After the critical drubbing handed out to Square Enix’s previous FMV venture, The Quiet Man, the company’s decision to produce a live-action mystery adventure evokes less a whodunnit than why make it? For director Koichiro Ito, it’s a chance to tap into Japan’s appetite for detective novels and mystery television dramas, but one that benefits from flesh-and-blood actors. “I think that having real people play the characters in the story adds a sense of depth to it,” he says. Enlisting Yasuhito Tachibana as the cinematographer and scenario director also avoids pitfalls – with a hit Netflix show, The Naked Director, to his name, he brings the production nous to avoid the hackier B-movie vibes that often plague the genre.
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Perhaps the sight of body-filled parlours is over-stimulating our little grey cells, but we wonder if there’s more at play beyond that. Both Ito and producer Junichi Ehara hint at a device made possible by live-action delivery, one which, in Ito’s words, “only achieves the impact it does precisely because the characters are played by real people”. Ehara certainly suggests there are easier ways to bring this crime saga to virtual life, given how the story involves several murders between 1922 and 2022. “It was probably more difficult to portray the Japan of 100 years ago in a live-action format instead of using full CG,” he says. But he feels it was a “good hurdle” and one that helps justify the FMV format to players beyond its “distinctive and impactful” looks.
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Putting those suspicions aside, our guide through the mystery is Haruka Kagami, a crime writer turned crime solver, investigating a century of skulduggery in the Shijima Family. While she meets the present-day clan in person, the events of 1922 and 1972 are relitigated as she reads about them in a novel, imagining herself into the detective’s shoes. Within these time jumps, the team makes canny use of a limited actor pool by recasting them as ancestors in each period – think Cloud Atlas with fewer eyebrow-raising accents and prosthetics. It also promises metatextual fun as a criminal in one era becomes the victim in another, and we bring those past biases with us to each fresh corpse.
Pursuing the truth begins by observing the investigation and noting clues. This isn’t a case of pixel hunting for evidence, à la Ace Attorney; Ito explains how any suspicious item is marked as such, and when you move to the next phase, all the clues are obtained. Instead, this viewing round is more about understanding the context of the information you’ll manipulate later. “If you really think about it, it should be possible to determine the sole person who could be the killer just from seeing the incident phase,” Ito says. The challenge isn’t sniffing out clues, but analysing them for relevance. “Some clues that seem ...
[https://magztertemp.s3.amazonaws.com/1387349800/1648040462/articles/62453cbe3a157/1648704540720.jpg]
Perhaps the sight of body-filled parlours is over-stimulating our little grey cells, but we wonder if there’s more at play beyond that. Both Ito and producer Junichi Ehara hint at a device made possible by live-action delivery, one which, in Ito’s words, “only achieves the impact it does precisely because the characters are played by real people”. Ehara certainly suggests there are easier ways to bring this crime saga to virtual life, given how the story involves several murders between 1922 and 2022. “It was probably more difficult to portray the Japan of 100 years ago in a live-action format instead of using full CG,” he says. But he feels it was a “good hurdle” and one that helps justify the FMV format to players beyond its “distinctive and impactful” looks.
[https://magztertemp.s3.amazonaws.com/1387349800/1648040462/articles/62453cbe3a157/1648704155486.jpg]
Putting those suspicions aside, our guide through the mystery is Haruka Kagami, a crime writer turned crime solver, investigating a century of skulduggery in the Shijima Family. While she meets the present-day clan in person, the events of 1922 and 1972 are relitigated as she reads about them in a novel, imagining herself into the detective’s shoes. Within these time jumps, the team makes canny use of a limited actor pool by recasting them as ancestors in each period – think Cloud Atlas with fewer eyebrow-raising accents and prosthetics. It also promises metatextual fun as a criminal in one era becomes the victim in another, and we bring those past biases with us to each fresh corpse.
Pursuing the truth begins by observing the investigation and noting clues. This isn’t a case of pixel hunting for evidence, à la Ace Attorney; Ito explains how any suspicious item is marked as such, and when you move to the next phase, all the clues are obtained. Instead, this viewing round is more about understanding the context of the information you’ll manipulate later. “If you really think about it, it should be possible to determine the sole person who could be the killer just from seeing the incident phase,” Ito says. The challenge isn’t sniffing out clues, but analysing them for relevance. “Some clues that seem ...
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Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 2022