Pattern of Murder

"Yeah. Death sucks. Every single time. But I've experienced so many, I'm kinda numb to the whole thing now."
"Jisei: The First Case"

The first game review of the year, is about the last games I played last year.

A young man awakens in a coffee shop, having fallen asleep after a triple expresso. He feels a bit sick, so heads towards the restroom, when he notices the women's restroom's door is open, and inside he discovers the body of a woman lying on the floor. For reasons not explained, our protagonist (who goes lengths to not ever mention his name to anyone) has a kind of psychometric ability, which allows him to experience for himself the death of a person he touches, and he can sense it when somebody dies nearby. The moment he touches the victim though, another customer of course sees the man doing something really suspicious, so he's immediately seen as the main suspect by an off-duty police detective who happened to be nearby. While they are waiting for police reinforcements though, our unnamed protagonist attempts to clear his name and find out who really commited this coffee shop murder in the visual novel Jisei: The First Case (2010). His adventures continue immediately in the direct sequeul Kansei: The Second Turn (2011), where he is taken in by a group of misfits with similar powers of telepathy and empathy. They visit the manor of a person who is, in a way, related to the murder that occured in the coffee shop the day before, but during their visit, this man also dies, and in his highly-secured office too! Once again, our unnamed protagonist and his new 'friends' find themselves working on the case, but as they do, they also stumble upon clues indicating a greater plot behind all this.

Jisei: The First Case and Kansei: The Second Turn are visual novel mystery adventures games developed by sakevisual. Jisei: The First Case was originally released back in 2010 already on PC as an early Japanese visual novel-inspired game, and was followed by its direct sequel Kansei: The Second Turn one year later. Apparently, the plan is to make five installments in the series, of which currently three have been released, but unlike Jisei: The First Case and Kansei: The Second Turn, the third entry Yousei from 2013 has not been released on consoles yet (I played the Switch versions of Jisei and Kansei). For older indie games, both Jisei and Kansei actually look quite nice with especially well designed character sprites and there's even voice acting available, which is really nice and unexpected for games of this scale, though the music didn't make as much an impression. Anyway, these games have been around for a long time, so I was always kinda aware of them, especially as the titles obviously indicated some Japanese link (Jisei and Kansei are Japanese words), and as I mostly play Japanese mystery adventure games and visual novels, I guess it was only a matter of time until I'd try them out. Though I guess it helped they were on Switch now and heavily discounted. Note though I got a small bug in the Switch version in Jisei, where the text box of a character wouldn't appear, though fortunately it wasn't a very important text box, while Kansei works fine, but... you can tell from the controls it was originally meant to be controlled with a mouse and while it's servicable, it could have been made a bit more comfortable to play (using the control stick to move a cursor to click on indicators just doesn't work really well...)

Gameplay-wise, neither Jisei nor Kansei will be very surprising: in Jisei you can explore several places within the coffee shop where the murder occured which you can examine, or you talk there with the other suspects/witnesses, who will tell you about themselves and the others. Learn enough information from them to activate a story flag which allows you to talk about them again about other topics, rinse and repeat and until you reach the end. As for actual mystery solving, this is limited to a few questions asked at the very end of the story to test you if you figured it out, but this is a very small segment. The sequel Kansei is more-or-less the same, but bigger. You have a larger location to explore (the manor), more characters to interview and there's actually a multi-ending structure, where you can examine different aspects of the mystery and arrive at different story climaxes, which definitely gives this second game a welcome length boost. As for the aforementioned special powers of the protagonist though: this is not reflected in actual gameplay. Touching the corpses to learn their final memories is always just a scripted part of the plot, so basically the information you learn there is forced upon you when the story wants you to know that. A tad disappointing, because in truth, these psychic abilites are barely used in both games in terms of the mystery plot. Like in the second game, a character uses telepathy to communicate with the others.... but people have mobile phones, even in 2010. The protagonist 'remembering' an important clue about the dying moments of the victim usually only comes into play at the very end of the story, so it feels kinda forced too.

But as mystery games, I have to say Jisei and Kansei didn't manage to really win me over. Jisei: The First Case is really just a prologue to the five-part story, and can be done in a mere 30 minutes. It isn't meant to be anymore than a prologue I guess, but everything is just far too... limited to make any impression. The mystery plot itself is also ridiculously small and barely a mystery at all! The first twenty minutes you're interviewing people who are all pointing at each other, and then basically you examine a piece of physical evidence a bit closer, and the story then magically tells you this piece of evidence points at one specific character, and it's over! The weird thing is that the piece of evidence had been found earlier, but for some reason the game doesn't allow you to find the super incriminating element of that piece of evidence until just before the denouement, because... well, otherwise the game would have been over in 5 minutes instead of 30. The whole existence of this piece of evidence doesn't even make sense when you consider what the murderer did, so that whole part surrounding that part of evidence feels incredibly contrived, planted there by the storywriters only because they didn't know how else to resolve their own murder mystery. And sadly enough, that piece of evidence is about all the "body" the murder mystery of the woman in the restroom has. There is nothing clever about this mystery, nothing surprising, they just find evidence pointing at a character. Even as a prologue, this is quite disappointing, and the only thing that makes Jisei: The First Case somewhat interesting in terms of plot is the hinting at something bigger regarding the murder, but also the protagonist's past and his powers, but that's it. Jisei teases things that might be interesting in the future, but doesn't really have much of its own, and as a murder mystery on its own, it's barely worth calling a mystery.

And then Kansei just recycles the mystery plot.

As a mystery, Kansei is definitely larger in set-up and fortunately, it isn't over as quickly as Jisei (especially due to its multi-ending structure), but the murder of the owner of the house in his high-security office is... disappointingly similar to what happened in Kansei. Perhaps this is less noticable if you played the game in real-time with more time in between, but I bought both games on the same day and played then back-to-back, and it's almost eerie how similar the two plots play out, complete with the "totally unnecessary piece of evidence left by the murderer found at the end of the story to seal the deal because otherwise, we can't resolve this plot". Kansei, in a way, almost feels like a "remake" of Jisei's plot, using similar ideas, just dressed differently. Only of course, it's supposed to be the sequel, a continuation. But the mystery makes the same mistakes, having characters point at each other with shady backstories, but then rendering all of that unnecessary, because of the introduction of physical evidence that only point at one character. So like Jisei, Kansei doesn't ever really surprise. You come across a corpse, you find evidence pointing at 1 character, it's over. No clever twists, no realization that a clue meant something completely differently, no figuring out what kind of clever tricks the murderer must've done, no, it's just coming across evidence the murderer left behind for no reason while they were committing an extremely straightforward murder. Kansei at least has multiple endings which allow you to explore different aspects of the crime, which is nice, though I have to say the "treasure hunt"-esque route is not nearly as interesting as the "whodunnit" route, and as said, even that route isn't that exciting because at the essence, it's very similar to Jisei.

Similar to Jisei therefore, the more interesting parts of Kansei are just the many teases about the ongoing story and the mysterious past of the protagonsit, but once again, these parts don't really add too much to the experience as it's simply more tease than explanation, so on its own, Kansei isn't really satisfying, even if it is an improvement on Jisei in scale and execution (graphics etc.).

So I can't say I'm a really big fan of Jisei: The First Case and Kansei: The Second Turn. While presentation-wise, both games look good considering they're fairly small-scale indie visual novels (and especially considering their age). they don't really stand out as individual murder mystery adventures. The plots are far too simply and limited to make any impression and don't really manage to surprise in either "Oh, I didn't see that coming" manner, nor in the "oh, that was a clever set-up or twist!" way. And as the overall storyline is still on-going, I also find it hard to recommend these games based on the mere teases and peeks we get regarding the protagonist' past and how the various cases are connected to each other. And Jisei in particular is just too short and offers too little on is own. Perhaps it's something that could change once the series is finished, but even then I can't say I'm a big fan of spreading this out across different games in this manner. I might return to this series in the future if it's all done and over, but that's a big if.