I'm the only person who cares about this game and that's probably okay.

Scar of the Doll was published in 1999 by an indie vn team called Child Dream. Its hard to get exact information on everyone involved and its even harder to determine if the game made a particular splash on Japan's vn scene. An English release of Scar of the Doll came in 2017 on Steam, nearly twenty years after that original release. Child Dream would later reform as "Mista Stories" and find more recent success building a shogi-themed mystery adventure. Given how much shogi a player seems to need to understand to even play that game, its fairly likely that Mista entry will be kept untranslated.

The story itself starts like any good mystery. Asumi arrives in Tokyo to meet with her sister. Arriving at the college lab her sister is supposed to be working at, she learns that no one in the lab knows who her sister is. In fact, they have no record this sister has ever existed. Asumi must comb through the lab's lies, find her missing sister, and try to find some peace away from the machinations of all these warring, scientific factions.

Scar of the Doll is a fascinating little game. Its instantly obvious as a relic of the 90s from the first visuals you see and its even more blatant as an indie team's passion project the further you go. The writing isn't always polished, there's some odd steps to activate the next event flag, and the sci-fi swerves are just as ridiculous as one might expect. But none of these issues are issues. They're features.

The occasionally clumsy writing also means it obfuscates its twists surprisingly well. Particularly cheesy bits of dialogue or narration often have hidden meanings behind it, which felt really rewarding to notice on a repeat viewing. Even if the prose and dialogue has its issues (which could also just be the translation), the narrative itself is almost airtight. The strength in the remake is how it tightens up those loose ends and small narrative inconsistencies. Everything the remake adds to the story works to make the story better. The most frequent kind of change I encountered in this game is giving characters the time to speak more honestly with each other. A new bad ending where pushing the nervous nerd too hard makes him shut down and get paranoid that you're using him to steal his research. A confrontational character apologizing to you privately, letting his guard down in a way he never quite did before. Even small little optional scenes that help layer the mystery. In the original game, a character's death seems to lose importance almost instantly. In the remake, you can go to the police station and overhear the cover-up occurring in real time, smoothing out that brief narrative annoyance. These scenes just work and show off the ways the writers have improved over the years.

Its the art style I flip-flopped on the most. The nearly watercolor-styled backgrounds and the off-putting character portraits worked together to craft the game's sense of unease. It gave the original game such striking features. Changing to a more modern, anime-stylized artwork allows the characters to express their feelings more clearly. But it also kind of takes away the ambiguity the original portraits offered. You could never get a good read on who was a friend or foe. Because they spent so much time on these expressions, they clearly felt the need to cut out some red herrings from the plot. One secondary character loses a portrait in this new artstyle, and another no longer exists in the plot at all. Losing a good red herring is a sad blow, even if it allowed them to focus on their core cast.

I have to talk about this next part without spoiling anything, so I'm gonna have to invent some fake character names. Wild Card, the Mastermind, Tool 1, and Tool 2.

The biggest changes as a remake, which I can't go too deep into detail on, occur in the ending. Defender of this game that I am, even I will admit that the original ending is rushed through. A few last minute twists pass by so quickly, you barely have time to reckon with what they could possibly mean. This 2022 remake shares most of the original's final plot beats, but it also gives those moments more time to breathe. The Wild Card's motives was completely unclear to me in the original context. I understood his relationship to the plot, but not how that relationship informed his present actions. The remake recognizes this flaw and gives him the time to explain why he seemed to switch sides so much and what his true intentions became in the end. It fleshes out the Wild Card in just really charming ways. By extension, it also gives the Mastermind a truly great send-off. When the Mastermind goes down with his ship, it almost came off like the man had a "explode the building" button on standby. Instead, the remake moves to the scene to a much more logical, more emotionally resonant final location. Letting Asumi and the Mastermind share a complicated final confrontation and letting those raw emotions spill out where they may. It works!

My only real complaint comes down to the fact that... I still want more! Tool 1 and Tool 2 die in the original game, their agency in any of the plot unclear at best. I don't use tools as an insult- their purpose in plot is to hurt themselves and others, over and over on the villain's orders. The remake's ending, to my surprise, spares the two Tools. I was delighted to see what kind of people the Tools were now that they had to act on their own. But ultimately, we don't get a chance to see what that looks like. The two bonus scenarios unlocked after completing the main story never touches on the fate of the Tools. And that's just kind of a shame. Why spare them if their survival doesn't truly add anything new to the story?

But still, I was delighted to return to this. A passion project from twenty years past, still trucking on all these years later. Its just sweet to see.