. You can play audio from it though. Not sure how this will be in the final version.

I'm also not sure if this is a demo thing or if it will be in the final version, but it's interesting that Xseed doesn't watermark their screen shots. I'm usually used to seeing an Idea Factory watermark or something for otome games. Or if you're Aksys, a watermark that takes up a large portion of the bottom corner lmao. Just an interesting sidenote.

ART

If I had to pick my favorite thing about the art, oddly enough it would be the backgrounds! They're gorgeous and extremely life-like. The sprites were also clear, although I felt at times the sprite art is a bit... inconsistent?

I think the ones that bother me the most are Emily and Watson's worried faces. Though I will say that Emily's happy sprite is super cute. Some sprites were remade between the psp and vita versions if I recall correctly.

(Click to enlarge)

The CGs were more consistent and fun. My favorite would be this one:

TRANSLATIONS

For the most part, I'd say the translations were really good. Some liberties were taken but it got the point across (and that's a whole debate I'd rather not get into right now). I don't recall seeing any typos in the demo. However, there were some weird punctuation choices. Ex. to-night, to-day, co-operate.
EDIT: After some research, I discovered that many words were actually spelled with a hyphen during the Victorian Era, and the translators kept it to make the experience authentic. One of the translators, Brittany, mentions that in the third blog post of the official site here, along with other information about her translation process.

I did notice that certain spellings were different like "colour" etc., but considering this game takes place in England, that translation reference was much more obvious to me.

Personally, I feel like Pendleton's speech is too formal, overall. I understand it's meant to highlight the difference in position between him and Emily, but it actually feels a bit clunky to me.

OVERALL

I don't know much about LDM, so I'm not sure if this is the full prologue or an abridged one. Regardless, I had a lot of fun playing this. The plot so far has been engaging, and it's nice to see Emily receive the opportunity to formally be a detective. The characters were interesting enough to make me want to know more about them. All in all, I'd definitely add this to my list of games to check out.

Until next time!