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Saturday, December 12, 2020

Kyoto Ryuu no Tera Satsujin Jiken(京都龍の寺殺人事件)

Long time readers may remember way back when I realized that I could play old ADV games on my phone (duh). I figured, hey this should be easy! Whip out the phone in a free moment, load my save state, and play a few minutes at a time. And here we are, almost a year later, I'm finally writing about the first Yamamura Misa Suspense title on the Famicom. Needless to say, this was NOT an easy game to get through.

To be fair, the rest of the game does not look this but c'mon

Now, I'd like to think I'm pretty fair in judging games in their proper context and timeframe and according to Google, this game came out at the end of 1987 (December 11 to be exact). Ignoring my disingenuous screenshot above, the graphics are not bad for the Famicom. On the surface, this game looks like it could be one of the better early murder mystery ADV games on the console. Unfortunately, in reality, it sucks so bad, it makes the first Tantei Jinguji game look good, which is quite a feat.

Hi, nice to meet you. Oh, don't mind the frickin' corpse behind you!

There are two major problems with this game, the first being the goddamn awful menu system that requires you to go through multiple steps just to ask a fucking question. Select the ear icon, pick the person to ask, pick the topic, pick the question and start all over for the next question.  Honestly, how hard would it be to remember your menu position?

Well, as long as there's some cleavage, who cares about mechanics?

At this point, I'm a hardened retro gamer so I can stand bad mechanics and some frustration if the story is good but that's where my major problem lies with this game. I dunno if Yamamura Misa's novels are a hundred times better but the whole premise of the game was just... stupid. It starts with the first murder victim holding some petals with letters on them and so the rest of game is filled with character names that just so happen to use those exact same letters. Be prepared to be constantly confused about who is who as you talk to Minako, Namiko, Minao, Naoko, etc. because yeah, it's totally believable that every suspect's first and last name just happen to be perfect anagrams. And also, why are you, a freakin' game designer, responsible for investigating the murder instead of the police?

Why the hell is this my job? Is this because of #DefundThePolice?

The game was so boring, I feel like I don't want to bore my growing audience with an equally boring blog post about it. I'm going to be honest here and admit I totally followed a guide after a few hours of navigating the god awful menu. There is one trick where you have to call *69 to find the last caller on someone's phone, except it's the Japanese version of *69, which I have no clue about. I didn't grow up in Japan. I'm a Jhipster. If I was Japanese, I would just be a "gamer". Well, a Japanese gamer so probably less trolling and death threats.

Oh yeah, you know I'm a real game journalist now that I'm trashing gamers. Don't worry, no matter how shitty some gamers might be, at least they're shitty for free instead of trying to make a living off of it like those game "journalists".

A gamer girl? Nice! Oh wait, Famicom? Pass for lack of taste.

Score: 1 so boring I inadvertently started ranting about gamergate for old times' sakes out of 5

I'm sorry, what were we talking about again? Oh right, this game! So anyway, it's terrible. Don't waste your time with it. Still, I read online that the next Yamamura Misa game is better so I'll probably stick with the series. The one I played on DS seemed pretty good but more on that in 2024.

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