Accuracy of Death

これは、映画なのか？ゲームなのか？

『Death Come True』

"Is this a film? Or a game?"

"Death Come True" tagline

We usually expect to find the name of the author on a novel, and the same holds for the screenplay writer in film credits, but it took a while before we got proper crediting in videogames. Up until the mid or late nineties, it was still pretty common to find aliases in videogame credits, as many videogame companies didn't want individual employees to be credited by name. Crediting could also be vague: you usually had segments like "Music" and "Programming" in videogame credits, but finding out who wrote the story or the actual text in a videogame could be a lot trickier, as this work was usually done by planners, but planners don't exclusively work on story, so you could never know who the writers were on a videogame. It's pretty hard to find proper writing credits for the majority of the Detective Conan videogames for example, as they have been around since the original GameBoy era. Things are different nowadays thankfully, allowing you to finally identify videogame writers you like.

Kodaka Kazutaka is an interesting case for myself, as I had played a few videogames written by him long before I became aware there was such a person. Kodaka became famous with the Danganronpa videogame series, a high-paced, quirky courtroom mystery game with psychodelic presentation and a script filled with pop culture references. I started with the series in 2012 with the first game, which is when the name Kodaka was first registered in my head, but later I heard he had also written some other videogames I enjoyed. While Danganronpa was Kodaka's own creative invention, he had previously worked as a freelance scenario writer for videogames, and it was during this period he wrote a lot for the Tantei Jinguuji Saburou franchise, writing both original stories for mobile phone releases as well as a few Tantei Jinguuji Saburou novels (Shinjuku no Bourei and Kagayakashii Mirai). The Six Sheets of Crime had always been one of my favorite entries in the Tantei Jinguuji Saburou mobile phone series, so I was quite surprised to learn that that was one of Kodaka's contributions. What was even more surprising was that Kodaka was the writer on the Detective Conan and Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo crossover game Meitantei Conan & Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo: Meguriau Futari no Meitantei ("Detective Conan and The Young Kindaichi Files: The Chance Meeting of the Two Great Detectives"), a Nintendo DS game which was a lot better than I ever dared hoped for.

As I had somehow managed to play all of Kodaka's mystery-related videogame output without ever planning for it and had indeed enjoyed most of them, it was only natural I'd keep an eye on him to see what he'd put out next. Death Come True (2020) is Kodaka's latest mystery videogame and was released this week. As you may have noticed from the screenshots though, Death Come True looks completely different from the previous games Kodaka worked on, as it makes use of Full Motion Video (FMV) filmed with actors, including Kuriyama Chiaki (Gogo Yubari in Kill Bill) and popular voice actor Kaji Yuki. I believe Kodaka studied something film-related in college (which is how he eventually rolled into the game industry), so in a way, him working on a game like this makes a lot of sense. The story does start with a familiar trope you see in a lot of Kodaka's other videogames: the protagonist waking up and having no idea what happened. The noise of a ringing phone wakes a young man lying on a hotel bed. At first, he's dazed and has no idea what happened to him, but a look in the mirror makes him realize he has no memories of who he is and why he's in this hotel room. But the television soon gives him some answers: the photograph of the serial killer Karaki Makoto shown in the news is the same face that looked back at him in the mirror. Confused, "Makoto" looks around his hotel room, only to find an unconscious woman tied up in the bathroom. This is followed by a loud knocking on the door by a police man who wants to take a look inside, a start sign for the evening of fright awaiting Makoto, where he needs to solve the mystery of who he really is and what he's doing in this hotel.

Interestingly, this game starts with a video message by the actor of Makoto, Hongou Kanata, asking the player not to spoil the story to others, kinda like the warning you get in the stageplay of Christie's The Mousetrap. The screenshots used in this article are just from the trailers, so I assume that's all safe.

Death Come True's promotion tagline was "Is this a movie? Or a game?" and that is definitely a fitting line. The game plays like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure: most of the time, you'll be watching a live-action drama, but once in a while this video will stop and you'll be prompted to choose how to proceed with the story next. For example, in the earliest part of the game, you can choose to open the door for the policeman knocking on the door, or to hide. These choices influence how the story will develop: a wrong choice usually ends up killing you one way or another, while the correct choice will of course progress the story. There are also moments where you are forced to experience a game over first, but that allows you to make new choices that weren't available the first time. The game thus revolves around finding the correct route (the correct sequence of choices) that will allow Makoto to figure out what is happening and why he's here. The game is not very long, and the first playthrough will probably take you about the time of a movie, which again invokes the tagline "Is this a movie? Or a game?"

But I think that ultimately many players will ask themselves: "Was it really necessary for this story to be told in the format of a videogame?" The limited scope of the game, the short play-time and the presentation don't really benefit the story that much to be honest. There are actually very few branching points in the story, and you only get to choose between two options of which one is almost always blatantly going to lead to a game over screen, so the whole experience is quite linear. Comparing Death Come True to other games that follow a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure approach (novel games) like 428 and Kamaitachi no Yoru is almost like night and day. Sure, Death Come True may have fully acted video sequences from start to finish, but because the game's so short, it's very simple to figure out what choices you should make. Whereas games like 428, Machi and Kamaitachi no Yoru have a looooooot more branching story paths and choices, which makes it a lot trickier to figure out what the correct route is. In those games, you really have to track your choices in a flowchart to see how the story changed at all the branching points, while in Death Come True, there's no flowchart function in the first place and each time you make a wrong turn, you're just returned to the previous branching point, allowing you to correct your mistake immediately. Because of that, you often feel like Death Come True might as well have been "just" a movie, as the branching points don't really add that much to the narrative and most players will experience the story in the exact same order anyway.

A game like Kamaitachi no Yoru makes pretty interesting use of the branching story structure to convey its mystery plot: even if you end up on a story route that'll get you killed, you usually can find small clues here and there that help you solve the overall mystery, and it's by combining the information you find across all branching routes that allow you find the correct route. The player is encouraged to try everything out to gain more information, and it also challenges the player to remember those small clues when making subsequent story-changing choices. However, due to the smaller scale, Death Come True often fails in really incorporating the player into this decision making. Most of the time, the story will more or less tell you what to do next, instead of relying on the player to figure out what the correct choice is. This is definitely partially because there are so few branching points in the first place. But nine out of ten times, it's like the story just gives up on being a game, and has the full motion video explain everything, without testing the player whether they actually paid attention or not. And in the remaining instances, you'll notice some kind of clue and expect the story to test you on that at some point in a clever way, only for the story to suddenly put a spotlight on that clue and to telegraph very clearly you should remember this and that this will be coming back in two minutes and that you should make your choice based on this clue. It tends to make the player a very passive part of the game. Of course, I understand that having to film more branching storylines/introducing more branching parts to bring out its potential as a videogame would've made this game more expansive and expensive, but as Death Come True is now, I don't think having it as a normal movie would've hurt the story in any way.

Taken as just a mystery story, Death Come True will definitely feel familiar to those who have played more videogames by Kodaka, especially Danganronpa. Story beats like the protagonist with amnesia, the closed circle situation and attempts at providing meta-criticism on the videogame medium are his bread and butter. I don't think the story is bad per se, but I feel there's a lot of untapped potential here. Had this been a game with a larger scope, there would've been more time to flesh out the characters (some of them don't even add anything to the overall plot now), more room to flesh out the clues and perhaps even allow the player to be more involved with the mystery solving process. The story of Death Come True feels a bit rushed as it is now and especially near the end, when the game finally tries to give the player a bit more agency in solving the mystery, it feels lacking as a lot of story elements just didn't have any time to really settle. One moment in the climax where the player *should* be feeling triumphant for pointing out a contradiction for example, feels disappointingly shallow as the game couldn't have gone more out of its way to tell you what that contradiction was, instead of letting the player solve it themselves and it doesn't help that this happened just moments earlier, so the clue never had any time to bury itself and remain hidden. Clues usually feel more rewarding if you do register them initally, but forget about them and only recall them at the necessary moment, but in Death Come True, everything you need to know is always told like one minute earlier.

And as a side note: all the Danganronpa games start with the respective protagonist waking up with amnesia, and the story is always about figuring out why they and the other members of the cast are locked up in a closed circle situation. So having amnesia is a fundamental part of the plot there. But Kodaka also likes the amnesia trope, or the 'knocked out and I can't remember exactly what happened' trope in the stories he wrote in his freelance days. Kodaka wrote four Tantei Jinguuji Saburou mobile phone games in total, and two of them use the same trope. In Search for the Dying Smoke! the player takes on the role of Jiinguuji's assistant Youko and his friend in the police Kumano, as Jinguuji himself suffers from amnesia. The Square Trap starts with Jinguuji being asked to transport a suitcase with money, but he's knocked out and wakes up in a room with a dead man lying next to him. And in the Detective Conan & Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo game, Hajime is knocked out early in the game only to wake up on a very mysterious island. Kodaka really loves this trope.

Death Come True did not redefine FMV games the way Her Story did and while I like the basic concept of the game and the story, as it's done now, I don't feel like the videogame medium adds something significant to the mystery plot. In fact, we have seen many of the story elements of Death Come True in movies before and while videogames excel in presenting branching narratives in a clear way, Death Come True doesn't feature nearly enough branching points to actually make full use of the videogame format. It's not a bad game per se, but I would've been willing to pay for a larger-scale game if that meant we'd see a more fleshed-out world and a story that made better use of the videogame format.