Trouble Times Two

Something old, something new

When it comes to mystery fiction, I usually try to avoid reading stories with similar settings/themes in succession, mostly because I'm afraid I'll get burned out on a theme. I decided to discuss the two games of today in one post not only because I played them one after another, but also because they are very alike, both being a retro art style, and both being sequels that ultimately aren't that different from the first games.

Two years ago, I reviewed Ise-Shima Mystery Annai: Itsuwari no Kuroshinju ("The Ise-Shima Mystery Guide: The False Black Pearl"), a mystery adventure released on the Switch, but made to play and look like one of those old 80s Famicom (NES) adventure games. The game was especially inspired by Okhotsk ni Kiyu, an adventure game developed by Horii Yuuji (creator of the cultural phenomenon Dragon Quest) and even had the same character designer in Arai Kiyokazu.  Ise-Shima Mystery Annai: Itsuwari no Kuroshinju never tried to be more than a mystery story that emulated Famicom detective games, also replicating the minor annoyances from games from that period, but all in all, I did enjoy the game as a blast to the past, so I was quite excited when the sequel was announced.

Akita-Oga Mystery Annai: Kogoeru Ginreika ("The Akita-Oga Mystery Guide: The Frozen Loosestrife") was released in the last week of 2020 on Switch (and now on Steam) and presents a new adventure starring the player (an unnamed police detective) and his young subordinate Ken. The story follows the now familiar pattern: the prologue has the two police detectives hunting the boss of a gang of conmen, but when they capture him, they learn that the Tokyo branch of the gang is controlled by a gang in the Akita prefecture, so the player and Ken travel to Akita to roll up the rest of the gang, but while some veteran police detectives are glad to see the Tokyo detectives, some other local detectives don't seem impressed by the city boys and vow to solve the cases themselves. But as the investigation moves on, they realize the gang is desperate to shake off the police and trying to cut off loose ends quickly, as each time the police find their targets murdered in a horrible manner: frozen alive to death. Can the player catch the murderer before more victims fall?

Having already written a full post on the predecessor Ise-Shima Mystery Annai: Itsuwari no Kuroshinju, I have to admit that I don't have that much to add to that, because Akita-Oga Mystery Annai: Kogoeru Ginreika is in essence very similar to the first game. Once again the game is not about having the player figure things out for themselves, but more about presenting the player a dramatic mystery story set around Akita. The focus is on checking out all the mysterious events and suspicious characters dangling in front of you and and being surprised by the sudden story developments. You'll visit a lot of real-life locations in Akita during your adventure (recreated in some nice 8-bit art) and the story is actually quite lengthy: I think it's at least double the length of the first game, and overall, the story does a great job at recreating the atmosphere of a stereotypical two-hour suspense drama show with a lots of twist and turns, which is exactly what it tries to be. If you liked the first game, or games like Famicom Detective Club (1988-1989) and Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (1985), Akita-Oga Mystery Annai: Kogoeru Ginreika is right up your alley. The music is still great (also listen to the deliciously late 80s pop theme song!!), though I have to say I still don't like the faux 3D maze segments these games always have.

Is it all good? Well, no. Akita-Oga Mystery Annai: Kogoeru Ginreika takes on the form of a Famicom game and that means not much text fits in each individual text box. But it seems the developers forgot that those older games also usually had shorter dialogues, so conversations in Akita-Oga Mystery Annai: Kogoeru Ginreika just go on and on because the writing style doesn't fit the limited text box space. What's even worse when the game forces you through these long conversations that aren't funny: there's a running gag that Ken likes the local food and every other location he tries some local dish and offers his thoughts on it before he remembers he's working: you can't skip these boring sections that's basically the same joke over and over again. Each "day" in the game also ends in a restaurant where they go over the leads they found: for some reason you always have to order food and try out everything (and read their comments) and it becomes really annoying after the second time. I believe Akita-Oga Mystery Annai: Kogoeru Ginreika was developed with some help from crowdfunding and it appears some of the backers were rewarded with appearances in this game: sadly enough these backers were incorporated in the most horrible manner, in segments that feel out of place and feel absolutely unneccessary. For example, early in the game, you have to call a person, but the game forces you to call the wrong number four or five times, and each time you get another small conversation with the person you accidentally called. These conversations were apparantly "rewards" for backers, who were allowed to write in a little bit, but for the player, this section is just a complete waste of time, as you have to go through all those conversations. There's another similar section in the second half of the game, where you're just repeating the same time-consuming action over and over again to force you to talk with all kinds of characters (= backers), even though it should've been over in one go!

Oh, what was interesting was that I played this game immediately after Root Film, and look who has a cameo in this game: Magari (and Yagumo too)! I didn't know about this, so I was very pleasantly surprised to see a very recent mystery adventure featured in a retro-style adventure. Overall though, I think Akita-Oga Mystery Annai: Kogoeru Ginreika was a solid sequel that does a great job at being a charming take on 1980s Famicom adventure games, but that could've been trimmed a bit for a more streamlined experience.

Last year, I also discussed MAKOTO WAKAIDO's Case Files "Executioner's Wedge"  a very short, but entertaining iOS/Android mystery game with a great retro visual style which reminded a bit of GameBoy graphics and also featured great moody music. I was surprised to learn that a sequel had been released in the last days of 2020, titled MAKOTO WAKAIDO's Case Files 2 "Bogeyman's Woods" because it had only been a few months since the first game was released, but you don't hear me complaining! Whereas the first game was set in the city, MAKOTO WAKAIDO's Case Files 2 "Bogeyman's Woods" brings us to a small village in O Prefecture, a setting that is clearly meant to invoke the works of Yokomizo Seishi. The discovery of the dead body of Sendou Tsugihiko in the forest would always have been news, as the influential Sendou clan has always ruled the village and now the family head Tsugihiko had died in a mysterious manner, just like his older brother many years ago. Tsugihiko had fallen, or been pushed from the hanging bridge above, but what makes his death even more musterious is the fact that someone had put the mask and straw raincape of the deity O-Kakushi on Tsugihiko's body after his fall. O-Kakushi is believed to have spirited people away in the forest in the past, resulting in their death. The mask and straw raincape are used in a village ceremony to appease O-Kakushi, and are usually kept locked in the Sendou storehouse. Has the ceremony of the villagers failed and is Tsugihiko's death the work of O-Kakushi?

While the second MAKOTO WAKAIDO's Case Files is very much a Kindaichi Kousuke-inspired mystery set in a small rural village and with family intrigues at the heart of the case, making it feel quite different from the first game, the sequel does play more-or-less the same as the first one, so I refer to that review for more details. Once again, you'll be going around the locations in search for clues and questioning people, and while the game still uses the cumbersome mechanic of having to "set" a testimony or piece of evidence before you start a conversation with a witness to hear if they have anything to say about that, the game at least improves on the first game by just showing with a marker whether a person will have anything important to say or not. It's more streamlined that the first game, but it's still odd you have to "set" your discussion topic first, then start a conversation, then finally ask them about the topic and then repeat the whole process again for another discussion topic. Why can't I just ask about all the relevant topics in one turn instead of having to start a new conversation each and every time for each seperate topic?

The story itself is entertaining enough: it'll only take you an hour or so to go through the whole game, so don't expect some kind of mystery classic that you'll remember your whole life, but MAKOTO WAKAIDO's Case Files 2 "Bogeyman's Woods" has a lot of character and atmosphere, and there are definitely worse ways to spend an hour. And it's free too, and like the previous game, you'll ony see ads if you mess up in the sections where they question you on the clues, so if you're good, you'll never see any ads in the game!

Anyway, Akita-Oga Mystery Annai: Kogoeru Ginreika and MAKOTO WAKAIDO's Case Files 2 "Bogeyman's Woods" were both entertaining, retro-style murder mystery adventure sequels which perhaps did very little to improve on their predecessors, but if you liked the first games in both series, you're likely to enjoy these sequels too. And wow, I have posted more reviews on mystery games than on novels here in 2021!  Let's cherish this moment!

Original Japanese title(s): 『秋田・男鹿ミステリー案内 凍える銀鈴花』,『和階堂真の事件簿2 – 隠し神の森』

The Thirteenth Pearl

 「美しさは人の心惑わす月のように

あの夏の朧月夜煌めき続ける」

「儚い珠のように・・・」(星守紗凪)

Beauty is like the moon that deceives the hearts of people

It keeps on shining like the misty moonlit night in the summer

"Hakanai Tama no You ni..." (Hoshimori Sana)

In general, I don't really mind from what time period my mystery fiction hails, as long as it entertains me. It's a reason why I don't bother with period tags like "Golden Age" for my reviews. Of course, it can be harder to obtain older material in general, but age itself is not a factor that plays a significant role when I pick the next in line. The same with videogames actually. Obviously, there's an extra hurdle here compared to for example books: a book from 1900 will function exactly the same as one published in 2019 and does not require other objects to work, while you do need to find the proper hardware for each videogame, and it's definitely harder to find older videogames, and the corresponding hardware. That's why the reviews of mystery videogames here on the blog do have a slight bias for newer hardware, as it's simply easier to get hold of them, but again, in general, I just play whatever seems interesting, as long as I have the right hardware.

Unlike books however, videogames have changed a lot in a relatively short period, especially in terms of visuals. When I open De Geheimzinnige Japanees, which is probably the oldest book I have at the moment, it's not that different from any book I purchase now in 2019, even though there's close to a century between those two releases. But if you compare for example Super Mario Bros. (1985) with Super Mario Odyssey (2017), you'll see an immense difference in terms of well, everything, but the graphics are probably the most obvious changes. And of course, these two games don't even run on the same hardware. The graphical style of the original Super Mario Bros. is of course also a product of its time, as the available hardware (the Famicom or Nintendo Entertainment System) then obviously couldn't even dream of rendering something like Super Mario Odyssey. Heck it is likely that nowadays, even one single music track from Odyssey will take up more storage than the Famicom can handle.

The mystery videogames I discuss here are, obviously, all games in the broader adventure genre, where you solve puzzles in order to progress in a story (yes, that is like a mystery story in general, where a puzzle/mysery needs to be solved to reach the conclusion). Broadly speaking, I usually discuss two kinds here. First are the novel games, which are like digital Choose-Your-Own-Adventures: you are mostly just reading yourself through a story, but occassionally you are confronted with a story-deciding choice, which influences the further outcome of the story. Usually you'll be exploring all kinds of branching storylines (and going back) in order to find the correct route to the end. Examples of these games are Kamaitachi no Yoru, 428 and Machi. The other type I usually discuss is the command-style adventure. Here you use set commands like [TALK], [MOVE], [USE], [LOOK] etc. do interact with the characters and environment in order to proceed in the story. These games are basically an offspring of traditional Point & Click adventures on the PC (for example Monkey Island), but with an easier control scheme for home consoles. This particular genre basically originated on the Famicom game system, where games like the first Tantei Jinguuji Saburou (1987), Nintendo's own Famicom Detective Club (1988-1989) and Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (1985) really solidified the genre and nowadays, games like Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney are still mostly based on these older games.

This is why I was so excited when the game Ise-Shima Mystery Annai: Itsuwari no Kuroshinju ("The Ise-Shima Mystery Guide: The False Black Pearl", Switch) was first announced. While this game was released in January 2019 for the Nintendo Switch, it was developed as an adventure game in the spirit of those old Famicom adventure games. In fact, the developers Happy Meal even noted that they could really just print the ROM on a cartridge and have it run on an actual Famicom if they wanted. As one can see from the graphics, the game really looks like one of those three-decade old videogames. The game looks especially a lot like Okhotsk ni Kiyu, an adventure game developed by Horii Yuuji (creator of the cultural phenomenon Dragon Quest). Horii developed three mystery adventure games for the PC in the 1980s, being Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken, Okhotsk ni Kiyu and Karuizawa Yuukai Annai, and the first two titles were also ported to the Famicom. What makes Ise-Shima Mystery Annai: Itsuwari no Kuroshinju visually interesting is that the character designs are made by Arai Kiyokazu, who also made the character designs for the Famicom port of Okhotsk ni Kiyu. So the game really looks like a Famicom adventure.

The story of Ise-Shima Mystery Annai: Itsuwari no Kuroshinju is also quite similar to Okhotsk ni Kiyu. The game starts with the unnamed protagonist, who is a police detective, receiving a call from his young and energetic subordinate Ken, with the report that a body was discovered in Ueno Park in Tokyo. It is not clear whether the man had had an accident, or was killed, but initial investigation is also troubled by the fact the man was not carrying any identification. Eventually, the duo of police detectives manage to track down the man's luggage in a station locker, where they discover he was in the possession of a kinchaku bag (a kind of small pouch) with a beautiful black pearl inside. The faded writing on the kinchaku bag lead the detectives to the region Ise-Shima, a popular tourist destination thanks the Ise Grand Shrine, Meoto Iwa, the fresh seafood and of course, pearl farms. The kinchaku bag seems to originate from a pearl farm of which the name starts with "Hama..." and the detectives this to be a hint to the identity of their corpse, but as they conduct their investigation, they slowly realize the murder might have to do with the luxury pearl farm Le Bijou, which has singlehandedly driven several traditional pearl farms to bankruptcy and is now slowly taking over Japan, and the foreign market with their newest black pearl.

The first murder in Tokyo and then a hint that leads to a tourist destination in Japan, and the detectives also become friends with two women who are somehow connected to the case? Yep, Ise-Shima Mystery Annai: Itsuwari no Kuroshinju is paying a lot of homage to Okhotsk ni Kiyu. The game really does play as an old Famicom detective adventure game, and people who enjoy games like Famicom Detective Club should really play this game. As a mystery game, you won't be doing much thinking of yourself (like those older games) and the story is more like a stereotypical two-hour suspense drama show, but that is of course exactly what this game is trying to be, and it succeeds really well in that sense. The game is more about following all the leads and being surprised by the sudden story developments rather than giving the player a chance to figure things out themselves (it's not like there are proper hints to who the murderer is) but it does a good job at dangling all kinds of mysterious events and suspicious characters in front of you. I wouldn't recommend the game to people really looking for an adventure game where you have to solve a case yourself, but man, I really, really want people who like Famicom adventures to play this, but it feels exactly like how it should. And that's even including the small annoyances: I never really liked the faux 3D mazes in Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken or the first two Famicom Detective Clubs and they weren't really fun here either, but yeah, it's part of the experience.

While the game looks like a game from the eighties though, the game is set in contemporary times. In fact, you'll be using a smartphone command quite a few times over the course of the game to for example take pictures, search for directions to your next destination and even play minigames to pass the time. A nice touch to mix the "modern" with the "old". At one point, you even check online reviews of the local restaurants! Another great touch is the digital manual: in the pause menu you can find a manual like you used to get with videogames, even complete with empty pages for you to take down some memos! It's also here where you can listen to the deliciously eighties theme song of the game (also used in the trailer).

By the way, I know sometimes (translations of) novels are delayed etc. after the initial announcement and release dates are shuffled, but I don't think I've ever seen it as bad as with this game. Ise-Shima Mystery Annai: Itsuwari no Kuroshinju was originally supposed to release in Fall 2017, on the Nintendo 3DS. Fall came, and went. After a long silence, the game was then supposed to release in early Spring 2018. And then it was announced it wouldn't be released on the 3DS anymore, but on the Nintendo Switch, but still within the year. And then a few days before 2018 would end, it was announced it would finally release on January 24, 2019. So that's like a fifteen month delay, and it was moved to another system too! That's like having a book announced, it releasing more than a year later and also only as a book you can only read on VR glasses or something like that.

Anyway, you don't have to expect anything more but a 1980s Famicom adventure from Ise-Shima Mystery Annai: Itsuwari no Kuroshinju, but nothing less either. It feels exactly like one of those old games, including the somewhat simple story, but the game has a lot of charm (great music too!) and for those who enjoy those old Famicom mystery adventures, which have definitely left their mark on mystery videogames in general, Ise-Shima Mystery Annai: Itsuwari no Kuroshinju is a no-brainer.

Original Japanese title(s): 『伊勢志摩ミステリー案内　偽りの黒真珠』