In 2022, a skeleton appears on the Shijima estate, prompting a mystery author to investigate their strange family history.
In 1972, a hostess tries to protect a singer from murderous threats,
In 1922, a young heiress tries to retrieve her family’s treasure and survive the murder and manipulation from enemies who want it for themselves.
The infamous “Fruit of Life” pops up in all these stories and its promise of immortality leaves violence and betrayal in its wake…
FMV games are strange beasts. They’re often inherently stilted, making long pauses while the actors wait for the player to cooperate and equipped with some actors of questionable quality. But I’d argue that, if you know what you’re getting into, those are features instead of bugs. It's always going to be an interesting balancing act between the constraints of real life filmmaking and creating exciting gameplay. Most of the game is split into two major sections. The investigation phase mostly involves watching a movie and watching the emotional soap drama play out. The game tries to add a sense of player agency by creating time based little button prompts to highlight a clue the characters are discussing, but you’ll receive all the clues at the end of the phase anyway. It's sort of a cheap way to trick players into forgetting how long its been since they pressed a button. The more useful feature, I think, is the suspect/evidence button. This lets you open up some notes while the movie is still playing and review the facts without stopping the ongoing action. It feels like you’re checking your notes with the detectives, and its just a little feature I appreciated.
This was first announced at a Japan-only Nintendo direct and I was 1000% positive this would never receive any kind of English translation. So it was a welcome surprise to see it get the support of an English sub/dub. I experimented with both audio formats a few times, which is relatively easy to change. While I wasn’t expecting too much, I think the English dub is just really unpolished, with voice acting that really contradicts how the actual actors spoke those lines. For example, early in the game, the two main characters are talking about their mutual friend. Haruka says “Are you just here to flirt with her?” The English dub makes her sound accusing, or even jealous. But when I revisited the scene in Japanese, the actor sounds like she’s just playfully teasing. It's the sort of thing that makes you reflect on the art of dubbing and how it works with live action performances. There’s nuances there that feel like they weren’t taken into account.
The deduction phase proper involves piecing together different clues to form your hypothesis. The game dumps dozens of clues on you and encourages you to connect them all. Most of them will probably connect to a bad hypothesis, which could lead you off track, but it also helps narrow down useless clues that you want to get rid of and connect more relevant facts. Its not a perfect system, but among the “put all the pieces together” mechanics that mystery games try to pull off, I can’t find much to really complain about in it.
Honestly, the real highlight of the game is how the whole cast works to pull off this huge narrative. Each actor plays a different character in different eras, which means you get to see how far these actors can stretch their performances. A shy little bookworm in the 2020s is a bitter playboy in the 1970s. A hyper competent assistant becomes a flirtatious mean girl, followed by a nervous, naive singer in another. It's just really fun to see these actors have fun.
Its huge time skipping narrative also means it gets to do really exciting things with recontextualizing characters. In the 2020s, Ryoei Shijima is depicted as a bitter old man who is potentially hogging the Fruit of Life for himself. His son Eiji theorizes that, if this immortality granting fruit exists, Ryoei is selfishly hoarding it from the needy or the scientists that could use it for good. This image of his selfish father extrapolates in Eiji’s mind and convinces him that Ryoei is happily letting innocents die for his own power.
But in the 1970s, we get to see Ryoei in his prime and how his own history shaped his life. He’s introduced explaining how he was outvoted by the other Shijimas. They want to give the fruit to a poor and needy soul… so that they can kidnap that person and experiment on them through generations. When Ryoei hears Eiji talk about using this mythical fruit to give to the needy, he thinks of immoral, violent acts in pursuit of personal wealth.
Both Ryoei and Eiji are motivated by helping others, but they both have different contexts for what that involves. Ryoei sees helping others as doing everything you can to give a person peace. Eiji sees it as doing everything you can to give a person life. That conflict and how they can’t communicate those distinctions to each other makes for some delicious, subtle drama. And its something this game excels at in its lengthy narrative. And its in these storylines where the game excels. These little micro tragedies throughout history are where the game’s at its best.
------
Now here’s a confession, I wrote all of that before I hit the finale, because I was so jazzed on the game I thought I could spew all my thoughts then and there and be ready to post with only minor edits once I was done.
But the finale is… frustrating. For a lot of reasons. I won’t go too deep into spoilers, but here’s a quick layout of the pause menu. Right in the center is a text box labeled “Rules of Reasoning.” Two of the rules are as follow:
There is only one killer in each case, no accomplice
Superhuman abilities or paranormal activities should be ruled out
The final case just kind of ignores those rules right out the gate and just expects you to follow along without any question. And don’t get me wrong, I was all for the game swerving into weird shit. But I also just don’t think a mystery game should… lie? Part of the final case also retroactively reveals that one of your previous successful cases was a frame job. Maybe its ridiculous to be annoyed by that, but when a game steers you directly towards a wrong answer just to reveal how wrong you were for completing the only way to complete the game… It's frustrating. It works in something like Spec Ops the Line, because that game is trying to tell a story about military expansionism and how it justifies itself. But in a mystery game you’ve just dedicated ten hours to… you want the mystery to be fair. Something you can feel accomplished for solving.
Also the epilogue involves a back to back “oh it was gay!” to “oh its When Marnie Was There” and I just despise that shit.
Still, its a really fun experience in spite of how frustrated I got towards the end. Special highlight to chapter 5. Just as the routine of cutscene/gameplay is wearing thin, the game transforms into a first person escape room. It's those creative choices that help me want to forgive this game in the end. You can tell how much fun these people had creating these mysteries, even if they were making things harder for themselves. And it's nice to see Square Enix fund these kinds of projects with that hot FF14 money. With things like this and the Live A Live remake, I hope more of these strange little productions come through the woodwork.
In 1972, a hostess tries to protect a singer from murderous threats,
In 1922, a young heiress tries to retrieve her family’s treasure and survive the murder and manipulation from enemies who want it for themselves.
The infamous “Fruit of Life” pops up in all these stories and its promise of immortality leaves violence and betrayal in its wake…
FMV games are strange beasts. They’re often inherently stilted, making long pauses while the actors wait for the player to cooperate and equipped with some actors of questionable quality. But I’d argue that, if you know what you’re getting into, those are features instead of bugs. It's always going to be an interesting balancing act between the constraints of real life filmmaking and creating exciting gameplay. Most of the game is split into two major sections. The investigation phase mostly involves watching a movie and watching the emotional soap drama play out. The game tries to add a sense of player agency by creating time based little button prompts to highlight a clue the characters are discussing, but you’ll receive all the clues at the end of the phase anyway. It's sort of a cheap way to trick players into forgetting how long its been since they pressed a button. The more useful feature, I think, is the suspect/evidence button. This lets you open up some notes while the movie is still playing and review the facts without stopping the ongoing action. It feels like you’re checking your notes with the detectives, and its just a little feature I appreciated.
This was first announced at a Japan-only Nintendo direct and I was 1000% positive this would never receive any kind of English translation. So it was a welcome surprise to see it get the support of an English sub/dub. I experimented with both audio formats a few times, which is relatively easy to change. While I wasn’t expecting too much, I think the English dub is just really unpolished, with voice acting that really contradicts how the actual actors spoke those lines. For example, early in the game, the two main characters are talking about their mutual friend. Haruka says “Are you just here to flirt with her?” The English dub makes her sound accusing, or even jealous. But when I revisited the scene in Japanese, the actor sounds like she’s just playfully teasing. It's the sort of thing that makes you reflect on the art of dubbing and how it works with live action performances. There’s nuances there that feel like they weren’t taken into account.
The deduction phase proper involves piecing together different clues to form your hypothesis. The game dumps dozens of clues on you and encourages you to connect them all. Most of them will probably connect to a bad hypothesis, which could lead you off track, but it also helps narrow down useless clues that you want to get rid of and connect more relevant facts. Its not a perfect system, but among the “put all the pieces together” mechanics that mystery games try to pull off, I can’t find much to really complain about in it.
Honestly, the real highlight of the game is how the whole cast works to pull off this huge narrative. Each actor plays a different character in different eras, which means you get to see how far these actors can stretch their performances. A shy little bookworm in the 2020s is a bitter playboy in the 1970s. A hyper competent assistant becomes a flirtatious mean girl, followed by a nervous, naive singer in another. It's just really fun to see these actors have fun.
Its huge time skipping narrative also means it gets to do really exciting things with recontextualizing characters. In the 2020s, Ryoei Shijima is depicted as a bitter old man who is potentially hogging the Fruit of Life for himself. His son Eiji theorizes that, if this immortality granting fruit exists, Ryoei is selfishly hoarding it from the needy or the scientists that could use it for good. This image of his selfish father extrapolates in Eiji’s mind and convinces him that Ryoei is happily letting innocents die for his own power.
But in the 1970s, we get to see Ryoei in his prime and how his own history shaped his life. He’s introduced explaining how he was outvoted by the other Shijimas. They want to give the fruit to a poor and needy soul… so that they can kidnap that person and experiment on them through generations. When Ryoei hears Eiji talk about using this mythical fruit to give to the needy, he thinks of immoral, violent acts in pursuit of personal wealth.
Both Ryoei and Eiji are motivated by helping others, but they both have different contexts for what that involves. Ryoei sees helping others as doing everything you can to give a person peace. Eiji sees it as doing everything you can to give a person life. That conflict and how they can’t communicate those distinctions to each other makes for some delicious, subtle drama. And its something this game excels at in its lengthy narrative. And its in these storylines where the game excels. These little micro tragedies throughout history are where the game’s at its best.
------
Now here’s a confession, I wrote all of that before I hit the finale, because I was so jazzed on the game I thought I could spew all my thoughts then and there and be ready to post with only minor edits once I was done.
But the finale is… frustrating. For a lot of reasons. I won’t go too deep into spoilers, but here’s a quick layout of the pause menu. Right in the center is a text box labeled “Rules of Reasoning.” Two of the rules are as follow:
There is only one killer in each case, no accomplice
Superhuman abilities or paranormal activities should be ruled out
The final case just kind of ignores those rules right out the gate and just expects you to follow along without any question. And don’t get me wrong, I was all for the game swerving into weird shit. But I also just don’t think a mystery game should… lie? Part of the final case also retroactively reveals that one of your previous successful cases was a frame job. Maybe its ridiculous to be annoyed by that, but when a game steers you directly towards a wrong answer just to reveal how wrong you were for completing the only way to complete the game… It's frustrating. It works in something like Spec Ops the Line, because that game is trying to tell a story about military expansionism and how it justifies itself. But in a mystery game you’ve just dedicated ten hours to… you want the mystery to be fair. Something you can feel accomplished for solving.
Also the epilogue involves a back to back “oh it was gay!” to “oh its When Marnie Was There” and I just despise that shit.
Still, its a really fun experience in spite of how frustrated I got towards the end. Special highlight to chapter 5. Just as the routine of cutscene/gameplay is wearing thin, the game transforms into a first person escape room. It's those creative choices that help me want to forgive this game in the end. You can tell how much fun these people had creating these mysteries, even if they were making things harder for themselves. And it's nice to see Square Enix fund these kinds of projects with that hot FF14 money. With things like this and the Live A Live remake, I hope more of these strange little productions come through the woodwork.