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“Every case has a truth worth chasing.”

Game Mechanics

Last updated 2022-05-14

Debates

Debates are the "battle" stages in Tears of Themis. The player must win an argument by employing the appropriate cards to lower your opponent's HP to zero. Arguments in stylized text style will come on the screen, respond to these arguments with the appropriate cards in order to defeat the opponent. Each card selection is a turn and the player has a limited amount of turns to complete the stage. Furthermore, whenever the player chooses a card to use, the enemy's "thought cloud bubble" charges. Once fully charged, the adversary will strike and reduce the player's health.

If a player runs out of cards, they can replenish the deck at the cost of 1 turn.

The player will win the stage after all arguments have been defeated. However, if a player runs out of turns or reaches 0 HP, they will be beaten.

Attributes

Arguments and Cards have different attributes: Intuition, Logic, Empathy, or Null (no typing). The three attributes have a restraint relationship: Logic restrains Empathy, Empathy restrains Intuition, and Intuition restrains Logic. Cards with the restrained party's attribute can increase the attack damage against the restrained party's attribute cards by 50%; the opposite will reduce the damage by 50%.

In addition, each thought comes with different combat skills, which can add debuffs and buffs to the opponent and your side respectively. When facing an enemy with higher combat power than your side, you can achieve good results by using the bonuses between each attribute wisely.

The attribute of the chosen card will impact the amount of damage done by a specific attack in the following ways:

  • Strong attacks deal out 1.5x damage
  • Weak attacks deal out 0.5x damage
  • Normal/null attacks deal out 1.0x damage
Icon Attribute Name Relationship
Logic Element Logic Attribute relationship
Intuition Element Intuition
Empathy Element Empathy

Cards

See also: List of Cards

Cards are used to debate the level in the main story and anomaly levels of the game, and is used to reduce the opponent's confidence value to 0 through the restraint relationship of different character's attribute cards. Cards are divided into three attributes: logic, empathy, and intuition, and are colored blue, red, and green. Each of the three attributes has a restraint relationship: logic restrains empathy, empathy restrains intuition, and intuition restrains logic. In terms of the restraint effect, the card with the restrained party's attribute can increase the damage multiplier by 50% against the attack of the card with the restrained party's attribute. Conversely, a card with the attribute of the restrained party can attack the card with the attribute of the restrained party with a 50% damage reduction.

Skills

Each card has its unique set of skills. Some people possess passive abilities. Others have abilities that will only function if you actively employ them.

Cards' skills will aid you in defense by raising your influence/defense stats or decreasing your opponents' stats so that you can easily overcome them.

Some Card Skills will assist you in passively increasing boosts. Formidable cards, for example, increase Influence when equipped with the Support Deck. This, in turn, aids you in fighting difficult opponents, particularly in the Anomaly levels.

Damage Calculations

Attack

playerAttackValue
enemyAttackValue

Defense

playerDefenceValue
enemyDefenceValue


Story Mechanics

Tears of Themis tells its story in a manner similar to visual novels, with dialogue played on the screen and character illustrations in the background. The player is frequently given with a sequence of options. These will not play a significant role in the tale, but are there for flavor and can be replayed afterwards.

The game has investigative and interactive elements in addition to the rest of the plot.

Questioning

Questioning is a game mode where the player questions a particular character to acquire key evidence.

The questions feature sentences that may be selected from a screen. This will start the question and answer discussion with the person with whom you are communicating. These are significant since they will provide you with information on the case and will be utilized as key pieces of evidence later on. Certain phrase alternatives will open up new dialogue that you can use to gain critical information in regards to the case that is to be logged as evidence. What’s more, certain phrases can unlock new phrases which can be asked by the player character.

Clue Analysis

This component of the game is analyzing things, searching for intriguing locations, and attempting to deduce various clues about the case from such item. The item is held in a three-dimensional space, so you’ll have the ability to search around different locales to look for clues.

Inspections

This game mode entails keeping meticulous notes on a character. Inspection entails examining a character for distinguishing features that set them apart from others.

Tapping a crucial region of the character will either initiate dialogue or display a zoomed-in pop-up of the area. You can view the characters in depth after zooming in.

This is also known as character analysis. These are typically simple. Some zoom-in locations may have many clues, so keep an eye out while looking!

To aid your search, use the magnifying glass in the upper left corner of the screen.

Investigation

During the investigation mode, the player will be shown situations in which they must search for evidence and items via tapping. There are additional items where dialogue can trigger a scene, although this may not be adequate evidence.

If having trouble finding items, use the magnifying glass in the upper left corner of the screen to show key evidence items.

Trials

At the end of the majority of episodes, players will compile all of their evidence to present in court in an attempt to win for their client. This is where your collection of evidence will come into play. All the clues and proofs you have collected will be used in the court to win the trial for your client in action.

As the trial progresses, the judge will ask for specific evidence to decide conclusions. You will not be penalized for selecting the incorrect evidence because you will be given the opportunity to choose as many times as you desire.

There are some trial sections where you must choose between two different dialogue options. For the most part, any option is acceptable because you can either repeat the trial or continue with slightly varied vocal selections for a few lines.