Yesterday Love

In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.

"Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There"

It was only while I was reading up on the topic of today's review, that I realized I was going back in time with reviewing these Kanno games. Heck, I didn't even know that Tantei Shinshi DASH was one of his games...

Kanno Hiroyuki (1968-2011) was a game designer and scenario writer who's remembered for working on adult graphic adventure games, some of which have made major impact on the history of adventure videogames in Japan. When I say adult graphic adventures, I mean, 18+ with nudity and explicit sex scenes, so in essence story-driven porn. Kanno however was a profound fan of classic mystery fiction, and his major works are also interesting examples of mystery adventure games, often with a science-fiction angle, but with said porn iadded. Due to different regulations for the home console videogame market in Japan, the PC games Kanno designed/wrote were usually censored/altered to remove all the explicit content/rewritten whenever these games were ported to home consoles, and I have reviewed two of his games in the past. Kanno's best known game is perhaps YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World, which I haven't played through yet, but in the past I have reviewed the 'safe' console versions of Tantei Shinshi DASH! (2000) and EVE burst error R (modern remaster of a 1995 adventure): these were both games I did consider flawed in terms of design, but which also offered interesting concepts as mystery-themed adventures.

DESIRE remaster ver. is as the title suggests a remastered version of DESIRE - Haitoku no Rasen ("DESIRE - Spiral of Immorality"), a science-fiction mystery adult adventure game originally released in 1994 on PC-9801 systems, with the remastered version available on Windows, PlayStation Vita and Nintendo Switch. Desire is also the name of the mysterious laboratory on a small island in the South Seas, an institution financed completely (including the island) by the powerful Granchester Foundation. The island is sealed away from the rest of the world, with more than hundred researchers and maintenance staff living more-or-less permanently on the island. While Desire is supposed to be doing research that 'benefits the link between man and ecology', nobody seems to know exactly what is being researched here (not even the researchers and engineers), providing soil for rumors like Desire being a site for the development of military equipment. While Desire has always been shrouded in mystery, one day SNT reporter Albert learns he's been invited to do an interview with Dr. Stelladovic, the head of Desire. Albert's girlfriend Makoto happens to be the head engineer at Desire, whom he hasn't seen in months, so the invitation is accepted at once, but Albert remains cautious. For why call for a reporter now, after so much secrecy, and why him, a reporter of a small news agency? At arrival on the island, Albert finds the young girl Tina on the beach who suffers from amnesia, but that's not the only thing that's odd about the island, as he slowly learns that Desire is not at all what everyone, including the researchers working in the lab themselves, thinks it is.

DESIRE is also an absolutely horrible game to struggle through if you're only interested in the science-fiction mystery aspect of the story. With Tantei Shinshi DASH! and EVE burst error R, I knew that they were originally adult graphic adventures that were toned down later, and while it was never hard to guess what the awkwardly written kiss scenes in the censored versions actually were in the original, uncensored versions, at least the core design of these games and story were still focused on a mystery plot. In DESIRE, there is a core science-fiction mystery plot that taken on its own, does really make an impression and in hindsight is nicely foreshadowed (even if it's not a fair-play puzzle mystery exactly), but the plot is stretched out very thinly to hang horribly written and barely disguised adult scenes and/or innuendo-filled dialogues from, and it's basically impossible to sympathize with any of the characters (save for the young Tina) as everybody is just flirting with everyone and sleeping, errr, passionately kissing around in incredibly unbelievable 'plot' developments. Sure, this was originally an explicit adult graphic adventure, so I guess it's supposed to be like bad porn (and the console versions aren't even porn due to censorship), but there's actually a good idea in there underneath that all, a plot would've been so much more entertaining and enjoyable if not for these obnoxious characters and horribly written dialogue that make the game a true trial to get through. In comparison, the Kamiki Raichi novel series by Hayasaka do feature explicit sex scenes, but at least Hayasaka makes sure to actually implement those scenes for a reason, as they are always integral part of the core puzzle plot, for example because seeing a person naked herself allows Raichi her to rule that person out as as the murderer. That's not the case with DESIRE, where none of the implied sex scenes are even remotely necessary to the core story and only serve as distractions as the story seems to jerk around between extreme mood swings, with plot-important dialogues suddenly turning into passionate kissing scenes from one moment to the next.

EVE burst error (1995) introduced a Multi Sight System, where the player could jump on the fly between two narratives with two different protagonists and you could only solve the case by going through both stories. The older DESIRE uses a more primitive version of this concept: you start the game playing as Albert, learning about what happens at the island and inside the Desire lab. Curious events happen over the course of four days, some even deadly. Once you have finished his scenario, you can replay the game as his girlfriend Makoto. Her scenario shows things from a completely different perspective, so events that raised questions or seemed mysterious in Albert's scenario, are explained in Makoto's story. By completing Makoto's story, you unlocked a third scenario, which answers some remaining questions. In theory, this subsequent jumping from one perspective to another can be used to bring pretty interesting mystery stories, with multiple people seeing the same events from various perspectives, each point of view answering questions raised by other story routes. In practice, it feels just like padding to have more innuendo-filled conversations and build-up to the sex-scenes-censored-into-kiss scenes in this game. Albert's scenario is basically just him flirting with every girl he sees and of course every girl falling for him like that in the span of four days, while Makoto's scenario... it's really, really awful and almost torture to get through.

The thing is, I do think that in essence, DESIRE has a very emotional and touching science-fiction mystery plot. It might not be a fair play puzzle plot mystery, but dig between the awkwardly written scenes of both Albert and Makoto's scenarios, and you'll also come across little instances of competent foreshadowing and build-up to reveal a mystery plot, a concept that one is not likely to forget soon. As you go through the final scenario, you'll realize how a lot of the small comments in the dialogues or actions of certain characters suddenly make sense now and the story itself is truly heartbreaking. But it would've worked much better as a focused short story, rather than how it's done now. There are still unanswered questions/scenes that don't make much sense, so surely this story would've benefitted so much if it had been written as a proper, focused science-fiction mystery adventure game, rather than a science-fiction mystery adventure game that also needs to perform as porn.

In the end, I really can't recommend DESIRE remaster ver., even if it's a very early example of a science-fiction mystery adventure, providing a lineage from DESIRE/EVE to more current mystery games like the Zero Escape series. I do really like the core idea of DESIRE, but for me, it would've worked much better if it had not been conceived as an explicit adult graphic adventure game, and if basically all the characters were completely different for there's basically only one character who's likeable in the whole game now. When I played EVE burst error R, I was also slightly annoyed by awkward writing due to the adult parts, but at the very least, EVE burst error felt more balanced and the story was also better suited for a longer experience. That balance is missing in DESIRE, and you basically have a good, if short science-fiction mystery story that is trapped by awful characters.

Original Japanese title(s): 『DESIRE remaster ver.』