428: Shibuya Scramble Review

Most visual novels don’t capture my attention.  I can read an ungodly amount of text in games, but that’s only when they’re accompanied by gameplay and visualized with detail.  I can read all those files describing monsters and biological functions in Resident Evil’s history, but that’s because you get to see those aspects in practice.  I love the Ace Attorney games and Zero Escape games, but those are broken up with puzzles and interaction on the player’s part (and in 999’s case, the long-winded text did wear on me).  I couldn’t even get an hour into Doki Doki Literature Club because it’s so visually uninteresting.  I know I can’t expect much from that example since it’s a free game, but the majority of visual novels are made like that.  Too much telling, not enough showing.

This is all a preface to why I bothered with the visual novel 428: Shibuya Scramble.  The game has long walls of text and essentially no gameplay so there would have to be something major to set it apart and at a glance that something isn’t apparent.  There is one very important person who made this a must-buy: Yukinori Kitajima.

I’ve mentioned Kitajima more than once on this blog.  He’s the writer of the excellently written Senran Kagura games, the 3DS Ace Attorney games (including working with the Professor Layton writer in their crossover), the underrated Okamiden and at least contributed to the aforementioned 999.

Before all of those, Kitajima’s claim to fame was 428.  It was originally released on the Wii in 2008 and was showered with praise, being one of the very few games/visual novels to ever get a perfect score in the Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu.  After the initial release it was ported to the PS3, PSP and iPhones to reach even more players.

In Japan.

And nowhere else.

It took a full decade for it to finally come out in America and I wanted to play it for about half of that time after being exposed to Kitajima’s genius.  It was finally translated and localized by Spike Chunsoft in 2018.  For reasons I’ll get into, it’s kind of understandable as to why it wasn’t originally released.

As much as Spike Chunsoft should be given credit for releasing it, they made some big mistakes with their release of 428.  For one, there was next to no advertizing.  I didn’t even know it was out until two months later when I came across it on the Steam store and almost had a heart attack.  There’s also not a single bit of marketing on the store page noting Kitajima’s involvement as the writer.  He’s almost the only reason I bought it!  Why would you not want to draw attention to someone with that kind of notoriety?

All of that is nothing when compared to the biggest problem.  Spike Chunsoft only released 428 on the PS4 and PC.  Nothing else.  There were already ports on the PS3, PSP and Wii, but instead of all of those, they decided the only game console version should be one of the worst game systems available.  Even if they went with the PS3 instead of the PS4, that wouldn’t change that it’s also not available portably.  Visual novels take a lot of time to get through so they’re ideal to take out and read on the go.  That’s why the DS, 3DS and especially the Vita have so many.  If they could fit it on a PSP, then the Vita and maybe the 3DS could handle it.  They didn’t even bother with the iPhone port.  It’s inconceivable why they wouldn’t make a portable option for this extremely long visual novel.

At least the PC version can be played by just about anyone who owns one.  Because of its nature as a visual novel, it doesn't take much to run, even for the lowest end PCs.  For me it only chugged on a few areas of one particular menu for selecting where to start reading from. Once the actual visual novel started, it ran perfectly.  As long as your computer can play videos, it can run 428 and should because this is one beast of a visual novel.

428: Shibuya Scramble is easily the biggest, most ambitious and probably most expensive visual novel I have ever seen.  This the Ben Hur or Resident Evil 6 of visual novels.  With most visual novels, characters with still images and/or limited animation are put behind text, but 428 takes that visual standard and throws it out the window.  Through the entire run, from beginning to end, the story is told through still pictures of live action actors that are ever-changing and never reused.  It’s like a slideshow of an FMV game with a handful of instances of actual FMV.  Every single image is excellently shot with use of depth of field, rule of thirds and is always at the perfect moment and angles, be it action scenes or suspenseful ones.  The photographers were clearly professionals and considering 428’s length, it had to have cost a pretty penny.

428 has the length of a JRPG, taking over 40 hours at least and all of those hours is text and high quality photography.  I can see why it was left untranslated for so long.  It must’ve been a titanic undertaking.  It may not have been terribly expensive to translate the text to English, but the time it had to have taken for all of it and replacing all the Japanese text must’ve been unreal.  This isn’t just a visual novel.  This is the visual novel.  Written by the Yukinori Kitajima.

The story it tells has often been compared to 24.  It takes place over the course of 10 hours and follows the perspective of 5 different characters whose stories intersect over the course of the overall plot.  My saying it’s the Resident Evil 6 of visual novels was not just referring to the production values.

It starts with a kidnapping case in which a girl named Hitomi is specifically asked by the kidnappers to drop off the briefcase with their ransom at the statue of Hachiko.  The kidnappers run off with the briefcase and the chase is on.  From there the story evolves into a complicated plot involving an international crime syndicate, a street gang rife with in-fighting, loan sharks, bioterrorism and a mysterious Middle Eastern woman.  Each character’s story has their own focus as everything is going on.

One of the officers assigned to the kidnapping case is Kano, a detective dealing with his future father-in-law, who hates detectives and has the story most like the crime drama you would expect a kidnapping premise to have.  Through his story Kano works with the police and finds clues about the aforementioned syndicate. Kano works with a fellow detective with a skill in wearing disguises and later with an American CIA agent.  His is the most interesting to me as he has to work with what he’s told, but at the same time has to rely on his own instincts and decisions as he refers to a guidebook written by one of his detective role models.

The local Shibuya teen Achi gets involved in the story inadvertently.  When he sees Hitomi in trouble, he runs away with her through the streets of Shibuya and much of his story is the both of them being on the run from a mysterious gunman with a cane.  Achi used to lead the local group of upstarts that were previously nothing more than a group of friends in Shibuya, but after he left it since evolved into a street gang bitter about his leaving.  Achi was born and raised in Shibuya so he’s very street smart, knows his way around and is also a good fighter, which helps when trying to get rid of pursuers and aggressors.

Minoru Minorikawa is the comically hot-blooded freelance journalist working for a local gossip magazine.  His editor owes the local Yakuza a great deal of money and is forced to run and hide from them when they come to collect.  The editor can’t afford a functioning staff, but Minorikawa takes control for the next issue.  Minorikawa believes that if he can get the next issue out by the deadline the collectors will believe they can come up with more income and give them more time.  Much of his story is traveling Shibuya to get interviews and scoops for the magazine while the editor is chased all over the city.

It’s also mostly him pointing and yelling at everything.  He loves to point and yell.  Ace Attorney characters don’t point and yell this much.  He even points and yells at inanimate objects!

The seemingly odd one out of all the characters is Tama, an amnesiac girl trapped in a cat mascot suit tasked with selling a dollar store diet drink called Burning Hammer for an inflated price at the behest of a local shyster named Yanagishita.  Yanagishita keeps falling for get rich quick schemes that put him in debt and he’s on the run from the very same collectors chasing Minorikawa’s editor.  He is a very silly character and his actor mugs at the camera for all he’s worth.

Tama works with him because he promised her payment that would let her afford a familiar necklace a local secondhand shop is selling.  She becomes much more important later, but I won’t go into detail on that.

Finally there’s Kenji Osawa, a local virologist and the father of Hitomi.  Osawa is a virologist who receives a threatening e-mail regarding a super virus with a high mortality rate he worked on previously.  Through his story he works closely with the police at his house to keep track of his daughters’ whereabouts while unraveling clues as to the virus and the secrets of the people around him.  He works in particular with a very eccentric detective who has very strange mannerisms, but is multitalented and befriends Osawa.

That’s the main characters, but 428 has tons of interesting side characters.  Osawa’s wife, the police chief, Kano's detective inspiration, the secondhand shop's owner and Yanagishita come to mind.  It’s a story where everyone is full of character, even when they aren’t given much screen time.  It’s the kind of fun background characters you’d see in something like the Persona games.

My favorite is definitely Yukinori Kitajima.

I want to play it!  I want to play it!

The separate character stories themselves don’t interact much for most of the overall story.  Until the plot thickens, they largely interact passively, seeing each other on the streets, maybe exchanging a few words without knowing what the other is really doing and, most importantly, impacting the other stories indirectly.

This is where the closest thing to gameplay 428 has comes in.  At points in a story, characters have choices they can make that affect the others.  If you don’t make the right choices with the right characters, you get a bad ending, which range from absurd to nightmarish to absurdly nightmarish.  After the bad ending, it gives you a hint as to what to do in order to prevent it from happening, at least until the very end when the hints stop.

A bad ending.

For example, at one point in Tama’s story you have the choice of giving your sample of Burning Hammer to a man that, if you played Kano’s story, you know is his disguise-obsessed friend.  Unfortunately, if you do that, he gives it to Kano in his story and it makes him pass out because it should be consumed after eating, which they couldn’t have known.  In another situation, Tama can bat a cockroach out a window to get it out of the way, but Hitomi and Achi are right outside, so if you do that, it makes Hitomi pass out from shock.

I should complain that seemingly innocuous choices cause a game over, but the bad endings are part of the fun instead of a punishment.  Since you can jump to any choice, it’s not frustrating to simply go back and change it and it gets a lot out of this simple mechanic through experimentation and seeing what could change.

The interactive element is divided by its 10 hours.  If you make a choice in one hour, you can only get the bad ending in that hour.  You move onto the next hour once everyone reaches their own “to be continued” point, which is a great structure.  I’m not as big a fan of the “keep out” system though.

At several points, a character’s story will stop your progression by putting “keep out” police tape on the time slot.  You break it and proceed by doing what is called “jumping” in another character’s story.  When a character is brought up in another story, their name appears in red and underlined, at which point you can select it and jump into their story right there.  It’s like a different means of the “to be continued” system, where it doesn’t want to reveal too much when another character isn’t there yet.  It seems like a good idea on paper, but in practice, it’s intrusive.  428 is already organized fine by going one hour at a time.  This gives two kinds of interruptions: one with the tape first appearing and one in the middle of a story and you jump to another one.

The only other nominal interaction is the term descriptions.  Certain terms will be blue and underlined.  By selecting them, 428 gives a description of what the terms mean.  Sometimes it’s figures of speech, locations in Shibuya, how the Japanese police system works and elaborations on side characters in the story.  It has two icons to differentiate what’s fictional and what’s from real life too, which is a neat touch.  There’s some interesting bits in them and they briefly break things up, but are usually optional.  They’re only required on the few times one of the previously-mentioned red text you need to jump comes up in them.

I imagine that one would be hard to make.  And gay.

All of that is almost meaningless when a visual novel lives and dies by the story and the bottom line is that the story is excellent and when coupled with the photography and sound direction it’s downright marvelous.  428 is a master class in plotting, twists, character development, emotional storytelling through visuals and music, setting things up to use later and the comedy style of bathos.

In stories like the Ace Attorney and Senran kagura games, there is a time for jokes and a time to be serious that it switches between.  In 428, the humor and silliness is interwoven into the plot and characters in such a way that it’s harder to tell when something is funny because it’s supposed to be, giving it a surreal edge that also makes it flow better.  That is what I see as bathos.

Every key character’s interactions and histories are detailed and relationships are built excellently, as one would expect from the writer of the Senran Kagura games.  Minorikawa and his editor, Osawa and the detective and Achi and Hitomi are great at playing off each other and supporting each other with relationships that cement who they are and always make a feel good situation even in the worst of times.  By the end, the characters all start coming together in a finale that’s nothing short of fantastic.  At least, half of it.

There are a few points to nitpick where it feels like 428 kind of drops the ball and one half of the finale is one of them.  At that point there are two plotlines going on and one of them goes out with less flair than I would have liked, in both the slightly different endings possible.  The conclusion of the other definitely makes up for it though.  Also, without spoiling it, the reason behind Tama’s amnesia is only briefly mentioned and for such a big plot point, kind of disappointing.

I never quite bought the acting from the CIA agent Jack Stanley either.  The Japanese actors are great at showing their facial emotions, but Stanley always seems to be acting and posing as instructed rather than coming off naturally and if that was supposed to be the idea, it came out wrong.  His actor (and another American actor involved) has more credit in motion capture for Japanese games rather than facial acting so it’s clear one of the more important factors in his casting was that he was a Japanese resident.  Knowing that, it’s understandable why it turned out this way, considering they were probably already breaking the bank without flying in Hugo Weaving and the character is still written well.

The complaints I have are minor in the grand scheme of things.  If I ever use the term “masterpiece” to describe a straight standalone visual novel, it will probably be this one because it is one of the best written stories in anything I have ever read, but that's moreso the original Japanese version.  The translation is a little… Off.

From what I understand, the translation is very faithful and I know beggars can’t be choosers considering how much effort they must’ve poured into it, but it’s not a perfect translation.

I haven’t read the original Japanese text (I can barely read kanji), but I’m pretty sure nobody in Japan uses any term like “flim-flam” as a real insult or figures of speech exclusive to the English language.  It takes me out of the setting.  It seems as though they also replaced the blue text description for these instances with the origins in the English language.  It’s still interesting for English players, but I would’ve preferred they try to keep in the quirks of Japanese language and use those descriptions for information about that instead.

There are also way too many typos.  I was willing to overlook it the first few times, but after about 10 or 15 instances of a repeated word, missing space between two words or a misplaced letter, it got annoying to the point I was groaning by the end.

It almost reads like it was all done on one draft with only the bare minimum of proofreading.  It never impacts the storytelling to a significant degree (this isn’t Ignition Entertainment) and that I can sing praises for the writing speaks to that they translated it well enough to still be good, but it really needed another look-over.

We'd better work on that transmogrifying spell then.

Even for the best visual novel ever made, it’s understandable that some readers still might think paying 50 dollars (30 if you can get it on sale) is asking too much, but for 428 it is absolutely worth it.  It’s expected for visual novels to have replay value through possible routes from the choices you make.  428 does have this in the form of the bad endings, which are treated as collectibles you can get achievements for, but it takes the replay value even further than that and adds on what’s almost another visual novel’s worth of content.

In addition to this tour de force being roughly 40 hours on its own, there are bonus scenarios you can find by going back to specific parts of the story and finding hidden codes you miss the first time and by passing a quiz asking about specific minor details from the story.  You will likely need a guide or help online for a few, however.  After getting the right endings, there are also two particularly special extra visual novels added on.  Unlike the main story, they aren’t written by Yukinori Kitajima.  One of them is a side story involving a certain character in the main story that didn’t have any direct involvement, while the other is a big setup for the anime sequel series Canaan, written by Kinoko Nasu, writer of the likes of the Fate series and Tsukihime.  They don’t have the choice system like in the main story, but they’re both nice standalone side stories that are a couple hours long each.

With all that value in one visual novel, I cannot recommend 428: Shibuya Scramble enough.  It’s practically the ultimate visual novel.  Even if you don’t read visual novels, everyone should read this one.  Spike Chunsoft could have not bothered with translating it, considering it’s a decade old, but they did because they knew they had gold on their hands.  It is one of the best written experiences I have ever gone through, and I seem to say that about a lot of games these days (a good sign of the state of the medium), but for 428, with the storytelling in every facet of its design, it’s only fitting it would succeed in that respect with flying colors.  It’s not just good.  It’s Yukinori Kitajima good.  I give 428: Shibuya Scramble a 9 out of 10.