Whenever you have a pair of detectives running an agency, you can’t always expect both of them to be around all the time. Sometimes, a case only calls for one person, or perhaps it will take one of the detectives away from the office for a long enough time that the other has to “man the fort” so to speak. This is the case in the latest DLC from developers Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and publisher SEGA for Lost Judgment called The Kaito Files. The question is whether or not this DLC is worth playing?

Story

Yagami is currently away on a case leaving Kaito to be the lone detective at the agency. While he has been spending his time looking for new cases to pick up, a special case is offered to him with a high yielding price - two million Yen upfront with twenty million Yen upon completion. This case is from a respectable businessman named Kyoyo that wants Kaito to find his wife who went missing two years ago, believed to have committed suicide. If Kaito manages to find her alive, there’s a bonus ten million Yen on top of the original twenty-two million.

While he ends up turning this case down initially, the twist of the details is what pulls him in. Not only is the man’s wife Mikiko, a long-lost lover of Kaito’s past, but their son Jun ends up finding him and tells Kaito all about how he believes Kaito to be his real dad. In disbelief of being the true father, Kaito takes on the case with the energetic son in order to find Mikiko. What he didn’t expect was how intense this case was going to end up getting!

Gameplay

Everything in the gameplay segment is pretty much the same as the base game. The main differences would be that there are no side missions and instead of martial art style combat options, you can fight with a bruiser or a tank style. You play as the meathead of the two detectives in the story after all.

Along with that, some of your skills in the skill tree will be locked behind getting a certain amount of specific bonus points at the end of your multiple fight encounters. If not that, then it will be locked behind a skill book or a specific number of tokens that have to be found. But instead of finding them lying around the city like Yagami does, you have to find twenty cats that are lounging around in the city.

The investigation side differs in a big way and the cat search is an aspect of it. Again, as you would expect from a brute like Kaito, you don’t really search with critical thinking. Instead, you have your three primal senses to work with: sight, smell, and sound. There are sound effects in the game that trigger when you need to use different ones, whether to find hidden goods or a lounging cat, but you will need to use all of your primal senses when completing story-based investigations.

Verdict

The Kaito Files are definitely an interesting add-on to the overall Lost Judgment game experience. While I do prefer to play as Yagami over Kaito personally, this is a very similar case to my review of the original game. It has half-decent gameplay, good music and aesthetics, limited replayability, but the story is a shining aspect of the experience. This time, the story had a rather slow start and I didn’t much get into it until near the end of Chapter 2, but once it got interesting, it didn’t stop! So, if you enjoyed the main game, I could definitely see you enjoying this DLC as well.