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.