A Story to Die For

" Well, I can certainly testify for your excellence as an editor. And as you know, I'm not that easy to please."

"Murder, She Wrote: The Classic Murder"

Yes, I have been playing relatively many DS games this year...

Earlier this year, I wrote a little about the Izumi Jiken File ("Izumi Case Files") series developed by G-Mode. It is one of the few mystery adventure game series which was originally created for Japanese feature phones. Some might not know about feature phones, but before smartphones took over the world, there was an interesting market for Japan-exclusive 3G feature phones (garakei) in the early 2000s, with many games developed exclusively for feature phones. These games could only be purchased and downloaded on a feature phone via the network provider, and only worked on those models. Smart phones eventually replaced these feature phones and these old feature phones and their services aren't supported anymore, but feature phones were the standard for over a decade in Japan and they provided a unique gaming environment at the time. Due to the shift to smart phones, a lot of feature phone games have become lost media. G-Mode has been re-releasing a lot of old feature phone games on Switch and Steam for the last two, three years however, which is how I got to play the first Izumi Jiken File, which was a popular detective game series back in the early days of feature phone games. How popular, you ask? Well, the series had been downloaded over a million times, so that means quite a lot of people have played these games!

Otona no DS Mystery - Izumi Jiken File ("A DS Mystery for Adults - The Izumi Case Files" 2007) was one of those rare times a feature phone IP made the jump from a feature phone to a dedicated gaming handheld system, which probably is also a sign of how popular the series was. This release on the Nintendo DS consists of six different scenarios/episodes, three of them being ports of the first three entries released previously on feature phones, and three episodes being completely original and exclusive to the DS. Overall though, all these episodes take on the same format and basic story: you play as as Izumi, editor of the famous and immensely popular mystery novelist Kyougetsu Masamune, who has one little problem. Kyougetsu gets distracted extremely easily and this always happens right before a deadline. Kyougetsu usually likes to stay somewhere else as he gets through crunch time,but for some reason he always happens to run into mysterious cases of death and he always gets very distracted by that, for he always suspects it is murder, but due to the deadlines, he can't concentrate on either the murder or his manuscript. And that always leads to our heroine Izumi being forced to investigate the case herself, interview all witnesses and suspects again to come up with her own conclusion, which allows her to compare notes with Kyougetsu and of course ultimately conforming Kyougetsu's suspicions of murder, all just so he will finally finish his book. Most of the time, the episodes are set in a tourist destination outside Tokyo, like Kamakura, Tottori and Hokkaido, allowing the games to show off a little bit of the locale.

As a mystery game, Otona no DS Mystery - Izumi Jiken File is extremely short and limited in scope, but while it is hardly a high point in the mystery library of the Nintendo DS, it is strangely enough also one of the mystery adventure games on the system that is the most truly puzzle-oriented and which really challenge you to carefully look at all the puzzle pieces to figure out who did it. But because the format originates from feature phones, the scope is very small. And that is actually one of the reasons why the series was so popular on feature phones in the first place. For especially in the early days of feature phones, phones didn't have that much free storage space, and more importantly, data costs were of course far more expensive than they are now. Because of that, story-based games for feature phones (like the popular Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney ports) often had to be split up in parts: you had to download a part, play that, and then delete the previous part to download the next part again. The Izumi Case Files games on the other hand were especially designed as light-weight games: each episode was just one single download app, and presented the player with a complete mystery story. That does mean each episode can be played through in just about 30-45 minutes the first time through, but that was close to the norm back then on the system. 

The three feature phone original episodes, and two of the three DS-original episodes follow the exact same three- act format, with limited gameplay, but fairly focused on the puzzle. Each of these episodes has Izumi look into a suspicious death, ranging from a man found one morning frozen on a bench on the "lowest mountain in Japan" to a hobby fisherman who have fallen drunk into the sea near Kamakura. In the first act, you just get the short introduction with Izumi looking for Kyougetsu and him telling about whatever case is bothering him now. In the second act, Izumi examines the scene of the incident and afterwards, she interviews all the suspects and witnesses The witness tells you about what they saw and did before the discovery of the murder and may provide you with one extra bit of information about one of the other suspects. Rinse and repeat for about five suspects, and at that point, you are basically done. For in the final act, you can directly go to Kyougetsu, who will ask you a few questions about the murder to test how much you have learned. Kyougetsu however doesn't really say whether you are answering his questions correctly or not until you have answered all his questions, meaning blindly guessing won't get you far (as you aren't told how many/which of the 5-8 questions asked you got right).

Interestingly however, these games only ask you about your conclusions, but there is no actual gameplay mechanic to represent the puzzle/solving element of the mystery. You are only given the testimonies of the suspects in the second cat and you then have to piece the thing together yourself either in your mind or on paper before you choose to continue with the third act. The puzzle format is a very focused whodunnit puzzle and at times can be tricky for something that is actually very simple in design: basically, you are always trying to make a timeline based on the testimonies of the suspects, checking who saw who at what time, and of course cross-referencing them with the other testimonies. If done right, you'll eventually realize one character must be lying, or at least intentionally withholding information, and that usually leads to the truth. Sometimes, you have also have to figure parts of the howdunnit, and in rare cases, the whodunnit aspect will only allow you to eliminate a few suspects initially, and the case has one extra act to give you that one extra clue that allows you to identify the culprit. To be honest, the really tricky part of the whodunnit puzzle is exactly there's no in-game mechanic to easily compare testimonies, which kinda forces you to put things down on paper or go through the testimonies one by one carefully, for ultimately it's just a "check whose testimony creates a contradiction" puzzle, but on the other hand, you could say this is a fairly pure whodunnit puzzle, of the likes you don't actually often see in mystery adventure games. It fits the simple hardware capabilities of the original feature phones of course, and I did enjoy playing with the testimony puzzle pieces, but every episode basically plays and feels the same because the story in each episode is pretty 'rigid', with next to no real story developments throughout and all witnesses only having one single story to tell you.

One interesting, but flawed addition this DS collection has over the original feature phone entries however is the episode "Wedge Sole", which plays completely differently from the other episodes and is probably even longer than all other five episodes combined on a first playthrough. It's a kind of open world mystery game with ambitious ideas, but not very rewarding execution. This episode is set in Tokyo, on the last day of the year and continues into the first day of the new year. You can play as two characters: Izumi and Masumi, a college student who is a recurring character in the series, and are able to "zap" between the two protagonists at will. The episode also introduces the concepts of "time" and "money": moving from one location to another takes time, and using public transport, or purchasing objects or spending time in a cafe costs money. Once you start the episode, you are basically free to go wherever you want, and you can find various "quests" across Tokyo. For example, if you can find Kyougetsu as Izumi, he will tell you about a mysterious death that has been on his mind, and then you can travel across Tokyo to find the suspects and hear their testimonies and finally report back to Kyougetsu. But you have to locate the suspects yourself, and some persons may only appear at a location at a certain time, so you have to be careful about the time, and how much money you spend on the train. But in the meantime, you might also stumble upon other quests too, like Izumi running into an old friend who seems to have something on her mind, or Masumi getting involved in a kidnapping. 

I like the idea of having a multi-quest mystery adventure game, and the time/money system reminds me of Tantei Shinshi DASH!, which was actually also a very flawed game even if the concept could be fun. But Wedge Sole just has too many minor inconveniences. For example, while you can take on several quests simultaneously, you can only finish one, as the episode ends whenever a quest is ended, so that kinda defeats the idea of being able to take on multiple quests. A quest usually only adds about 10~20 percent to the overall completion percentage, meaning you have to play this episode quite a few times. The map is also extremely cumbersome to navigate: it basically only shows you the Yamanote train line, but sometimes you actually have to transfer to the subway to arrive at a certain location, but that is not indicated on the map, so you just must happen to know what in real-life, you're supposed to change from the train to the subway at a certain station. That of course doesn't really work well with the limited money/time, because you already have to be careful about your actions and then give you a map that isn't really helpful. Ultimately, I didn't really like Wedge Sole even if it was an ambitious experiment to do something else with this series.

The games feature photo-realistic backgrounds and the characters are designed in a realistic manner too by the way, but there's basically no animation, and the games all look incredibly plain. While the three episodes that originate from the feature phones are now all available on the Nintendo Switch too, I have to say they play a lot better on the DS due to this DS version being a proper port. The Nintendo Switch versions are, intentionaly, faithful ports of the feature phone versions, which mean their screen sizes are also as they were on feature phones. This results in very narrow screen on your television or Switch screen, with gigantic black bars on both sides. This DS game however has the graphics properly adjusted for the DS screen, so you can read everything perfectly fine. 

Otona no DS Mystery - Izumi Jiken File is by no means a must-have if you're into mystery adventure games on the Nintendo DS, and yet, it was a game I wanted to play for a long time because it was based on a feature phone mystery franchise, and that fact alone made me really curious. While the main series is now being ported to the Switch, I am still glad I decided to pick this release up due to the DS-exclusive cases, and having found a new copy that was actually pretty cheap. While I think the focus on a whodunnit puzzle is pretty interesting and something you don't often see in mystery video games, there's no denying these games are just very limited in scope, so it's hard to recommend them to people unless you're really into DS adventures. Still, the Switch ports of the feature phone games are on sale every few months, so it might be worth looking those up if you're into this very short, but interesting period in the history of Japanese mystery media.

Original Japanese title(s): 『大人のDSミステリー  いづみ事件ファイル』