Countdown to the End
As someone that has enjoyed many different types of Visual Novels over the years, I feel like I’ve been exposed to myriad types of storytelling techniques. As such, not much surprises me in the genre but when the reveal for Shuten Order claimed that it would include radically different gameplay elements to fit its many segments to tell one cohesive story, my interest was piqued.
At the same time, I wondered if this was simply a gimmick to differentiate itself without the vision nor execution required to pull off such a feat and went in hoping for the best.
An amnesiac protagonist, stop me if you heard this one before.
Waking up in an unfamiliar hotel room with no memories, the girl is confronted by two individuals claiming to be angels and named “Rei Shimobe”. According to the angel Rei was once the Founder of the Shuten Order but was killed by one of the ministers of the order. Only by solving her own murder and confronting the killer can she be truly resurrected with all her memories. With nothing else to go by, Rei trusts in the words of the angels and strikes out to find her own killer.
As a premise, the idea of an amnesiac protagonist is as played out as it could be but I found the idea of trying to find out my own murderer within a strict time limit made for an intriguing set up for things to come. As there are five different ministers to investigate, the first real choice to make was figuring out who I wanted to pursue first.
The ministers were an interesting bunch of characters with their own quirks and motivations.
Picking a minister was the same as picking a route as it not only determined the story and setting to come but also the type of gameplay that I would be exposed to.
For example, choosing the Minister of Health “Ushitora Yugen” was going into the self-described genre of “Extreme Escape Adventure.”
As someone who loves the Zero Escape series, that ended up being the first route that I chose.
I love me some escape rooms.
As the story and plot is the life blood of games of this type, I won’t go into any specifics, but I will say that I received exactly what was described. However, given that each of the routes only took about 6~ hours to complete, I feel the gameplay elements introduced in them all felt half-baked and were never really given the type to evolve beyond the simplistic forms that they are introduced.
For example, in the extreme escape route, I often found myself having to repeatedly do the same kinds of mundane puzzles to progress through the area. Not only were the puzzles dull and repetitive, they also didn’t make much sense to be present in the context of the game.
If I never have to do another 3×3 sliding puzzle again for the rest of my life, that would be swell.
In another route where I was tasked with hiding from a deranged killer, I found the difficulty basically non-existent as it was incredibly easy to avoid the stalker and even when I was discovered due to me being reckless, it was simple to lock a gate behind me and hide in a locker until I was able to get away.
In truth, I would say every single one of the gameplay styles used in Shuten Order felt like a watered-down version of something that’s been done much better in other games. It’s a shame because it did succeed in keeping things fresh to some degree but could not hold my attention for very long and I eagerly wanted the segment to end so I could see the next route.
Luckily, the story remained interesting for the most part with the major caveat of repeated revelations/information that I had learned from a previous route dragging things down. As I finished each route and went onto the next, the information I learned would not be retained by Rei until the final chapter. This meant Rei was reacting to information I had learned already many hours ago over and over again. While this makes sense in the context of the story, it was still obnoxious to see repeatedly and ended up slowing the pace of the game significantly.
Thankfully, the story does come together well at the very end for a satisfying conclusion and the last sequence of piecing together all the clues gathered from the routes to find the culprit was quite satisfying, especially with the added stakes of no manual saves being allowed.
While the different types of gameplay elements kept things fresh, they were overly simplistic for their own good.
As is sadly typical, there is no ENG VA option available and while I found the performances of the JPN VA quite good, I could not say the same for the localization efforts.
During the course of the game, I’ve noted many cases of typos and grammar mistakes which can be forgiven for a game with a lot of text like this one but the sheer quantity of them left me scratching my head. Worse yet, spacing of the text was all over the place, sometimes not even fitting the text into the text box proper or having a placeholder ‘x’ where there should’ve been text. An entire animation video with a bunch of voiced lines and text flying around everywhere, none of which was translated.
Perhaps these are all issues that will be resolved in a day 1 patch as I can’t imagine the team not noticing the issues as they are all part of the main game, but I can only review the game as it exists and not what it might potentially be on release.
The PC port is also barebones with very limited settings options, and I wasn’t even able to manually select a resolution for the display. At the very least, I didn’t suffer any hard crashes during my playthrough but it’s worth mentioning I found a soft lock during the Minister of Justice’s route which required me to force shut down the game. The issue was repeatable as well so definitely something that needs to be addressed.
Come on guys, you can do better than this.
Shuten Order is a game of great ambition, unfortunately lacking in execution and polish to properly shoulder the weight of said ambition. While there is a good story to experience and some great moments sprinkled throughout the adventure, the issues with its storytelling and half-baked gameplay elements makes it come far short of its lofty ambitions.
Fun Tidbit: This is one of those games that just by simply playing it will get you most of the achievements except for the ending which requires a replay of the lengthy final chapter to get the other one, which seems a bit cruel.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
