428: Shibuya Scramble / 428 ～封印された渋谷で～

428: Shibuya Scramble is an amazing game. It's a visual novel whose gameplay consists solely of reading and making choices, yet despite being a relatively reserved format, it feels like 428 was developed with the guiding principle of making as many components of the game as possible provide entertainment in some way, which is what allows 428 to transcend the bounds of the format.

Of course, you don't need to devolve into hyperbolic puffery to see the little twists 428 put on the genre. The core conceit is that rather than covering a single protagonist, 428 follows the stories of five different people over the course of the same day in Shibuya, Tokyo. Basically, it's an extreme form of Simultaneous Arcs. So the choices you make naturally alter what happens to the character you're controlling—but one character's decisions will also often have spill-over effects to the other characters as well. So the goal is to make the proper choices so that every character manages to successfully make it to the end of their story.

Technically, there's slightly more to the gameplay... but not much.

The game is littered with points where the narrative will tell you to "KEEP OUT" and prevent you from progressing. To advance, you need to go to another character's narrative and search for red text, which will let you "jump" to another character. Finding the proper "jump" prompt will bring you directly to the "KEEP OUT" point and then unlock it. So this is essentially a less organic method by which the game uses your progress with one character to gate your progress with another.

The only other "gameplay mechanic" are tips, which show up as blue text. In most games tips are added to a glossary to be viewed at any time, but in 428 they can only be viewed when the corresponding text is on-screen.

If there's one thing 428 taught me, it's that every single other game with tips I've played has done them completely wrong. As I said, tips usually take the form of a glossary, although sometimes they'll be little skits instead. But in 428 they're... everything. You never know what you're going to get when you open one: it could be character backstory, random trivia, an explanation of how the current scene ties in with something else going on, an update on an off-screen plot thread, a joke, an explanation of a scientific concept, or even a serialized story. There's so much variety, and the tip is almost always both relevant and entertaining.

428 also does a fantastic job of keeping itself organized thanks to its flowchart and overall design. The story is divided into hour-long chapters, and you can't progress to the next hour until you navigate all characters to the end of the current chapter. Having to keep track of a multitude of characters simultaneously over the course of a day sounds like the perfect recipe for a confusing narrative, but 428 manages to remain easy to digest while maintaining style.

The interlocking structure of the plot means you need to constantly rotate through each character, helping you remember their stories by ensuring there's never a long period of time where anyone is neglected. If you could play each character's fully story in order, you'd likely forget most of the first character's story by the time you got to the last one. But by getting each character's story in bite-sized pieces, you're able to digest them all simultaneously. The "KEEP OUT" and choice systems subdivide each chapter even further, really ensuring you never spend too long with any one character.

The game's flowchart also does a lot of work in keeping the story organized. The flowchart is divided into five-minute chunks, with one timeline for each character. As a result, it's always easy to see how each scene slots into the other characters' narratives. The flowchart also shows you all the possible choices (as well as which of those you've made) and jumps, and lets you immediately teleport to any of them, which makes exploring all possibilities relatively quick and easy. (Whenever you make a choice, the flowchart also automatically updates itself across all characters, making ripple effects easy to spot.)

Lastly, the basic nature of the game reinforces the narrative for you. Yes, the gameplay is pretty simple: it's reading and making choices. But that means you are actively making the decisions that are holding the plot together. The events don't just happen on their own. You need to select them, and you get to see how different decisions lead to different results. This makes all the interlocking narrative points obvious, and I think makes it easier to remember and logically connect everything in your mind than if the narrative did it automatically.

If you don't make all the optimal choices, at least one of your characters will reach a bad end, which can range from tragic to hilarious. Like pretty much everything in the game, the bad ends are yet another form of entertainment, so you never know how exactly it's going to play out. There are a few "normal" bad ends, where a character might just get killed or hopelessly sidetracked, but plenty go completely off the deep end. Every bad end also has a hint that gives you a clue on how to avoid it, which helps prevent you from getting stuck (even though pretty much every puzzle can be beat just by exploring every option).

The bad ends also happen to be where most of my complaints are concentrated. There are a few bad ends that contradict the game's canon... This is relatively minor in the general sense, but a bit unfair as a mystery. More substantively, remember the "KEEP OUT" mechanic? It turns out there are a few "KEEP OUT"s that can't be unlocked, and so expending the effort to try to clear them almost ends up feeling like a slap in the face. Why couldn't they have been bad ends instead, so that it was clear there was no way to directly pass through them? The game obviously has no issues with silly bad ends, so I'm sure they could have come up with something.

Anyway, just what exactly is this story that requires so much keeping track of?

...I don't really want to get into it.

428 is much more of an adventure thriller story than a traditional mystery. That means the joy comes from seeing what's going to happen next. So if I tell you what's going to happen, that defeats the point of it, right? Sure I could give a vague summary, but I still think it's best to just wait and see.

Of course, I can't say nothing. We start off following a rookie police detective, who's conducting a sting operation at the Hachiko statue near Shibuya station. A girl has been kidnapped, and the kidnappers have demanded that the kidnapped girl's twin sister bring the ransom money to Hachiko. Just how are the kidnappers planning to get the ransom money and safely escape from the busiest intersection in the world?! ...is the game's hook, but I didn't find it that compelling, to be honest. A kidnapping is interesting enough, but Shibuya crossing bit didn't particularly pique my interest (especially since we find the answer relatively early on).

Anyway, the hand-off time for the money arrives, and a very long day begins. In addition to the detective, we follow a young man who loves Shibuya, the kidnapped girl's father, a hot-headed reporter, and a part-time worker trapped in a mascot costume. Each character has their own goals and their own adventure. The fact that we follow several different characters allows the game to adopt all different moods and styles without feeling disjointed. Heck, it feels natural that, for instance, the part-time worker's story is much wackier than the kidnapped girl's father's.

The story is very good, but even beyond that, it seems clear to me that the director understood that the narrative's resolution must be properly supported and that, as a video game, the entire journey leading up to that resolution needs to be fun and entertaining. One of the recurring themes of 428 is that everyone is the protagonist of their own story, but these stories are constantly intersecting and messing with each other. As a result there's a diverse cast of side characters who pop in and out of the protagonists' lives; within each chapter, you never know who's going to show up or what mayhem will be unleashed. (I've already mentioned how the game uses tips for all sorts of purposes, but one of my favorites is providing background info on the side characters. It's only ever a few details, but it really makes it feel like everyone is their own person with their own story!)

A lot of 428's charm comes from its visual style. 428 is a "sound novel," meaning there are no text boxes, and instead text just appears line-by-line over the screen, such as in the When They Cry games. However, unlike many visual novels, 428 does not use anime graphics. Instead, all the graphics are staged photos of real actors, props, and locations. The developers were meticulous in getting all the photos they needed, and the results are impressive. While sprite-based games recycle the same sprites and backgrounds over the course of the game, 428 has to constantly roll out new graphics from start to finish.

You can tell they put a lot of effort into amassing all the photos, and it really paid off. There are hundreds of them, if not thousands. The graphics are carefully framed to capture the action (while sometimes leaving neat details in the background), and there is occasionally a mini-animation or special effect to add an extra spark. Even when a scene just consists of people standing around talking, the background will constantly cut between the characters or show us how their stances and expressions change line by line, creating a consistent feeling of movement and progression.

There's a large cast of endearing characters with larger-than-life personalities and wacky outfits. Most of them feel like they'd fit in perfectly in an Ace Attorney game, but seeing everything acted out by real people provides another flavor of enjoyment. (And, even if they have a similar feeling, there's still a large difference between a character designed to be played by an actor and a live-action version of an animated character.) Even though a lot of characters only show up for a short segment, since chance encounters are a recurring theme of the game, they have so much personality and random details about them thrown in that they still feel like fully-realized people.

Since 428 is a "sound novel," music obviously plays a large role, taking up one half of the sub-genre name. And, as in so many other areas, the game delivers. There's an exceedingly large soundtrack covering a wide variety of styles and moods, all catchy and smartly deployed in-game. As it's meant to do, the sound sets the stage for the variety of stories that unfold.

The game has a few extra goodies to keep you occupied after you beat the main story. There are some extra scenarios, along with a number of secrets. Some are hinted at and some have absolutely no trace, but you're probably best off just looking them up. The post-game builds upon the game's strengths, further fleshing out and developing the surrounding cast while letting you stay a bit longer in Shibuya.

428 is simply a fantastic story crafted with heaps of skill and finesse. Obviously if you're looking for action this game won't deliver, but if you're looking for a good yarn, 428 takes advantage of the medium to deliver a tantalizingly tangled story in a digestible format with a bombastic cast elevated by having it played out by real people.