Light That Doesn't Shine

「だが、空が、白んできていた。開けぬ夜はない。そう、俺達の追跡も、事件の全ても、そこで終息を迎えるはずだ。俺は確信していた。決して開けない夜はないのだ。そう、決して」

『探偵神宮寺三郎　灯火が消えぬ間に』

"But I could already see first daylight. No night lasts forever. Our chase, the whole case was heading towards its conclusion. And I knew. No night lasts forever. Never."

"Detective Jinguuji Saburou - Before the Light Fades"

Posting a review on a day that is related to the topic of the review always excites me slightly. Slightly (and I'll be the first to admit that I do sometimes shuffle with the order of my posts backlog to have certain posts appear on certain days. Just because).

Tantei Jinguuji Saburou series
The Shinjuku Central Park Murder Case (1987) [Nintendo Famicom Disk System]
The Unfinished Reportage (1996) [Sony PlayStation / SEGA Saturn]
At the End of the Dream (1998) [Sony PlayStation / SEGA Saturn]
Before the Light Fades (1999) [Sony PlaySation]
The White Phantom Girl (2005) [Nintendo GameBoy Advance]
Ashes and Diamonds (2009) [Sony PlayStation Portable]
The Red Butterfly (2010) [Nintendo DS]
Rondo of Revenge (2012) [Nintendo 3DS]

The 1999 PlayStation game Tantei Jinguuji Saburou -  Tomoshibi ga Kienu Ma ni ("Detective Jinguuji Saburou - Before the Light Fades") starts on the night of April 27, and shows us a familiar sight: private detective Jinguuji Saburou sitting in his office in Shinjuku, Tokyo, accompanied by his assistant Youko and jazz music. Business has been slow lately, but the sudden arrival of the young man Masataka at his office (followed by a group of angry yakuza thugs) marks the start of a new adventure. Jinguuji is asked by both his old friend Inspector Kumano of the police force, and the Kantou Meijigumi yakuza family to investigate the smuggling of customized pistols in Shinjuku, a threat that could endanger the balance of power in both the 'light' world as well as the underworld of the city (because the Kantou Meijigumi isn't down with guns in their turf). Tasked with this heavy job, but also some other smaller investigations, Jinguuji makes his way once more through the human jungle of Shinjuku.

Tomoshibi ga Kienu Ma ni is the seventh game in the long running Tantei Jinguuji Saburou series, and the last in the series to be developed by the original creators of the series, the company Data East: Data East went bankrupt in 2003, and the Tantei Jinguuji Saburou series has since then been developed by WorkJam / Arc System Works. Tomoshibi ga Kienu Ma ni can therefore be considered the last of the 'original' series. And what a game it is! Data East had been developing the hardboiled detective adventure game series since 1987, and Tomoshibi ga Kienu Ma ni combines the best elements of all previous entries. This is overall my favorite Tantei Jinguuji Saburou game I've played until now, and I have played practically all of them, including the mobile phone spin-off series! (I still need to play PlayStation 2's Innocent Black and Kind of Blue though).

Storywise, it's what we'd had learned to expect from the series: a hardboiled detective story with here and there hints of social commentary, all set in Shinjuku. Mikan no Rupo dealt with immigrant workers and discrimination; Yume no Owari with drug dealing and this time, the investigation into the gun smuggling brings Jinguuji in close contact with the darker sides of urban migration and the underworld of Shinjuku (and even abroad!). Of course, it would be kinda heavy if it was only about these themes, so as always social commentary just serves as a background for the events that happen, which are as captivating and exciting as ever. Suffice to say that Tomoshibi ga Kienu Ma ni's story belongs among the best of the series.

The previous two games, Mikan no Rupo and Yume no Owari ni, featured a so-called zapping system, which allowed the player to 'zap' between protagonists, with each character providing a different view on the case. Jinguuji would for example shadow a suspect, while Youko would do research in the library; both storylines would come together at certain points, but they also would offer their own unique insights on the case, with the parallel stories complementing each other. Tomoshibi ga Kienu Ma ni surprisingly did away with the multi-layered narrative, instead opting for a fairly straightforward presentation. I say fairly, because it wouldn't really be Tantei Jinguuji Saburou if they didn't try something new with it.

Tomoshibi ga Kienu Ma ni features a time-element not seen since the original game (where sometimes you had to smoke to allow time to pass): in this game, movement between the various locations costs time, and sometimes you can only visit certain locations during the day or night. The day-and-night cycle is also connected to a date-system, and each chapter (or case) has a certain time-limit. For example, the first case involves the tracking of a daughter who has gone missing, and you have three days to complete the investigation. You have to visit the right locations at the right time, or else you'll run out of time for your investigation. Sometimes, you'll choose a wrong place or time for finding witnesses, forcing you to wait a day. This time-management system adds a sense of urgency to the game, as you obviously will want to solve each case before time's up, but also allows you to get more into the skin of a private detective, as a real investigation probably does feature a lot of useless questioning and just being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Though it's not all just stress. You can assign your assistant Youko to do certain tasks every morning, and sometimes she'll provide information needed to progress in the game, even if you happened to have missed it yourself. The chance of that happening does rely on the task you gave Youko though, so it does involve a bit of strategy. It's funny how they added this system in Tomoshibi ga Kienu Ma ni though: it's the first time in a detective game featuring an assistant where they actually make such a character part of the gameplay in a meaningful way. A later installment in the series, Shiroi Kage no Shoujo, actually did something similar, where you could 'nurture' your own assistant in an RPG-style by choosing right answers to questions: an assistant with better statistics was able to help you out better in case you got stuck. Kinda wondering why other detective games never did something meaningful with the assistant (looking hard at Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games now: they really need fixing the narrative problems there with Watson and Holmes...).

And sidetracking here, but I really want to address the infamous issue of the assistant Misono Youko. She has been there ever since the very first game, but for some reason, they just can't stick to one character design for her. Look at this little graph I made of her appearances in the main game series: it's like she goes to the plastic surgeon between every game!

But Data East certainly did their best with the rest of the game. For a Tantei Jinguuji Saburou game, it's actually quite long, featuring thirty different endings (most of them bad endings if you didn't manage to finish a case on time). The music is, of course, fantastic, with amazing jazz lounge tracks that never bore (it's a game, so music tracks tend to loop often, but that's never a problem with the Tantei Jinguuji Saburou games). Art design is based on the previous game, Yume no Owari ni, which is definitely a great thing: I might not be a fan of the character design of Youko here, but the rest of the game looks amazing. And it's also nice they cleaned the user interface, so you can actually see much more of the screen compared to previous games! 

Okay, this review has become waaaaay to long, but to conclude: Tantei Jinguuji Saburou: Tomoshibi ga Kienu Ma ni is a fantastic hardboiled detective adventure game, that can easily be considered the pinnacle of the series. Older Jinguuji games tended to be more fun as stories than games, but Tomoshibi ga Kienu Ma ni works as both a story and a game.

Original Japanese title(s): 『探偵神宮寺三郎　灯火が消えぬ間に』

Turnabout Corner

華やかな夢なんて　持ちたくはない

 断ち切った過去になど　縛られたくない 

飾らない人生を生きて行く　明日がある限り 

「明日を解く鍵」　(樋口琴路)

I don't want to hold on brilliant dreams

I don't want to be tied up by the severed past

I want to live a careless life, as long as there's a tomorrow

"The Key to Solve Tomorrow" (Higuchi Kotoji)

At this rate, this month might end without any reviews on books, only on other media!

Shinjuku. One of the most crowded districts in Tokyo. Famous for the gigantic underground maze that is Shinjuku Station. The big TV screen mounted on the Studio Alta building in front of the west exit of the station is one of the more recognizable meeting locations in the whole of Japan. And walk a bit deeper into the district from that exit and you'll get to Kabukichou, center of night-time entertainment and yakuza territory. Shinjuku is full of dreams and despair, of life and death and also the home of the private detective Jinguuji Saburou and his assistent Youko. Three cases manage to find their way to the Jinguuji Detective Agency in Tantei Jinguuji Saburou: Mikan no Rupo ("Detective Jinguuji Saburou: The Unfinished Report"). Jinguuji is sent a key by a journalist friend, asking him to hang on to it for a while, but Jinguuji has no time to find out more about it, because the police has (unofficially) asked his help in a serial murder case with foreigner victims. Youko is meanwhile busy with a case of a disappeared husband who had been working in Shinjuku. But it seems like that these three cases aren't completely unrelated after all...

Tantei Jinguuji Saburou is a long-running hardboiled detective adventure game series and basically the only thing I'm still using the hardboiled tag for. The series started out on the Famicom (NES) and did quite well, as it saw no less than four different games on that system. But the series never appeared on the Super Famicom (SNES) for some sinister reason, so when the fifth game in the series, Mikan no Rupo, finally appeared on the Saturn and PlaySation, it had skipped a whole generation of gaming. But it was still our beloved Jinguuji. Mostly. The art design has made a weird jump to City Hunter-esque designs (thankfully revised in Yume no Owari ni), but the jazz music (now in actual CD quality, instead of the Famicom synthesizer!) is fantastic.

And yes, Tantei Jinguuji Saburou music will appear in Music to be Murdered by.

As for the story of Mikan no Rupo, it's pretty good, though quite short. The Tantei Jinguuji Saburou games are often shakai-ha type stories, detective stories with some social commentary. It fits the hardboiled detective theme, with Jinguuji moving around in both the 'open world' and the underworld and witnessing quite a lot of social problems. Mikan no Rupo in particular deals with the social circumstances of immigrant workers and discrimination, themes that would reappear in later games (for example in one of the titles included in Tantei Jinguuji Saburou: Akai Chou). There is no puzzle-solving (neither mentally nor in a gameplay-sense) in the game, so as a player you're more along for the ride. It's an entertaining story, presented in a (mostly) attractive way.

Mostly, I say, because it does has a bit of problems. The flags you have to activate in progress in a story are sometimes really strange (oh, so I have to smoke three times instead of twice? I have to talk to those people in a particular order?). It's not as bad as in the first game (where smoking too much can result in a game over), but still, it's something they should smoothed out a bit (though I have to admit, the fantastic sequel Yume no Owari ni had the same problems). There are also strange sections where you control Jinguuji directly (something that was only done in the first game), but you're dropped in these action scenes with little explanation, and they are more frustrating then fun (like the section where you just have to check every bookcase...).

Something interesting pops up in the final part of the game though. Here we have a fairly straightforward hardboiled detective story, dealing with immigrants and yakuza gangs and such... and then we're suddenly confronted with what appears to be a kind of locked room murder. Sure, the murder is solved quite quickly, and the trick behind needs a bit of work, because it's a bit silly as it is now, but still, we're given a classic problem! The Tantei Jinguuji Saburou series has always been a bit strange like that, actually. Audiovisually, the series breathes hardboiled, from the art by Terada Katsuya to the jazzy tunes of the soundtrack. But even the first game, Shinjuku Chuuou Kouen Satsujin Jiken basically consisted of an impossible crime in the park, and while later games usually feature less incredible crimes, there's often enough space in their plots to present a proper, interesting orthodox whodunnit or howdunnit with very little rewriting. For some reason the plots are always presented a lot easier than they need to be though. Tantei Jinguuji Saburou always moves between several modes of storytelling and it never seems to settle on one final choice. Not a problem per se, but it does mean that the atmosphere of the games can differ quite a bit depending on the title.

I would say that Yume no Owari ni is a much better Tantei Jinguuji Saburou game, if we compare it to another title of the same console generation, but it's not bad. You can get it for practically nothing second hand (the games have been removed from the PlayStation archives, sadly enough) and you won't be disappointed if you liked other titles in the series.

Original Japanese title(s): 『探偵神宮寺三郎　未完のルポ』

「俺は煙草に火をつけた」

「事件が解決して素直に喜ぶものはいない」

『探偵神宮寺三郎：新宿中央公園殺人事件（携帯アプリ版）』

"Nobody is truly happy when a case is over"

"Detective Jinguuji Saburou: The Shinjuku Central Park Murder Case (mobile phone ver.)"

I've mentioned Tantei Jinguuji Saburou here once or twice, but as I've been playing quite a lot of the games lately, why not make a more general post about this awesome hardboiled detective game series?

While not very known in the Western world, Tantei Jinguuji Saburou is actually one of the oldest running game series, having survived many consoles and even development studios, and started in 1987 with Shinjuku Chuuou Kouen Satsujin Jiken ("The Shinjuku Central Park Murder Case") for the Famicom Disk System. The adventure (which featured advanced graphics and sounds for those times) introduced us to the private eye Jinguuji Saburou, a hardboiled detective who operates from Kabukichou, Shinjuku, Tokyo. He's assisted by Misono Youko, a secretary who is fluent in several languages and quite capable of detecting herself. At the beginning of the game, Jinguuji is requested by his old friend inspector Kumano to help solve the mystery of a strangled woman in Shinjuku Central Park.

The game is set in a hardboiled world, with Jinguuji having to confront witnesses in hostess clubs and even the boss of a yakuza group during his investigation. To emphasize his hardboiledness, the game even has a smoke option, which allows Jinguuji to...smoke. And think. But most people just use it to smoke. It's actually one of the hallmarks of the series, with every Jinguuji game having a button solely mapped to smoking, accompanied by "I lit a cigarette".

Despite the hardboiled world though, the plot of Shinjuku Chuuou Kouen Satsujin Jiken actually has more in common with more orthodox detectives, as the biggest mystery is how the culprit managed to leave the body in the park without leaving any footprints. While Jinguuji does solves this using hardboiled methods (including threatening a yakuza boss in his own home!), the case is distinctly orthodox. In later Jinguuji games, the footprints in the snow theme or other orthodox detective themes aren't the focus of the games, but they never really disappear from the games either.

Shinjuku Chuuou Kouen Satsujin Jiken turned out to be quite popular and by now, 15 games have been released in the main series for several consoles and handhelds, as well as about 20 games in a seperate series for mobile phones. Whether he is solving a crime in hometown Shinjuku, neighbouring Yokohama or even somewhere else,  Jinguuji always stays the same though; a hardboiled story that manages to touch you emotionally, great art, great music, GREAT MUSIC and a lot of smoking. Jinguuji even tried to make it to American shores, as Aksys localised the first Nintendo DS game as Jake Hunter: Memories of the Past. He still smoked, but it didn't really catch on. Maybe because the game was now set in fictional Aspicio U.S.A. instead of Shinjuku.　

Because, Shinjuku plays a vital part in the story. A big emphasis is placed on the hardboiled word of Shinjuku on a visual, a spatial, as well as on a social plane in later games. Places like the clubs in Shinjuku as well as other famous places like the Alta TV screen and Central Park are often visited, but the 'shadow' people of Shinjuku like hostesses, yakuza, homeless people and corrupt officals are also often featured in later stories. Actually, a remake of Shinjuku Chuuou Kouen Satsujin Jiken for the mobile phone (as well as for the Nintendo DS) got rid of pretty much all of the plot of the original game, inserting... yes, more homeless people, yakuza and corrupt people in the new story. Whether that's good or bad change, I can't say, but it's certainly different. But in a sense, Shinjuku as a town, as an entity has been a very big factor in the more recent games, somewhat similar to how Shinjuku has played a very big part in Angel Heart. Of course, it's a very romantic image of Shinjuku, the image of dark town with dangers everywhere, which yet somehow charms its inhabitants.

This is somewhat outside the scope of my blog, but the role of environment in games and the interaction with environment is actually quite interesting, be it a totally fictional one (Hyrule of The Legend of Zelda) or like Shinjuku, based on a real location.

Shinjuku as a location also played a very big part in Tantei Jinguuji Saburou Episode Code: Hai to Diamond ("Detective Jinguuji Saburou Episode Code: Ashes and Diamonds") (PSP), the lastest Jinguuji I played. The story begins with the search for the legacy of a recently deceased real estate developer in Shinjuku, but the case will turn out to have ties with kidnapping cases of homeless people, buildings owned by yakuza, corrupt officals and... the infrastructure of Shinjuku itself. A town which has changed immensely since the war and which changes even now and yet maintains its Shinjuku identity. Gamewise, the game features the ingredients you'd expect from a Jinguuji game (smoking! great music!) and this time also features a branching storyline, something I hadn't expected, as the Jinguuji games are amongst the most linear games in existence.

The Jinguuji series will never be the deduction-fest that is Trick X Logic and even something like the Trick game is more orthodox than the Jinguuji series. However, it is The Lady in the Lake in gaming, that is to say, it features well written stories and character, as well as good music and a truly distinctive style make the Jinguuji series something a detective/gamer should at least try.

See you next trouble

Original Japanese titles:　『新宿中央園殺人事件』、『探偵神宮寺三郎Episode Code灰とダイアモンド』