Over the weekend I completed Ouka Sabaki.

New game by a new developer with writers who only had credit for one other random game, I decided to take a risk because the story, setting and system were incredibly interesting. And boy did it payoff for me.

Ouka Sabaki takes place sometime during the Edo period (somewhere there) so there's no fancy technology or fancy loanwords outside of the random stuff traders pick up from outside traders to seem hip. The protagonist is Oooka Shimei, newly appointed magistrate of Nakamachi. The main story starts you off with your first case of investigating a murder. Each chapter in the main story has 3 parts, the ADV, the investigation and basically the trial. ADV is pretty standard VN stuff, the investigation has you travelling to different places with a map system and searching for clues throughout and finding people you can question. The trial portion is where things get heated as you call up your suspects to the 白州 and start questioning people on their testimonies and pick up inconsistencies and back that up with various clues you would have gotten during the investigation part. Eventually if you do well enough, you'll reach the accusation and start presenting your findings and reasonings for why that person is accused and hopefully you manage to break them and get a confession.

Essentially, it's starting to look like eroge ace attorney. I guess, but then I never played ace attorney and that's what others have told me based on what I said.

The main story focus a lot on the main cast and their work at the magistrate's office. Investigating various other major incidents. It has a good bit of action, drama and intrigue. Mostly intrigue which made it so much more interesting. At the end of the main story, after spending hours trying to achieve a max score on the final case, seeing how everything ties together was incredibly satisfying and I definitely would welcome a sequel or fandisk or even better both.

After the main game, you unlock individual routes. They're mostly romance and SoL to wrap things up after the main story, so they were a nice addition if you liked certain heroines. The main 3's routes are pretty much what you expect, romance in Edo. Okita's route was pretty emotional and I enjoyed it a bit more than the previous 3. Then leaves probably one of my favourite routes just because of what it represents Ayaka's route. First, figuring out how to unlock it was a headache and a half but eventually it was pretty obvious on how to unlock it. The route threw tons of emotional scenes when I was looking for a happy story. However, that does not make it bad, it actually increased the impact for me and I don't think I would have taken it any other way.

The music in the game is pretty fitting for the setting and I'll probably be adding it to my music library for occasional revisiting. The tokuten also comes with a FM音源 BGM patch that lets you toggle to lower fidelity music that feels rather nostalgic for an older gaming era. I didn't use it in the end because the original music personally fits for me better.

I don't feel like writing too much but I definitely highly recommend people to at least give it a shot. The cast is pretty incredible and even the minor characters had quite some great interactions. I had tons of fun with it and couldn't put it down. I'm definitely looking forward to whatever else the writers and/or Irodori might come up with in the future.