Samurai of Hyuga Book 3

I liked this game a lot more than the first two in the series. Those leaned heavily on anime tropes and picked some of ones I don't enjoy as much mixed in with the ones that do.

This entry keeps the best part of the series (good action scenes, strong themes and well-distinguished characters) and less of the bad parts. It also adds new mechanics.

The first third or so of the game finishes off Samurai of Hyuga 2 with a detective scenario. I love mystery/detective games so that colored my perception of the rest of the game in a positive light. It has an unusual pattern; I've made classifications of IF mystery games before and written about them in posts, but this is a little different. IF mystery games usually have one of the following ways to model deduction (this is copied from a different post of mine):
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This game is most similar to 3, except instead of one quiz, there are a couple of dozen mini-quizzes to see if you're paying attention.

Sometimes the logic of the author wasn't clear to me, so I used a guide on and off, both here and to keep my attunement high later.

I felt more engaged in the game because of this. The subject matter was very heavy, but the interactions were more enjoyable than other entries in the series.

The second half of the game involves you confronting the next Demon in the series, a powerful general of an army. At this point, I got a bit confused, as I was reading in bits and pieces over a week. I somehow got roped into training soldiers for a competition, my ninja companion went away, and one of the general's samurai killed three other samurai, and I don't know why (probably because I didn't accompany them when given the choice). So I was lost a bit.

But, I ended up losing my nerve as a ronin while also training a bunch of new people. The goal became to identify each person's nature, what they needed, and to strengthen up.

Again, I liked this section a lot. Again, my mind wasn't always in sync with the authors, so I used a guide sometimes (but I do that with a ton of parser games, so...). I liked the ending.

This episode really turned around the series for me. I said that I wouldn't have continued past Samurai of Hyuga 2 if I weren't reviewing all Hosted Games, and that's true, but since I did try it, I'm glad.