Statements are limited by the number of Proposal Points you have.
Control is completely done via the stylus and once it is your turn to make a statement, you’ll find a screen full of speech bubbles, each filled with the colour coded words “Trust”, “Suspicion” or both along with arrows pointing up or downwards next to them. All you have to do is then drag one of these bubbles onto another character’s portrait and a statement will be made but there are limits. Everyone is assigned a set number of “Proposal Points” at the beginning of a Kira Game and how many of these points you use depends on the kind of statement you use. Points can also be used for “Special Statements” which will allow you to use a character’s unique ability such as reducing your own suspicion level to zero.

After a certain number of statements, a full turn ends and it’s voting time. Every character puts a vote towards the person they think is Kira and if there are enough votes, that person is arrested. Those with high suspicion levels are very likely to end up with large number of votes but on the other hand, high trust levels between characters mean they’ll less likely suspect each other so it’s up to you to keep yourself to make good use of your points.


It’s voting time. Have you caught the right person?
Of course, a Death Note game wouldn’t be complete without letting the player make use of the Death God’s tool. If the target you’re after isn’t captured during a vote then you will have a chance to your skill depending on who’s role you are in. In Kira’s role, you’re allowed to kill off a person with the Death Note but unfortunately, you don’t have the fun of writing names even though you’re playing the game on a DS. However, using it also has its penalties. If you fail to kill off L then you end up with your Proposal Points halved. Similarly, you lose points when playing as L for each wrong arrest made so it’s all about strategy in the Kira Game and spotting patterns. Difficulty varies from time to time but often only one character shows the pattern you’re looking for making it fairly easy to catch out your rival.


Can’t forget the Death Note, can we?
Besides trying to catch your rival, each Kira Game you play in Story Mode also has an optional condition that you can fulfil to earn yourself an apple, Ryuk’s favourite snack. By earning enough of these, you can unlock hidden characters for Single Play Mode and the bonus episode I mentioned earlier. Interestingly, if you try to restart a game, the character you’re after is almost never the same so you can’t try to mimic the quick save method to cheat your way through. It also adds a flexible level of difficulty to the game because while beating the main objective of catching your rival is fairly easy (it’s only time consuming), fulfilling the optional conditions isn’t so easy.

On the other hand if you have enough of the story or just want to have a quick Kira Game, Single Play Mode allows you to customise your own game letting you to choose which character you want to play as and also set the rules such as how many Proposal Points characters start with. And if you think playing against AI opponents is too easy, you can even have a wireless match with another player.