Murder on the Eurasia Express（ユーラシアエクスプレス殺人事件）

You may have noticed there are a lot of these interactive movie games on this blog lately. As usual, I need to make room to further drown myself in the delirious pleasure of shameless consumerism (aka hoarding). Err, excuse me, I mean, "engage in my personally enriching hobby of video game collecting".

What's the point of buying more games when you have a giant pile?
When are you going to have time to actually play all those games?
Don't you think there's better things to spend your money on?  ▼

Murder on the Eurasia Express beats the record for being the shortest of the bunch so far, clocking in at only about 2 to 3 hours. Unlike the anime games I've been playing recently, this is FMV with OMG, real people!!

Wow, the hair rendering looks so realistic!

Even though there were a lot of cheesy FMV games with the advent of the CD-ROM, I still enjoyed them back in the day. Just being able to hear "real" music instead of sound chips and midi was mind blowing at the time. One game I particularly enjoyed as a kid was Burn Cycle (rating board, what's that?). They should make a sequel with the new body, what with all these pronoun switching these days (if you played, you know what I mean).

This game was unfortunately not as good as Burn Cycle unless you dig the "train full of high school Japanese girls" setting. Unfortunately, I didn't recognize most of the cast but I think they're pretty famous? I did recognize Fukuda Kyoko and oh boy that was a quick flashback to the past. Since this game came out in 1998 and she was born in 1982, she actually should have been going to high school at the time, if my gamer math is correct. Then again, why the hell would you want to go to school when you can act in a mediocre 6,800 yen PS1 FMV murder mystery game?

Oh crap, my book report is due tomorrow!

Yeah, 6,800 yen for a 3 hour game. Ouch. Of course it's way cheaper now but can you imagine if someone were to try to sell a shitty 2-3 hour game for $60 today??

Rating Pending? I'll rate it right now: diarrhea

They would rave about how amazing the shit game is of course! Because everything is backwards now! Fortunately, this game is at least entertaining... somewhat. You can only go to a few carriages and the lounge and you're just basically going from room to room asking questions. There's a time limit too, which is annoying.

Arbitrary time limits that make you restart the game? We love those!!

For some weird reason, you can look at every person's chest and knees and no worries, you can stare at the crotch of the guys too if that's your thing. And no, there is absolutely no point of looking down in terms of beating the game.

Teacher's knees here because looking at high school girls' knees is sick.

Turns out that I've been mentally scarred by all the moe social media outrage vis-à-vis chichi bukuro blood drives, wrinkled/clear skirt, etc. that I forget what regular Japanese girls look like. Oh yeah, I totally forgot that most Japanese girls are flat as a board!

Turns out clothing is pretty effective at covering body parts... IRL

Score: 2 There's an important clue on one of the girl's chest! If you inspect each one carefully, you'll discover that you're a pervert! out of 5 (2.5 hours to beat)

Anyways, you go from room to room, asking questions and uncovering more questions to ask. Swap the disc, repeat, and finally at the end of disc 4, you have to actually do some thinking to present the correct evidence to identify the killer.

It's just like Murder on the Orient Express but with Japanese girls and the mystery not even remotely as interesting and there you have Murder on the Eurasia Express in a nutshell. However, I still gave it a score of 2 as barely worth checking out because I felt the human drama was interesting enough to warrant a couple hours of your time.

One of the girls gives you (the camera) a kiss at the end and your secretary is different depending on how fast you beat the game, etc but no way I'm going to replay just to see those minor differences.

At least the manual is really nice. Took a quick pic before purging.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely