AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative / AI：ソムニウムファイル ニルヴァーナ イニシアチブ

When I first finished AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, my feelings were a lot more positive than those for its predecessor, AI: The Somnium Files, which is admittedly not a high bar. (Boy are those names a mouthful.) But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that pretty much no individual component of NI was better than TSF… except for the fact that the main characters weren’t absolutely insufferable. So NI may not be more well-crafted than TSF, but the fact that we don’t play as Date still makes it way better in my book.

Process of Elimination / 探偵撲滅

Process of Elimination is another Danganronpa wannabe from Nippon Ichi Software, following in the footsteps of Exile Election. Process of Elimination and Exile Election feel like together they form one Danganronpa: Exile Election focuses on a death game and trials, while Process of Elimination has quirky gimmick-based characters and murder mysteries. However, despite my flippant first sentence, I liked Process of Elimination a lot. It’s unquestionably lacking in certain respects, including providing comprehensive fair-play mysteries, but is so earnest in presenting a story about detectives that I can’t help by enjoy it.

Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane

Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane is, as you might surmise from the title, an Ace Attorney-inspired murder mystery video game. (Games in that sub-genre are never particularly subtle about their inspiration.) The main feature that differentiates Tyrion Cuthbert is the fact that it takes place in a fantasy world with magic. Well, I suppose technically Ace Attorney has already done that, but unlike that game, where the use of magic itself was the crime, here we’re solving crimes that just happen to take place in a world with magic.

Special Report Division / 特殊報道部

Who doesn’t like a good conspiracy theory? There are plenty of allegedly supernatural phenomena out there. Personally, I’m a skeptic. Despite the fact that there are now significant portions of the world where almost everyone has a camera on their person at all times, concrete proof of such phenomena has yet to emerge. But the allure of these types of mysteries is undeniable, and Special Report Division is a fun excursion into a world where these stories are more than just urban legend.

A Detective's Novel

A Detective’s Novel is a detective visual novel that costs $1. If nothing else, the developers understood the value of their product.

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.

The First Hardship of Nagomu Ichiyanagi - The Rain-Lattice Mansion / 雨格子の館 一柳和、最初の受難

An isolated house in the rain... A series of gruesome, themed murders... And a wimpy kid who has to solve them all.

These are the elements that make up Nagomu Ichiyanagi.

The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass

Do you like mysteries? Actually, no, that's not the appropriate question to ask. Do you love mysteries? Think carefully about your answer. I'm not asking if you think you love mysteries. I'm asking if you truly, with your heart and soul, love mysteries, to the exclusion and detriment of everything else. Because The Sekimeiya seems like it was made for somebody who does.

On paper, The Sekimeiya is very close to how I likely would have described my ideal mystery game before playing The Sekimeiya. There is an endless deluge of mysteries, plenty of content, an incredibly tight plot, and unique ideas taken to their logical extreme. Yet in reality the experience is difficult to unabashedly enjoy. There are a lot of things that The Sekimeiya does right and that it does great, and there are no immediately obvious technical faults, so exactly what went wrong?

Let's take a trip into the labyrinth to explore that question.

Chaos;Head Noah / カオスヘッドノア

Takumi Nishijou is just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill reclusive socially anxious MMORPG-addicted anime-obsessed self-absorbed rude cowardly acerbic loner Japanese teenager that lives alone in a storage container on top of an apartment building. Y'know, the usual. One day weird things start to happen, and Takumi wants them to stop, and... that's pretty much the entire plot of Chaos;Head. (I'm not calling it "ChäoS;HEAd," sorry not sorry.)

Murder by Numbers

If you poke around the internet for thoughts on Murder by Numbers, pretty much everyone who discusses it compares it to Phoenix Wright with Picross, to which I have just one thing to say... [XXXXXXXXX]!

Jisei

Jisei is a murder mystery visual novel about a teenage boy who has the ability to experience someone else's death by touching their corpse. (Kind of like his own personal divination seance... although it doesn't help him much this time.) We don't ever learn why he has this power, or, interestingly enough, even what his name is, so... let's call him Jessie. Over the course of the game we get various tidbits about Jessie, who serves as a neat, minor underlying mystery as we investigate the more pressing murder.

Exile Election / 追放選挙

Progress does not happen in a vacuum. Every so often we get a groundbreaking, massively influential video game, and while such masterpieces might have plenty of originality, they’re never completely original, and always build upon previous works in some way. For example, take Dark Souls, which formed the bedrock and namesake of the Souls-like subgenre, and has been used as a point of comparison so often it’s become a meme. It’s arguably the most influential game of the past decade (if we exclude the mobile market). But neither Dark Souls itself nor the underlying ideas that led to its success and influence popped up out of nowhere. Dark Souls very clearly inherited a lot from Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware’s previous game. And if this was an essay on video game genealogy and not a review for a game that I haven’t even mentioned yet, we could dig even further and identify Demon’s Souls’ influences.

My point is that for every massively popular, genre-defining game out there, there are going to be other games that laid the groundwork for it. And that means that other games need to actually lay the groundwork. They won’t be highly-polished pinnacles of perfection, but a unique idea or two in an otherwise ordinary package with an execution that will range from flawed to decent. And that’s what I feel like Exile Election is. It introduces some original ideas to the death game subgenre, but they just... aren’t very good. They’re not bad, but not very good, either. Exile Election seems to me like a game that is underwhelming on its own, but will someday serve as a reference point that someone will use to identify, analyze, and rectify in their own game in order to make it fantastic.

Missing Parts: the Detective Stories / ミッシングパーツ the TANTEI stories

Most murder mystery video games tend to be pretty silly. Maybe it's because, compared to mystery novels, they generally have a younger target audience, or because the visual element requires some extra pizazz, or some combination of the two along with some other things. While there are some novels that are out there, generally they're more restrained than video games.

But then we have a game like Missing Parts: The Detective Stories, which is about an ordinary guy, Magami Kyousuke, investigating ordinary murders in an ordinary city during his ordinary life. While there are some flavorful characters, there aren't any hyper-talented high schoolers or spirit mediums. These murders take place in apartments and alleys, not secluded islands or space stations.

And it's sooooo good.

AI: The Somnium Files / AI：ソムニウムファイル

AI: The Somnium Files is the latest video game by Uchikoshi Kotaro, most famous for making the Zero Escape series (which I adore) and the Infinity series (which I have not played). After the... troubled ending of the Zero Escape franchise, it was exciting to see what Uchikoshi would pull out with his first original video game since 2009. (The Punch Line anime came first, so that statement is technically correct!) Knowing that AI: The Somnium Files would be heavily plot-focused, I made sure to minimize my exposure prior to release, and, after many months of waiting, finally played Uchikoshi's new masterpiece.

Unfortunately, sometimes, life is simply unfair.

Aviary Attorney

In a lawless land, only one man (with a distinctly avian name) stands between hapless defendants and ineffectual policeman, corrupt prosecutors, and indifferent judges, fighting for truth and justice against insurmountable odds.

Hmm, where have I seen this before...?

Aviary Attorney wears its inspiration on its sleeve, and, even though it was a neat idea to use classical illustrations and music and Aviary Attorney nails the witty banter of its namesake, the game falls short in nearly every other respect. I doubt Ace Attorney fans will be able to resist the temptation of such an obvious tribute, but just make sure to purchase Aviary Attorney on sale and temper your expectations.

Methods: The Detective Competition

Methods: The Detective Competition is an odd duck. Its mysteries are simple, the character designs make it look like the game should have been called "Meth-heads," and its worldbuilding can only be described as bizarre.

And yet I can't help but adore it. All the weirdness joins together into one big ball of DETECTIVES with the energy of a shonen anime tournament arc. The graphic style is weird, but it's consistent, and there's tons of assets so it feels like it's the result of a conscious decision rather than a monetary restriction. The unorthodox plot structure has some drawbacks, but also keeps the game from ever getting predictable. And the silly sense of humor, while sometimes tonally dissonant, gives the game a charm of its own.

Birth ME Code

You may or may not have heard the term "ontological mystery" before, but if you're the kind of person that reads a blog like this, you've probably already encountered some. An ontological mystery is essentially a story where the characters find themselves in an unfamiliar and often limited setting, and one of the main focuses of the story is learning about and escaping from the setting. I've already reviewed a few of them. Other major questions often include why these people in particular were chosen and who is behind everything.

Birth ME Code, the second game in the ABiMe series, takes this sub-genre and flips it on its head by letting you play as the mastermind and tasking you with ensuring your death game runs smoothly. (Well... Without naming any names, a fair number of ontological mysteries are convoluted enough where it turns out by the end that you were the mastermind the whole time. But Birth ME Code is different because it bakes this into the premise.)

Or at least, it tries to flip the sub-genre on its head. It's a solid ontological mystery, especially considering it was all done by one guy (even if he calls himself "Team" Miracle Moon), and a noticeable improvement from his previous game, Head AS Code. There's a lot to like, and Birth ME Code will undoubtedly scratch your itch if you're looking for games like Zero Escape or Danganronpa, but, along with a few other pitfalls, it never really manages to live up to its central conceit.

Steins;Gate / シュタインズ・ゲート

In my Raging Loop review, I said that one of the things that I thought made the game work so well was that the protagonist was intelligent and approached the situation in the same way the player would, creating a narrative flow that was engaging, natural, and aligned with what the actual player wanted to do even though there was very little direct control.

Steins;Gate is not like that.

Raging Loop / レイジングループ

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’m back, and hopefully I’ll last longer this time!

A few weeks ago, I finished... “Raging Loop” is what the English version will be called, so I guess we'll go with that. (If you look at the Japanese title in the picture above, you can see that the Japanese version calls itself "REI-JIN-G-LU-P".) Anyway, I finished Raging Loop a few weeks ago. I thought it was a pretty neat game that would never see the light of day in America, since it was extremely, extremely Japanese, plus it had already been out for several years, so the time for a translation had passed.

Naturally, the English localization was announced the next week.

So here we are! Since the game is coming out in English, and it’s a pretty niche game that people probably don’t know much about, I figured I may as well get reviews going again and help people find out about this game. (Of course, I’m not the first person to review this, but I may certainly be the least-known person to do so! Also, since I'm basing this just on my experiences with the Japanese version, I may end up using different terms than the official localization ends up using.)

Lux-Pain / ルクス・ペイン

Welcome to Lux-Pain, where we play as Saijou Atsuki, a stoic silver-haired prettyboy high school student with a tragic past and magic powers that cause his right eye to glow yellow that he uses to fight evil as part of a secret organization. That's right, we're full speed ahead on the chuuni train and brakes are broke.