Death of a Butterfly

 ゴキゲンな蝶になってきらめく風に乗って

今すぐ キミに会いに行こう

「Butter-Fly」（和田光司）

 

I'll become a happy butterfly, and glide on the glittering wind

To come see you right away

"Butter-Fly" (Wada Kouji)

Oh man, I have a backlog of more than ten unwritten review posts now. I really should get started on them and not play videogames...

Buddy Collection is an ongoing episodic otome-lite mystery videogame developed by Narutrick, which can be played for free on browsers and smartphones. The overarching story is about Nagisa, a student of a detective high school with the curriculum not only including theory classes on various topics of use for detectives, but also practice classes where the students get to work on real cases for study credits. The school also utilizes a 'buddy' system, with two students always working together. Nagisa and her buddy belonged in the top A Class of the school, but during one of their investigations, Nagisa's buddy went missing and she lost her memory. During her recovery, she's put in the lowest E Class, which consists of three students who have trouble finding a right buddy due to personal problems. Each episode in this series has Nagisa working with three possible E Class buddies on different cases, while she also slowly uncovers more about why she lost her memories and where her own buddy has gone to.

In 2018, an enhanced version of the first episode was released on Switch with the title Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- ("Buddy Collection If -The Red String of Fate-") and while it was a short and simple game, I did find it entertaining and was looking forward to more of this series be released. As I am writing this post, three episodes are already playable for free on PC/smartphone, but it seems developer Narutrick has some problems getting these regular episodes out on Switch. That's why they created a completely original Buddy Collection entry exclusively for the Switch, as a side-story occurring somewhere during the events of the main episodes. Buddy Collection Extra - Kochousou no Kimyou na Gonin ("Buddy Collection Extra - The Curious Five Persons at the Butterfly House") starts with Nagisa being sent off on a case with a buddy of her choice, but to the duo's surprise the case is solved almost immediately. They make their way back to the train station, but all trains have stopped running due to the storm, and it's impossible for the two to find a hotel. Luckily for them, their client contacts them: with the storm going on, it's too dangerous to ask them to come back to their place to stay for the night because it's too far, but she arranges for Nagisa and her buddy to stay at the place of someone she knows who lives near the station. The two high school detectives are picked up by Outarou, a somewhat shifty man who lives in the Butterfly House, indeed not far from the train station by car, but still located right in the middle of a lonely forest. He tells his two new guests that he has three other guests staying at his house that evening too: friends of his sister Ageha who died exactly one year ago. She committed suicide one year ago by setting fire to her room, but while her brother arrived before the fire really got going on, she had already passed away due to the smoke. During the evening, Nagisa and her buddy notice that there's some tension in the room and that there's more to this gathering of Outarou and Ageha's three friends, but the two detectives couldn't have known that the following morning, they'd find one of them would be murdered. Due to the storm and the very sturdy exterior lock, it's unlikely the murderer is an outsider, so who of the remaining people in the Butterfly House is the murderer and why?

The Buddy Collection games are a combination between novel games (digital Choose-Your-Own-Adventure games) and otome games (story-driven videogames targeted towards women that usually focus on a protagonist developing a romantic relationship with one of the eligible characters): in the first episode, picking a certain buddy meant you'd spend more time with them, learn more about their backstory and even slightly alter the mystery plot because each of the buddies had different talents. Buddy Collection Extra builds on this idea in an even more entertaining manner: at the start of the game, you get to pick who your buddy will be, and each buddy actually leads to a completely different murder mystery set at the Butterfly House: all the scenarios feature different murder victims, they're killed in very different circumstances and the clues leading up to the confrontation are also all different. So you're basically getting three different stories that happen to be using the same basic setting. I started the game with Haruka as my buddy for example, and the victim in that scenario was someone who lived in the two other scenarios. The different scenarios also make good use of the various talents/characteristics of the various buddies: Shingo for example has an instinct to just make correct guesses and while that puts him on the trail of the murderer of his scenario very soon, he has trouble finding actual evidence to support what his gut feeling is telling him, while Haruka has trouble getting things done because he can't physically stand seeing blood.

Also: you know something is going to happen in the Butterfly House because for some reason all the rooms lock automatically. Why would anyone have autolock in their own home?!

So basically, you're presented three different murder mysteries in this game. None of them are really long (an hour or so), and the plots and gameplay are therefore not that complex (a few story-changing choices that either lead to the next chapter or a game over, but you can redo them immediately), but they are fun enough and while the three stories do use the same basic setting and characters (the personalities/backstories of all the characters remain the same throughout the three different story variations), the mysteries are different enough to not make it feel like you're just playing through color variations of the same idea. The Butterfly House is named so because both Outarou and Ageha loved butterflies, and there are also butterflies and butterfly models kept throughout the house and the three scenarios all utilize this theme of butterflies in different ways. What's also interesting is that each scenario will reveal bits and pieces of the common back story regarding Ageha's death, but not everything. For example, my first playthrough with Haruka eventually revealed how certain members of the cast really though of each other, but that relationship is not explained in the other routes and left vague. It's only by playing all the scenarios that you'll truly get a good idea of what really played between Outarou, Ageha and her three friends. This is also seen in the manner in which the game collects clues for you: some clues are put in a route-specific menu, other information is put in commonly shared data pool, as those clues pertain to the backstory all routes share. 

When you have played all three seperate routes, you'll unlock one final route where you visit the Butterfly House not with one buddy, but all three of them! It's the grand finale to the game, finally revealing what really happened a year ago with Ageha, but I like how the game works on a meta-level too: a lot of information pertinent to the case is known to the player, because they have played the game with three seperate buddies and uncovered a lot of information through those routes. The final route expects of the player of course that they have that knowledge now, but that wouldn't make sense for the in-game characters who visit the Butterfly House for the first time. However, the story does a good job at changing the events just ever so slightly due to the presence of three buddies, explaining how the characters learn the information the player had already learned through previous playthroughs. The final story is a good ending that brings the three seperate routes together in a nice way.

So in all in all,  Buddy Collection Extra - Kochousou no Kimyou na Gonin was fun to play. It's not a long game by any means, but it tells a nice story by making clever use of the concept of having three distinct buddies/scenarios to tell three different murder mystery stories, and also rewarding the player for playing through all three scenarios, as you learn more about the underlying story as you go through them one after another. I certainly hope that the main episodes of Buddy Collection will also be released on Switch in the future, as a side-story, this one did not disappoint at all.

Original Japanese title(s): 『Buddy Collection Extra －胡蝶荘の奇妙な五人－』