Troublesome Dicks

Troublesome Dicks is a Point-and-click adventure in a film noir detective setting. Set during the Prohibition Era it follows three unsuccessful private detectives who have been unable to get work since crime declined. Although the three are initially at odds, trying to sabotage one another so that they can get the clients that do come in seeking help, they are eventually forced to pair up when they discover what is really going on in the town. Although random encounters do not occur, battles can be initialized with various foes (often initiated by the foes themselves, such as mobsters and JAZZ Police), where they game switches to a turn-based battle system similar to Final Fantasy VII. During certain intense moments that are intended to be timed, these battles may instead happen in real time. The game's title is intended to be a triple entendre: It refers to the group as being detectives ("dicks") who get in the way of the plans of the game's primary (albeit hidden) antagonist; another meaning where the "dicks" refers to them being "douchebags" but with the "troublesome" part meaning the same thing as the first meaning; and a final meaning where it simply has a sexual connotation for no reason at all other than to have one.

There are three main characters in the game: Thor, who has been finding himself only able to sleep in his office; Loki, who has serious anger-management issues and Baldur, who has sunken into a severe depression and finds his only comfort at the bottom of his eighth bottle of cheap wine. There are also two secret characters that can be recruited through the use of proper event taking: Scott Aho, a speakeasy bartender associated with the trio and Detective Doofy, a member of the police force who can be swayed to the dicks' side.

Each character eventually receives a crystal shard embedded in their chests that allows them to "ascend" — or transform — into some form of monster specific to the character to aid in combat, though each with their pros and cons.

Introduction
The game starts out with an introductory cutscene with the starting character, Thor, read in a mock-film noir style. Below is an excerpt from this cutscene:

"It was a dark and tumultuous night. The spiders crawled like goulash across the support beams of my dark and dreary office. The only place lately I could get any sleep. My cup o' noodle burbled like a baby with a bagel, stirring me from the only rest I'd gotten that week. My head was pounding off the drunken stupor of the night before to this and the heady percolating of the coffee pot, sitting in its corner like a prizewinning champion. 'Way too much foam', I grumbled to myself. I didn't even know coffee could get foamy.

''I felt like a thronobulax at a board meeting. The world still spun and whirled, though if it hadn't I may have thought I had already cashed in my chips. I hadn't had a dame call me in 37 days, and despite being on the right side of the law I couldn't help finding myself itching for some perp somewhere to kidnap a hysterical broad's rich husband or steal her precious Maltese chicken. Crime had been lax in the city as of late, at least to a level the fuzz could handle themselves and troubled dicks like me had nothing left to do but sit and twiddle our thumbs or slip into a local speakeasy. One guess as to which choice I came to."''