On Your Tail Review (Banderi)
Normally I despise Ace Attorney/Danganronpa mystery games because I can't get past the writing and the gameplay. The writing in this one is also quite cheesy and it's not my cup of tea, but I can get past it (after turning off the grunts) because of the immaculate 2D art and charming style. The game is filled to the brim with authentic little details and references of a typical Italian town, from the Molise joke (ok that was kind of cheesy, but I'll admit, as an indie dev I probably wouldn't have resisted putting it in either) to the literal hundreds of street signs, graphics, buildings, WW2 memorials, movie posters, etc. that you would see in a little seaside town in Liguria decades ago. Everything is so nostalgic and makes me want to keep playing even if just for that. The 80s summer songs on the Radio Mare Blu make me weep from homesickness - I MUST find them somehow. Shame that they aren't listed anywhere on the OST, I would legit put them in my playlists; I don't think they are actual songs (I couldn't find anything by googling the lyrics) but if they were made by the team... god damn. The level of dedication.
Unfortunately the story itself is kind of bland. Nothing wrong with a simple, lighthearted cartoony story of course- but this is why I hate these games usually: it's a mystery/detective game, damn it, let me be immersed and captivated by the mystery! Let me use my noggin! There is quite literally nothing in these types of games that make any sense in a detective sort of way. The "mystery" minigame is just nonsense trial and error you have to sit through over and over and over with no causal logic behind the events whatsoever at best, and directly contradicting what the characters have said at worst. After reaching the one in the fort and sitting down through countless failed attempts and their unskippable cutscenes, I gave up and looked up the solution in a walkthrough video (THANK you to whomever races the fastest to post full no-commentary gameplays!) and my jaw dropped at the "solution" order of events, which I wouldn't have picked even a million attempts in.
The story is just a pretend investigation to throw over minigames and puzzles. And that's just a topical whiplash that usually I can't get behind. Usually, like I said. This game is so well put together (the waitress & ice cream minigames are actually quite fun) that surprisingly, I don't mind it as much. But this only works because I personally do find the other parts of the game captivating enough; another person, that not be hit by the nostalgia as much as me, probably wouldn't like it very much. Then again, lots of people love Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, so the market is certainly there.
In that sense, this game reminds me a lot of BNA. The story of that show was also objectively trash, but the charm carried it so well, that you could really enjoy it without thinking about it. Unfortunately, it's still a tragedy for me, that loves some good writing. This would have been a god-tier game if only with just a few alterations to the writing style.
The 3D style is fine, but nowhere near the level of quality of the 2D art. The art is top notch and compliments the characters perfectly- while the 3D is more of a middle-of-the-road style with semi realistic lighting and slightly stylized anthropomorphic figures. It works, but I could have seen it much better with, perhaps, a more cartoony cel shaded approach. Then again the contrast is also really cool in and of itself. The lower body proportions are weirdly too small though. The stump feet work with hooves and small kids but not with anyone else. I think they were going for a "chibi" approach but exploded the models to more realistic tones midway through development and forgot to update the feet.
The controls are ok, but a bit underdeveloped. The first person camera is perfectly fine, but the third person camera is very erratic. It follows the model way too firmly and jitters like crazy when going down stairs. It's too sensitive to sudden analog movement spikes without actually raising the max turn speed. It's also a tad too close to the model when indoors (mind you it's a very tough thing to fix in games that use indoor scenes, but there are ways to mitigate it) and the vertical range is quite too narrow; and, lastly, it commits the GRAVEST, UNFORGIVABLE SIN of the vertical speed mismatching the horizontal speed (I'm being facetious, it's not that bad but jokes aside it is there, it's quite annoying when games do that without being able to change it and as a dev it makes my skin crawl)
The game runs mostly fine, though with some very mild hiccups here and there, especially when loading areas while passing under tunnels; another thing that is NOT trivial to fix, even though we love to crap on it a lot as players, but it is there so I wanted to mention it. The follower pop-ins are a similar story - yeah there are ways around it, but for an indie with this amount of work already put in, the fact that they added in followers that don't phase through walls and actually follow a navpath is a great starting point. There's very few other actual bugs that I noticed, one being the character cards being switched *after* the dialogue switch, leading to a one frame flash of the wrong card on screen before it changes. Nothing game breaking, nothing that can't be easily fixed with a patch.
EDIT: Other minor bugs/issues encountered:
- The map's icons are slightly offset to the left leading to mixups reading the streets
- The cards labels in the menus are cut off at the bottom of the screen
- Very rarely, collisions can unload while changing areas leading to falling in the void
- You can pause the game during a load screen, and get stuck if you missed it/don't know
The English translation is quite good, and it keeps the Italian mostly intact for the jokes. I'm not a huge fan of overusing the word "gelato" specifically, because it feeds into the idea that it's an entirely distinct, untranslatable thing (it's literally just the word for "ice cream", there is no other "type" of ice cream in Italy, I know it's made differently in the US but that's simply how they are done here- you wouldn't use a distinct foreign word for every country's slight variation of a dish in the world) but it's a really minor thing. The constant "Santa madre" is also a tad cheesy in English, it feels a bit like an anime protagonist kind of speech quirk, but it does fit with the character writing and it is a legit expression, if only a bit overused.
I am really bad at judging price points so I won't comment on that, but I don't think it's too much asking for such an enormous amount of good work. All in all, this is an insane endeavor that shows the utter passion that only an indie team could put in a game, and their own legit real life experience when designing a place based in Italy. I am proud a game like this came out of my country, and wish the devs nothing but the best in their future projects. I hope they stick with this and iron out just a bit of the controls, and then bask in their achievement, which I really can't help but love!