De Ja- I'm only a couple hours into this, but I thought I would give a preliminary report since runin is dying to find out about this game. First off let me say that if you don't know any japanese and don't understand why other people who don't would want to play a Snatcher-style adventure game, well I don't know exactly myself. Usually I stay away from these types of games, but De Ja intrigued me for a few reasons- the Indiana Jones setting, the really nice artwork, and the fact that every single line in the game is spoken (I can pick out a few japanese words here and there, so that is a huge help). So far it hasn't been too overwhelming, and I've been able to figure out basically what's going on.
The intro starts with some dude in a mayan(?) temple, stumbling across some treasure. There's a sceptre he really digs, but as he's freaking out about finding treasure, a hot chick in white appears behind him. The graphics are really nice during this part, but strangely there's no sound other than voices! She eventually turns into a huge monster and he falls down into a chasm, then the game flash forwards to Japan in the present day (I assume), and you play the part of a small time private eye. An old man arrives and gives you the sceptre you saw in the intro, and that's where your adventure begins. Right now I'm moving around town talking to people, getting information on the sceptre. The game is nice enough to show animated little icons for your commands so you always know what you're doing (speaking is a little face moving it's mouth, showing items is a little backpack opening, etc). Moving around town is done by menu command too, there's a little walk icon then you can pick where you want to go. It's pretty easy so far, and inventory management seems limited to just showing stuff to people so far, I don't really forsee any King's Quest type puzzles.
The voices are all great, and you can turn them off if you want to, but since they add to the experience I leave them on. One thing that kind of sucks is that the music is all in PSG (is that the right term?) format, no redbook since the whole CD is packed with voice acting. The music is still great though, in fact the theme that plays when you're at your office is lifted right from the vocal line from an old BeeGees song. Everytime I go back to my office I can't stop humming disco, it rules.
The only problems I've had so far are that some of the animation is a little wierd, like whoever programmed it didn't really know what they were doing. Sometimes things anime really smoothly (like background animation), but during the cinemas wierd things happen like the whole character disappearing then reappearing in a different pose, or a mouth not moving until halfway through their speach. It's not a big deal, but it's just odd since the art and graphics are so polished otherwise. I mean it seems like NEC really, really went all out with this game, I've played the original version a little on an X68000 emulator and it's obvious they had to redraw everything, record voices, even add the cinemas since I don't remember a cool intro on the X68000 version.
I think runin would love this game, and anybody else who enjoys digital comics. I'm going to keep playing, I'll give an update if I encounter a game stopping part where you absolutely HAVE to know japanese to progress.
