Phantom Rhapsody

「論理の旋律は必ず真実を奏でる」

『スパイラル　～推理の絆～』

"The melody of logic will always play the truth"

"Spiral ~ Bonds of Reasoning~

Huh, another mystery about time travel... rather many of them this year...

As far as I can remember, all the mystery videogames I discuss here on the blog are adventure games, with novel games being a subgenre within the adventure genre. That's not surprising of course: a mystery is a carefully plotted narrative with clues and build-up, and what genre of videogames would fit better than the narrative-driven and puzzle-focused adventure game? Games like the Ace Attorney series have you wander around collecting testimony and evidence which you use to solve contradiction-centred puzzles to move the plot forward (in a Columbo-manner), while a novel game like Kamaitachi no Yoru takes on a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure form to allow the player to find the correct route to the solution. Some series will focus more on telling a story than allowing the player to actively solve a mystery (like the Tantei Jinguuji Saburou series), some may focus almost completely on having the player solve a mystery (like Return of the Obra Dinn). But ultimately, these are all games that fall firmly within the broad adventure genre of videogames.

Which is what makes the Nintendo DS game Sigma Harmonics (2008) unique, for this is not 'just' a mystery adventure, it's also a role-playing game, a unique combination. Of course, given that the developer is Square-Enix (of the influential Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series), the fact that this is a Japanese RPG doesn't come completely out of nowhere and given that the JRPG is often a story-driven genre, one can probably imagine that the combination of genres could work. I remember this game was mentioned in a comment to a post early in this blog's lifetime. I think I expressed my interest in the game then, but I only bought it a few years later, and then even more years passed before I actually played it. With this blog over ten years old now, I estimate Sigma Harmonics had been on the list for almost nine years now.

Earth is always threatened by the existence of twilight demons who want to change the flow of time to bring forth destruction, but they find an obstacle in several clans who have vowed to protect Earth with their special powers. High school students Kurogami Sigma and Tsukiyumi Neon belong to such families. The Kurogami family specializes in "tuning" the world, which allows them to repair the changes in time made by the demons. The Tsukiyomi family specializes in combat, allowing deities to possess them during battle. Demons are usually sealed away in the Crack of Time, with the Seal located in the Great Clock in Kurogami Manor, meaning the clans only have to fight the occasional escaped demon. One day however, the Seal is broken and Sigma and Neon awaken in a completely destroyed world, a world where the Kurogami family has been extinct for several generations. They realize that the demons must have changed the past so the Kurogami family died out, resulting in the new present. With "their" present now gone, Sigma and Neon follow the trail through the Cracks of Time to find out what happened to the Kurogamis. They learn that several generations earlier, the whole family died out in "The Kurogami Family Tragedy", a horrible murder case. Because demons are banished into the Cracks of Time, they can not directly affect and kill people in the 'real' world, but they can influence people's minds to give them a nudge in the evil direction and have them kill other people. Sigma and Neon too can only observe short fragments of past events through the Cracks of Time, but this does allow them to solve the murders: by figuring out the truth behind the murder case and identifying the person acting under the demon's influence, they weaken its hold on the timeline, allowing Sigma and Neon to fight the demon and fix the timeline again. However, the demons don't give up easily and keep on picking new murderers and methods to ensure The Kurogami Family Tragedy occurs, while Sigma and Neon are willing to risk everything to recover their own future.

Fighting demons? Changing timelines? Cracks of Time? Definitely not the usual themes you encounter in mystery stories, though far from rare in RPGs. Sigma Harmonics sounds completely nuts as a detective story at first, but it works better than you might expect at first. The gameplay loop basically consists of three elements: an Exploration (adventure) mode, a Battle mode and a Reasoning mode. Each chapter starts with an introduction of the people who lived in Kurogami Manor back then, followed immediately by the murder scene. Then you move to the Exploration mode, where you guide Sigma and Neon as they wander around Kurogami Manor in search for clues. Because Sigma and Neon are stuck in the Cracks of Time, they are only able to see short fragments of the events and conversations that occured back then, so they first have to puzzle together a timeline of the incident for themselves using these so-called "Sound Inscriptions" scattered across the manor and by finding evidence for themselves. As they wander around though, they also encounter minor demons in the Cracks of Time, which Sigma and Neon have to battle (win a fight, earn experience, level up, learn new moves/become stronger, the usual RPG stuff). Once Sigma and Neon have gathered all the necessary evidence, they can start deducing how the murder was committed, and who the murderer is by combining all the facts they found. The story then moves on to the chapter boss battle and after that, the next chapter. Rinse and repeat as the demons cause a new murder in the next chapter.

Sigma Harmonics has a really interesting concept full of potential, but the execution is highly uneven, and on the whole, I can't really recommend the game wholeheartedly. To start with the good: the Reasoning system is fairly original, and the way the mystery part of the game links up to the RPG system is really good. At the end of each chapter, you need to deduce the truth behind the case by answering self-posed questions and placing the various facts you learned throughout your search of the manor on a board, which allows you to generate new insights. For example, you may want to determine who has no alibi, and you accomplish that by combining the Sound Inscriptions that tell you that [A was seen by B], [C, D and E were all together] and [F was not there]. Interestingly, the game will proceed even if you pick the wrong answers/facts at certain times. While you'll be wanting to generate the right answer, the game actually also allows for you to generate false hypotheses, making this a tricky mystery game as the game won't immediately tell you you're wrong, but allow you to build upon your wrong premises. This is something few mystery games allow for, though I've discussed games like Trick DS, Trick X Logic and Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments in the past that do similar things. The brilliance of this lies in the subsequent encounter with the demon possessing the murderer: the chapter boss' strength is directly influenced by how close to the truth you came during the Reasoning section. If you arrived at the completely wrong conclusion, you're in for an impossible fight, while deducing the complete truth weakens the boss so much you can beat them in two or three hits! This synergy between the mystery plot and the RPG battle mechanics is absolutely fantastic, making it really rewarding to solve the crime as best as you can. You can easily defeat the bosses even with minimal character leveling as long as you make sure you identified the correct murderer/murder method.

The RPG battle system has a neat idea behind it too, for those interested in JRPGs. During battle, Neon is the one who will be fighting demons while possessed by a deity, but it's Sigma (the player) who can control her actions, as Neon isn't conscious while she's possessed. Each attack runs on a cooldown timer, so after using a certain move, you need to wait for the timer to recharge again. These timers are connected to a music equalizer and Sigma has the power to change the background music during a battle to change the equalizer and the speed at which certain attack piles recharge. Sigma is also able to change the deity who's possessing Neon during a battle, which also alters her attack style. Interestingly, Neon's apperarance and personality also change when she switches "jobs" and this is also reflected in her dialogue in and outside of battle, giving you different "flavors" of Neon to team up with in the story.

The game also has fantastic production values. The setting of a semi-futuristic Showa-era Japanese manor looks great, somewhat similar to 1920s manors like the Kagetani Manor in Kohakuiro no Yuigon and the Kinema Mansion in Glass Rose. The 3D models of the main characters belong to the best ever put on the Nintendo DS system (the polygon count is crazy!), the music is fantastic and there's some solid voice acting too. Few games on the DS look and sound so good.

So it's such a shame the game is literally filled with small to major annoyances that ultimately bring this game down. It's like the designers decided to make every little thing you do slightly annoying, but it all adds up quickly. Interacting with evidence/Sound Inscriptions isn't just using your stylus on the touchscreen directly, no, it's having to go through a menu first, and then select the "Examine" command each and every time. Some evidence is clearly indicated on the screen with a hotspot; but others aren't for some sinister reason, so you can never be sure what can be interacted with or not unless you try that for every little thing on every screen. Sometimes, evidence can only be interacted with/seen if you're standing immediately in front of it, while in other times, you don't need to do that. Evidence/Sound Inscriptions are also scattered across several timeslots: you may start at 15:00, you search the manor for all the evidence/Sound Inscriptions of that timeslot, then jump back to 14:00, search the exact same-looking manor for the evidence/Sound Inscriptions of that timeslot etc. It's very, very boring as nothing changes between timeslots except for the locations of the evidence/Sound Inscriptions. Random encounters with demons have a load time of a few seconds, which quickly add up. And then you have the so-called Karma demons which wander around the manor in all timeslots. They are incredibly strong (stronger than most bosses) and usually can't be beaten the first time you play this game. The idea is that you evade them as you search the manor for evidence, but that's all they are: an annoyance that force you to take a roundabout route through the manor simply because you can't beat them. It just takes more time (and don't get me started on the Karma that suddenly spawn right in front of the door of the room you're currently in). Karma don't add anything to the game, and don't even give unique rewards if you do manage to defeat them. The Reasoning system can be very finicky about where you need to place your evidence (and restarting a board is cumbersome), while the Battle system is pretty vague about how changing your Job/BGM changes your options during a fight, so usually, you just stick with the same job/BGM with the strongest moves. With enemies that mostly do the same despite different appearances and little room for implementing real strategies, things get very stale soon.

Storywise, there's also a lot of room for improvement. Overall, the story can be pretty interesting: each chapter/alternate timeline features a different murder case, with different people becoming the murderer or victim, and with different murder methods. It's pretty neat how these chapters also link up: some clues carry over to the next chapter, sometimes previous chapters work as misdirection because events seem similar and overall, you can definitely sense that each chapter adds something as you move towards the finale. The mystery plots themselves are not very complex, but as you only see fragments of the case (through the Sound Inscriptions), it can be pretty tricky reconstructing what happened exactly and overall, I found them adequately satisfying, even if a bit vague at times. But the overarching story is also very vague most of the time. A lot of the background story and details are only explained in a sort of encyclopedia hidden away in the menus and never mentioned in the main storyline. Some of these details are indeed trivial and fit perfectly there as an extra, but a lot of is pretty crucial to understand the main storyline of Sigma Harmonics. And even with those hidden extra story explanations, the story lacks cohesiveness. The ending is also utterly nuts. What starts out as a minor time-jumping mystery RPG... well, the transformation in tone and scale in the last chapter, that's like jumping from the first episode of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann straight to the last one. It's like the writer didn't even care about the worldbuilding of Sigma Harmonics anymore and decided to go out with a bang, even if it didn't make any sense or lacked set-up.

Simply said, Sigma Harmonics is a flawed game. The production values are absolutely top-notch, and the concept of mixing the mystery adventure genre with a RPG certainly has potential and it does result in some fine moments in this game, but there are just so many game design choices that don't seem to make any sense, like they were only made to irritate the player. One or two of these misses wouldn't have killed the game, but when every little thing seems to be designed in a way to be just the right kind of annoying, you end up with a game that can't be recommended to everyone. Only try if you're really, really interested to see how the deduction mechanics work in this game or how a mystery RPG could work. This is exactly the type of game that could improve a lot from a remake treatment.

Original Japanese title(s): 『シグマハーモニクス』